He’d come to the right place. Our agency prided itself on meeting unusual demands: Siamese twins, tattooed girls, girls with three or four breasts, girls with beards, girls with clitorises in their armpits, girls with vaginas so muscular they could make a man ejaculate just by constricting their fleshy inner coils around his penis, like an anaconda squeezing its prey. Our books were full of fabulous freaks and beautiful mutants, and we did a roaring trade. I like to think we performed a public service for the girls as well – where else could a one-legged hermaphrodite with multiple piercings find such gainful employment?
Nutman was something else, though. When he first walked through our doors we had him pegged as a common or garden thrill-seeker, but it soon became clear that his requirements were anything but run of the mill. Once upon a time, he told me, he’d been a regular guy with a healthy libido. Perhaps too healthy. He’d never been short of mistresses. The problem was that he’d been forced to find a new one every week. They always parted on the best of terms, but he simply exhausted them, giving them orgasm after orgasm until they begged for mercy.
Nutman discovered his unusual proclivities by accident one day, while rogering a Polish countess in a suite at the Ritz. He’d vaguely noticed, while pumping away with his usual enthusiasm, that his partner had become strangely passive. At the time he thought little of it – he’d already given her half a dozen climaxes, cresting her increasingly violent convulsions like a surfer riding a tsunami. When at last she stopped convulsing, he simply assumed she was taking a breather, husbanding her forces in preparation for the one last shattering mutual spasm of satisfaction that lay in store.
It wasn’t until after a good ten minutes of thrusting that he realised she was dead.
In that instant, Nutman experienced a heady cocktail of conflicting emotions. There was guilt in there, and sadness, and regret. But he also felt a burgeoning excitement as blood rushed to his already swollen cock. The upshot was that he’d continued to ram his rod into the corpse for several hours, and his orgasm, when it had finally occurred, had been of an earth-shattering intensity, the like of which he’d never experienced before. There had been a moment of panic when he’d been unable to extricate himself immediately, but a combination of copious spunk and cock-shrivelling fear had finally enabled him to withdraw.
He swore to the medical examiner he hadn’t noticed his partner’s plight until it was too late, and that he’d stopped banging her the instant he’d become aware of it. Eyebrows were raised during the inquest, which he’d dutifully attended, but it was established she’d been suffering from a rare heart condition. Even the Countess’s relatives, who’d jetted in en masse from Kraków, shook him cordially by the hand and whispered their gratitude that at least she’d died happy. It probably helped also that Nutman gave no indication of intending to make a claim on any part of her inheritance.
From that moment on, he was a man with a mission. Living, breathing women just didn’t do it for him any more. And because he was neither sadist nor murderer, he turned to us. As professional caterers for peculiar tastes, it was our biggest challenge to date, but one to which we’d happily risen. At first, we supplied him with corpses that still bore signs of recent life, their flesh still relatively wholesome and occasionally even pliable to the touch. But then there’d been a mix-up over dates, and before anyone had spotted the error Nutman had found himself locked in congress with a cadaver that was no longer, shall we say, in the first flush of death. To cut a long story short, he had discovered that his cock was not the only living thing in the corpse’s vagina, only to realise almost instantaneously that a certain maggoty presence was only adding zest to his pleasure. After that he begged us for bodies that were bloated and rotting and heaving with all manner of creepy-crawlies.
It didn’t stop there, of course, because Nutman was no bog-standard necrophiliac. I remember the first time he tentatively inquired about the possibility of fucking a zombie. With my customary sang froid I managed not to react as though this were the sickest request I had ever dealt with. Instead, I entrusted the relevant research to Lapotaire and Gulliver, who had yet to return from one of their field-trips empty-handed. And lo, Nutman arrived at our establishment one week later, all aquiver with anticipation, and found himself sequestered in the Yellow Suite with the finest specimen of the walking dead that you could ever hope to muster – a lovely young thing with greyish-green skin (some but not all of it hanging off in flaps), expressionless eyes wreathed in crepey mauve circles and an insatiable craving for human flesh that made it necessary to chain her to the bed so that Nutman could get his jollies without her teeth tearing chunks out of him. He swore to me afterwards that he’d made her come, but this was a claim I took with a large pinch of salt. I mean, with all that snarling and thrashing around from the start, not to mention a natural tendency towards deliquescence, how could he tell?
