Nothing could dampen his spirits as he rushed around the residence, packing his special bible – the one he’d been given at his ordination – a small envelope of salt, and a vial of holy water into a basket.
“Come now, Hai.You can help me.You can assist me in the administration of the sacrament.”
The servant looked pale, as if he’d had no sleep the night before. “No, mon Père,” he said, in a very odd voice. “It’s not an auspicious day for this. Please don’t go to the river. Do it some other time.”
Jean-Michel stared at him angrily. “Don’t be a superstitious fool! Any day is a good day for a baptism. Come along now.”
“Father, I . . . I do not feel well. I cannot go with you. Please don’t make me.”
“Idiot!” the priest said, shaking his head. “Fine then, you lazy, good-for-nothing sinner. Don’t come!” He walked out of the residence, making sure to slam the door behind him.
As he began his walk down to the river, his anger at Hai smouldered like a stick of incense, but then he reasoned that it would not be pleasing to God if he performed the baptisms with bitterness in his heart. Silently he mouthed a prayer as he picked his way through the jungle scrub and approached the edge of the river.
They were there waiting for him, and dressed just as he had instructed in pure, virginal white. Joy surged in Father Jean-Michel’s heart.They looked like three incarnations of the blessed Virgin Mary, with their lustrous dark hair loose and hanging about their shoulders.
“Good morning,” he called, as he approached them. All three turned in his direction and, almost as one, gave him a slight bow.
“Children, beautiful children of Christ! This is a wonderful day. God has brought a miracle to this wilderness.” The priest spoke with his arms held wide. “Today you will be reborn into everlasting life!”
The priest put down the basket, after retrieving the vial of holy water. He turned towards the river, uncorking the vial, and let the liquid drain upon the wet riverbank, asking God to bless this place as a site of rebirth for the three young women.
He turned and beckoned the women down to the water, glancing around in the hope that some of the other villagers had come to watch, but they were alone. He shook off his disappointment and, picking up his bible and the small twist of salt, said: “I have taken the liberty of choosing your Christian names.These will be the names by which you are called to the Catholic faith.”
The priest was not altogether sure they understood everything he said, but it mattered not; he was saving their souls and, after all, that’s what counted. Wading out deeper into the water, he stopped only when it reached his waist.
The cool liquid seeped through his cassock and it billowed out around him in the gentle current. “Come,” he said to the tallest, reaching out his hand. “Don’t be afraid, Christ is with us.”
The girl he’d beckoned smiled and stepped into the water. As she approached him, it seemed to Father Jean-Michel that she was changing already; her face shone with an unearthly radiance.
To his amusement, the other girls followed their sister. “One at a time,” he said and chuckled. “I cannot baptize you all at once.” But they didn’t seem to understand, and came towards him, gliding as if free of earthly gravity.
The tallest girl put her hand on his arm. “My sisters want to be near me, Father. Please allow them.”
The priest smiled, and nodded, paging his bible open to the page. “Alright then. We must begin.” He turned to the tallest girl. “Do you renounce all other faiths and give yourself wilfully to the holy mother church?”
She inclined her head and smiled. “Of course.”
Father Jean-Michel unwrapped the twist of paper containing the salt and pinched a few grains with his fingers. “Open your mouth, child.”
The girl before him lurched in the water. It seemed she lost her footing in the current, because before he could stop her, she’d pressed herself up against him, her dark red mouth open, her face too close to his. He stepped backwards to allow himself the room to administer the salt, but there was someone behind him. He turned to look, and was confronted with her smiling, rounder sister. “Oh . . . I’m . . .”
Hands touched him in the water. He turned again, only to be faced with the third girl, who pulled the bible from his hand and stretched out her arm, casually letting it float away on the current.
“No . . . no,” he said, confused. “This is not how it . . .”
A pair of slender arms slipped under his own and embraced him from behind, and the other two were suddenly on him, pressing their ripe lips to his face, his neck, his mouth. He felt the combined weight of the sisters pulling him down into the water, and further into the middle of the stream.
Sinuous bare legs entwined with his beneath the surface. Hands slithered and caressed his bare flesh. “No,” he cried out.“No . . .”
They did not stop. The one he had been planning to name Mary lifted her robe over her head and, smiling the same impassive smile as the other sister, released it to the river’s hunger. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him lewdly, mouth open, her curved tongue working its way into his mouth.
Behind, he could feel breasts pressing into him, rubbing hard, cruel nipples into his back. Unseen fingers closed around his cock and stroked it.The priest wanted to fight them, wanted to push them all away, but even as he dreamed that short dream, his will evaporated as the blood coursed into his cock, making it instantly hard.
“He is ready,” one of them whispered. “You first, older sister.”
The sensation of carnivorous, enveloping heat made him whimper, and the sister at his lips slipped a long, satisfied hissing breath into his mouth. Jean-Michel felt his soul abandon him, releasing a long-dormant beast within his heart. He reached beneath the surface and grabbed at Mary’s exquisitely formed ass, pushing her onto his cock. Her hips rolled as she rode him, holding him tight with her legs, her tight, hot passage milking him. She gave a low growl and bit into his lower lip.
Pain and pleasure bloomed in equal measure. He savoured his own blood on his lips at the same time she did. The taste triggered something inside her, for she tilted back her bloody mouth and keened as her body shuddered violently.Then just as suddenly as it had begun, she released him, wriggling free of his grasp, and floated away, licking her lips.
Almost immediately, the little round sister – the one he had called Elizabeth – took her older sister’s place. She gazed into his eyes for a moment and he saw himself reflected, distorted, in hers.
Opening her mouth, a long flat tongue flashed out and lapped at his face, picking up the blood that her older sister had left behind. Jean-Michel embraced her, lifting her higher in the water and pressing his hungry mouth to her round, firm breast. Arms encircled his head and pressed him to it.
Beneath the water, a curious caress – then arms surrounded his hips and a burning mouth took his cock, fellating him as he nursed ravenously on the breasts at his face. Not possible, he managed to think, although his mind was a riot of desire and sensation. The mouth at his cock was unbearably clever. A rough tongue writhed away at the underside, even as the gorgeous sucking continued. He pumped his hips in the water, feeling the head slip into a tight throat. Another body was at his back, rubbing frantically against his skin. The sensation was unexpectedly rough, as though the unseen girl’s flesh was as coarse as scales.
“Oh, God,” he moaned, reaching back to touch the woman who tormented him from behind.
He felt another pain, this one at his neck, sharper and deeper than the first. The mouth around his cock was gone and the girl in his arms slid down his body, impaling herself on him.
The pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the sweet cunt that drew itself up and down on his rod. Thrusting upwards, he heard the girl grunt with pleasure and so he plunged into her again, and again, each time increasing the violence of his penetration. She pressed her face to his neck, feeding as he fucked. With each hungry suck, he felt h
is cock harden and grow until he could hardly squeeze into her passage. She left off feeding, flung back her head and groaned.
Never had Father Jean-Michel taken the Old Testament literally, but now he knew without a doubt that he was having congress with demons. The moment he realized it, the girl in front of him changed. The pale skin of her neck and breast took on a new texture. As she lowered her head, the eyes that met his were those of a serpent, and between her plump lips, needle-sharp fangs glinted in the grey, morning light.
Despite the acute pleasure, he shoved her away, but he needn’t have bothered, for she released her grip on him with a serpentine smile.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” he shouted, backing away desperately, towards the river’s bank.
Arms surrounded him from behind, blocking his way. The thing that slithered its way between his legs was not human, but the tail of a serpent. “My little sister has not had her fill yet,” whispered a voice at his ear.