After that his demands grew ever more recherché. The banshee wasn’t too much of a problem, though we’d had to issue earplugs to everyone on the premises, and a number of dead rodents with bloodied orifices had to be cleared out of the cellar afterwards. But the ghost had required an inordinate amount of preparation. We’d been obliged to set up temporary shop in an old manor house on the Norfolk coast, since the shade of the maidservant who had died there some two hundred years earlier was unable to leave the room in which she’d been murdered. Nutman had declared the experience so exhilarating – “like plunging my penis into shrieking quicksilver”, as he put it – that we’d gone out of our way to provide him with further refinements on the theme: a phantom governess who’d been hanged for poisoning the two children in her charge and – our pièce de résistance – a spectral French aristocrat who’d been guillotined during the Terror. This last one had required a field trip to Paris, but Nutman, as always, paid handsomely and declared it the most exciting sexual experience of his life, albeit one tinged with frustration at his partner not being in any condition to give satisfactory head. He evidently put the stump of her neck to good use, though.
But I could tell he was beginning to grow weary again. It was increasingly a case of been there, fucked that. We’d heard rumours about a female werewolf on the loose in Dorset, but Nutman just wasn’t interested. A werewolf wasn’t dead, he said. They had to be dead.
And then he came up with another idea.
“A vampire,” he said. “I’ve got to have a vampire.”
I stared at him open-mouthed and said, “You’re fucking insane.”
I tried to explain that zombies and ghosts were one thing. Zombies were flesh-eaters, but slow-witted and easily restrained. Ghosts were too ethereal to offer much in the way of physical threat. But vampires were something else entirely. Vampires were seductive, cunning... and invariably lethal.
He shook his head. “I’m prepared to take the risk.”
So we set it up. Lapotaire caught the plane to Bucharest – and was never heard from again. Gulliver followed his trail into the Carpathians, but was better equipped than his missing colleague and managed to strike some sort of deal with the gypsies he encountered there. When he came back, it was with a heavy wooden box.
I examined her (during daylight hours, of course. I may put on a show of being devil-may-care, but I’m no fool), and have to say – she was beautiful. Skin almost translucent, lips succulent and red, just a hint of pearly-white tooth, breasts ripe and luscious, just begging to be licked and sucked. The only thing missing was a heartbeat.
And Nutman was enchanted. He came back night after night, disappearing into the Azure Suite at sundown and emerging exhausted at dawn. For the first time since we’d met, I sensed he was becoming emotionally as well as physically involved. We’d urged him to take precautions and instructed him in the correct use of garlic, but I couldn’t help noticing that he’d taken to wearing his collar up so we couldn’t see his neck. I began to fret – and not just because I didn’t want to lose one of our most valuable customers – so Wyvern and I cooked up a sche
me that would enable us to examine his throat. It involved the simultaneous presentation of a Dry Martini and removal of Nutman’s overcoat, and we pulled the manoeuvre off without a hitch, the absurdly elaborate ring on my left hand catching on Nutman’s shirt collar and dragging it askew, just as we’d planned.
Wyvern and I, stationed on either side of him, murmured our apologies and straightened the collar before catching each other’s eye and, in that very same instant, letting out a barely perceptible sigh of relief. The neck was intact, unbitten. Nutman, who seemed not to have noticed our inhabitually close attentions, knocked back the Martini in a couple of gulps, thanked us and hurried, as usual, into the Azure Suite.
But the noises that issued forth that night were anything but usual. They began with convivial laughter, but presently changed to a groaning so unearthly it sent chills down my spine. As time wore on, the pitch of the groaning rose until it sounded more like screaming. But this was nothing like any of the screaming I’d ever heard – and I hear a lot of it in my job, as you can imagine. Something had gone horribly wrong, I think we all realised that. Even so, I waited until sunrise before venturing into the Azure Suite. Better safe than sorry.
The vampire lay asleep on the bed, plump and replete, cheeks flushed and lips even ruddier than normal. Nutman, or what was left of him, lay naked in her arms, a desiccated husk of a human being. I looked at his neck again and saw the flesh there was still unpunctured. The man’s penis, on the other hand, was a shrivelled-up seed pod covered in tooth-marks. It was obvious what had happened. The vampire had been giving him the blow job of a lifetime, night after night, sucking the life-blood out of his cock along with his sperm, and he hadn’t been able to resist.
And so we lost our most faithful and lucrative client. But at least I can say with certainty that he died a happy man.
We kept the vampire on our books.
THIS YEAR AT MARIENBAD
Angelica Jacob
Angelica Jacob is the pseudonym of S. G. Klein. Having worked as a book editor in London for fourteen years, she moved to Cornwall before returning to her native Scotland where she now lives and works. Her first novel, Fermentation, was published in 1997. Her second novel, Confession, was published in 2013. It tells of a two-year period in the life of Charlotte Brontë when she met and fell in love with her French tutor, Monsieur Constantin Héger. S. G. Klein has also written numerous short stories.
Greta and Niklaus had been travelling two months when they arrived at NovoGrand Central Station Marienbad. They’d already visited all the run-of-the-mill countries such as Holland, France, Spain and Italy, but the Czech Republic was the destination both had invested in so heavily – or, to be more precise, the Mariánské Lázně spa, where Last Year at Marienbad, a film they had a passion for, was set.
For Niklaus, it was the culmination of a year’s careful planning. Last Year at Marienbad was one of the most erotically charged films he had ever seen, and he hoped to inject some of the same noirish depth into his relationship with Greta. But for Greta the film (and therefore the trip) was little more than an intellectual exercise, something to be reviewed and discussed, but not necessarily indulged. Nonetheless, as soon as they arrived, Niklaus stepped from the train and the game began.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I believe I met you here last year, didn’t I? You were travelling en route to somewhere, but you stopped off here on the way.”
“I don’t remember,” she replied. “No, I can’t recall such a meeting. You must be mistaken.”
“Oh, but we did,” continued Niklaus, as he picked up his suitcase and began following her down the platform. “Of course, it could have been in Karlstadt or Friedrichsbad or perhaps Baden-Salsa, but wherever it was, it was springtime, all the blossom was out – apple, almond, cherry. You said it looked like pink and white snow. You were wearing a pale yellow dress with a choker of pearls at your neck. I remember touching them, how cool they felt and how smooth.”
Ignoring Niklaus, Greta held out her hand and hailed a cab.
“The Mariánské Lázně spa,” she said, hoping the driver would understand where she meant.
Speeding through the town, with its crumbling façades and legendary bridges, Niklaus continued his tirade of memories, insisting that he and Greta had met the previous spring, while she for her part continued to act as if what she was hearing were ludicrous. It wasn’t until they caught sight of the hotel that both fell silent.
The building was more than they had expected: vaster, more baroque, more mysterious. Standing in acre upon acre of garden, it rose four-square from the ground, an edifice replete with turreted walls, interior courtyards and tiered marble staircases.
As they entered the foyer, Greta took a sharp intake of breath. The reception area was cavernous, furnished mostly with mirrors and chandeliers – exactly as it had been in the film. She could already hear her footsteps echoing down endless corridors, feel herself drifting from room to room, catch herself looking at the reflections in the million-and-one gilded mirrors.
“You do remember now, don’t you?” Niklaus whispered into her ear. “This is the hotel in which hallways cross hallways, this is where we met that troupe of performers. There were midgets and a woman who balanced chairs on her feet and a man who ate fire. They performed for us in one of the ballrooms. There was a girl with tattoos on her body, snakes entwined with roses – you insisted she was the most beautiful creature you had ever set eyes upon.”