The priest tried to turn around, but the lamia clung to him. The sisters in the water swam towards him with undulating strokes. Before he could protest again, they were on him.The youngest, the one he’d planned to call Magdalen, slithered up his body. Her beautiful, inhuman form swayed hypnotically, locking him with her eyes. She mounted him with a sigh.
The fear, the revulsion, the hate, all drained away the moment she enveloped him, for hers was the most delicious of all carnal embraces. He knew in that moment that his life was over. And in that same moment, the priest surrendered. His hips arched upwards into the clutches of that deadly beauty. In only a few thrusts he was lost. Seating his cock fully, he cried out and poured his seed into the lamia’s womb. Warm, scaled bodies surrounded him even before he finished coming, pulling him under the cool waters of the river.
The Rise and Fall of the Burlesque Empire
Maxim Jakubowski
It could be that in another life I sold my soul to the devil.
And what is happening to me now is just a form of punishment, a kind of torture inflicted on me in some indeterminate circle of hell where I must be stewing.
There is no other explanation.
I have the gift of time travel.
But I can’t control it.
I am randomly taken to places and times. In a loop that is nothing less than infernal, things happen to me that claw into the sheer fabric of my heart and soul and diminish me with every journey, eating me away like a rat gnawing at my stomach. And on and on it goes and somehow, something inside of me assures me it will never cease and the terrible pain will endure forever because I am not allow to die.
In my sleep, I was transported to Times Square.
I knew it wasn’t a dream. I could smell the street, sense the vibrancy of Manhattan, touch people, eat, do things you cannot achieve in your sleep.The smell of the hamburger and hot dog stands, the blissfully soft touch of women’s bare skin, the sensation of thin urban rain peppering my hair, oh no, I was certainly awake. More than awake, in fact.
It was the heyday of Times Square when New York was both decadent and joyous, a period I could only recognize from film clips and photographs as my first actual visit to the city hadn’t actually occurred until much later when I was in my 30s. A newspaper headline on a corner stand confirmed to me it was the time of the Rosenbergs’ trial. In real life, I had then just been a small boy in short trousers.
One moment, I was tossing between my sheets, the next I was standing on the corner of Broadway and 45th Street, drinking in the sight of oversize limousines and sports cars racing south and passers-by gazing in wonder at the neon jungle surrounding us.
Somehow I took it all in my stride; unlike the naked Schwarzenegger cum Terminator from the movies, I was fully clothed. My left hand searched for my inside jacket pocket and found a roll of green bills and coins. At least, I would not have to beg.
I have never been much of a tourist, so after an hour or so of walking around exploring this New York of memories my mind was already wandering. I hadn’t even travelled more than four blocks in any direction from my point of arrival, as if a curse of some sort would break out should I venture too far, and I was literally a prisoner of 42nd Street and its wonderful excesses.
A brightly lit theatre marquee caught my attention advertising “the Original Burlesque Extravaganza” , featuring women’s exotic names I had at some time or another come across in books or articles: Lili St. Cyr, Bettie Page, Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr. I doubted they were the real article, but my curiosity was piqued. I parted with a couple of dollar notes and walked in. There was even a two-sided programme sheet I was handed by a bored looking commissionaire in a frayed uniform before I entered the auditorium.Which confirmed the show was a homage to Bettie Page, Blaze Starr and others and did not in fact feature the actual legends.
The spectacle was all I could have hoped for: blissfully over the top and boisterous, comic, colourful. True, the show had little in common with burlesque’s origins, with a lack of fat comedians tossing out New Jersey jokes and warming up the audience prior to the arrival of the dancers in their attires of feathers, divine lingerie and layers of flimsy fabric in every shade of the rainbow. But there was a Master of Ceremony, a thin, nervous guy who looked a little like Lenny Bruce without the sweaty drugged pallor. No doubt a stand-up slumming here between gigs, perfecting his scorn like a precursor to his Bob Fosse Cabaret future counterpart. But the thin audience – the small theatre could at most hold a hundred or so punters and was barely a third full – blanked him totally, visibly here just for the gals.
It was fun. Most of the dancers didn’t take themselves seriously and even attained, in part, a level of performance art in their crafty disrobing and dancing act, balancing props and knowing smiles, teasing the anorexic crowd with a twinkle in their eyes or an occasional thrust just on the right side of vulgarity. There was a Carmen Miranda look-alike whose scratched record kept on jumping on the turntable behind the small stage so her juggling plastic bananas were always that little bit out of sync; and then there was the dark-haired would-be biker girl, whose labyrinth of zips kept on getting stuck as she manoeuvred herself out of her leather gear and sported an unbelievable number of layers of black underwear under her tight trousers; or again, the regal Claudia from Germany, as the M.C. introduced her, she of the thunder thighs and red hair like fire who shook her arse with the best of them, and even winked at me as she turned her head halfway through her set. Or maybe it had been a speck of dust.
I counted five dancers in all. But strangely enough, no blondes. Was it an early hint that the devil was playing games with me? Or just me hankering for forbidden fruit?
The men in the audience came and went. There was a five minute break, and the show began again. No one was asked to leave the auditorium. One could spend the whole day here without being disturbed, it appeared. At the time, I still thought this was a curious sort of dream, not totally unpleasant and having nothing better to do decided to stay put and see the women again and maybe check whether Teutonic Claudia’s signal had been deliberate or not. After all, she did have spectacular breasts, strong, high globes whose red pasties harmonized perfectly with her flaming hair.
But when her time came in the order of rotation, after a young pimply stagehand had cleared the previous dancer’s scattered red, white and blue feathers from the stage (she had performed a faltering but broadly comic French Ooh La La act), the regal Claudia did not appear.
Instead, the M.C. sheepishly slithered on and, leering outrageously, said:
“And now a real treat for all you amateurs of sheer pulchritude, for the first time ever on a New York stage, for the first time ever on any stage, the virginal, the beautiful Anais . . .”
A young woman hesitantly came to the fore.
He had not been exaggerating: it was visibly her first time doing this. She didn’t even have much of an outfit. Just ordinary summer street clothes with a few silk belts and scarves and a scarlet boa no doubt borrowed just now from another of
the girls here.
She had long dark untidy hair that trailed all the way to midway down her back. Her pale shoulders shone like beacons through the tangled hair draped across them. Her aquiline nose stood out proudly, punctuating the savage beauty of her features. Her ruby red lipsticked lips stood out like a lighthouse in a starless night.
Jesus, I thought. She is the one.
As she embarked on her slow, languorous dance, more sad seduction than ironic burlesque, my fevered imagination was already imagining, writing her whole life story to this point, all the burdens and adversities that had led her here to have to dance for strangers for a few dollars.
She was visibly an amateur. The single spotlight held her in its grip as she tried to inject some feeling into her movements. It didn’t work. It was evident it was not her choice to be here. A man to my right heckled. Two more in the row in front of me stood up and walked out. Even the music she had chosen or been allocated was wrong for her, some big band tune that could never blend adequately with her innate grace and dignity as she attempted to negotiate its rhythms to the staccato clockwork stance of her private dance.
I was captivated.
Even from where I was sitting, the dark pools of her eyes drew me like a whirlpool of emptiness.
She attempted a brave smile as she pulled her white summer cotton skirt away with a minor flourish and slid the thin silk scarves to and fro across her flat, taut stomach. I gulped. Her clumsiness almost made me want to cry.
There were more heckles from the sparse audience. On stage, Anais lowered her eyes, as if ashamed of her imperfections. I wanted to applaud, to counter the negativity of my fellow punters, but didn’t. She was now, apart from the boa circling her neck like a slave collar, just in brassiere and knickers, both black and plain, the pallor of her tall, thin body isolated like a pool of light on the heart of the stage.
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