But Greta shook her head, displaying not one iota of interest and disguising her puzzlement at Niklaus’s digression from the game – since when were there circus entertainers in the film? “You’re mistaken,” she replied, sticking to the script as she knew it. “I remember nothing of the kind. This is my first visit to the Mariánské Lázně.”
Unperturbed, Niklaus continued.
“You were wearing a red dress,” he said as they walked up the central staircase towards their room. Their footsteps echoed against the cold stone. “It was midnight, and we were standing at the roulette table. The whole place was crowded, but there was a woman wearing a top hat and coat-tails – you said she looked magical. You said you wanted to make love to her and that I was to watch you.”
Greta shot him a glance.
“I doubt I said that. No, I wouldn’t have said that.”
The porter opened the door to their bedroom and, once inside, Niklaus went and stood by the large French windows overlooking the garden. Below him, people, couples mainly, moved in unison: some held hands, others were deep in conversation. And there, a little ahead of a tiered patio, were the serried ranks of familiar shrubs, each one tortured into a dark geometric shape with barely a leaf out of place. Gravelled pathways ran in straight lines across manicured lawns, just as it was on celluloid. It was strange, stepping into this movie scene, strange – and oddly exciting – to fabricate whatever you and your partner might have experienced the previous spring.
Suddenly, he began to imagine a whole gamut of things he would like to have done to Greta, things they might have enjoyed had she not been so reticent. He’d like to have blindfolded her, like to have spent hours playing with her cunt, like to have experienced a threesome, like to have had her suck him off in a public place.
He turned from the window.
“Do you remember?” he asked. “This is the same room we stayed in last year. You must remember. You were wearing a black dress and diamonds here.” Niklaus touched his neck. “You took the dress off and you asked for the woman croupier to be brought from downstairs. When she entered the room, you told her to sit on the bed with you. I was to remain in the shadows: I wasn’t to talk, I was only to watch. You made the croupier – her name was Marietta, remember? – you asked her to undress, which she did, and then she lay down beside you. The light from the chandelier played on your skin, white diamonds and rhomboids of colour, and your sighs echoed through the silence, whispers of air. I watched the two of you kiss, your mouths looked softer than egg yolks, y
our legs were entwined around each other’s backs. I like to think my presence made your passion more intense. You were groaning and I could see your hand beginning to rub Marietta’s thighs, delving between her legs. I could see it all, your two oystery cunts glistening and wet, and then how you began to lick down Marietta’s stomach, between her legs. Your back arched and at that moment I moved from where I was sitting, silently crept up behind you. The instant I touched your skin, your whole body tensed, but I leant forward, told you to keep licking Marietta or I’d snap your neck. You cannot have expected me to keep to my corner, to watch and not participate. That would have been unkind.”
“Stop!” said Greta. “This didn’t happen. We’ve never been here before. I don’t like this game any longer. Niklaus? This wasn’t part of the film!”
But Niklaus’s “memories” were too vivid to halt.
“I forced your head between her thighs; you were on all fours, like an animal, beautiful, besotted, bestial. I pushed myself into your cunt, I had my hands round your throat, you wanted me inside you, you were enjoying yourself with Marietta, I wanted to spit and split you in two and I held my hands tighter – you remember that – you could hardly breathe, you were struggling under me –”
“No,” whispered Greta, with more determination than she had done before. Her cheeks burned with humiliation. “None of this happened. I’ve never been here, we’ve never been here. Niklaus, none of this is true. I wouldn’t allow it.”
“You have been here,” said Niklaus. “This is the bed where I strangled you, where you died. We were making love, I put my hands round your throat, you couldn’t breathe and when I came I finished the job, squeezed my hands tighter. Marietta got dressed and left the room. You looked so beautiful, lying there on the bed. I combed your hair away from your eyes, put perfume on your wrists –”
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