Into the Dark Wilds

by Lizbeth Dusseau

  ***

  Two days after Max asked for my non-offensive statement for the papers, I presented him with my best offering, hoping that he’d keep it intact, though expecting him to mark it with red and return it to me to be re-written. He barked at me from his office door, and I knew I’d get a good tongue lashing for this effort by the sound of his attitude. Inside his office, he waved for me to close the door. Looking down at his desk, his face remained dour, and I cringed.

  “You’ve written little here to placate the hierarchy,” he said, showing no emotion. He began to read …

  “Rowena Dulciat threatens stability and order because she represents freedom and change from the constricted thinking that binds the loins, that very lifeblood of our existence. She brought that freedom to her time a century ago, and she can bring it here now. It need not be a revolution of blood and guns, but a revolution of truth, where honest women and men acknowledge themselves and the bodies we were born to enjoy. Her revolution need not lead to chaos, there need not be pain to insure ourselves the benefits. We need not make this a bloody physical battle, just a quiet victory.

  “When we live, separate from our natural sexual states, we hamper our ability to function fully, we cast suspicion in our relationships, breed unwholesomeness in bedrooms and condemn the children we create to lives as slaves to this unnatural existence. When we take away the duality of womanhood that leaves us either whores or women with virgin loins, we give ourselves back our lives, our purpose and the pleasure we were born to enjoy. Rowena Dulciat was no devil, no evil witch. She scared us for the power she demonstrated; holding a mirror to her face to reflect back the truth.”

  “I suppose it’s too strong,” I said, as he finished. I was about to reach out and take the paper from his hand.

  Staring me squarely in the eye, he shook his head, “That really doesn’t matter, Chloe. It’ll be what I print.”

  So soberly said, I had to run his words back through my mind a couple of times to make sure I fully understood his meaning. Still, no change in his expression, not a smile, a quick amused smirk, not any usual Max Gatov inflection. “Then I suppose I’ll get on with my editing?” I said.

  “Do that.”

  That’s all my master wanted, and I left his office not knowing what I felt about him or about the conference we’d just had. I think he was giving me his respect, and a good deal of faith. My words could be as inflammatory as my first submission. But that didn’t seem to matter any more.

  ***

  That night, my body burned from candle wax and sexual desire. I spasmed from his forceful entry of my ass, and then I slept exhausted until I woke up screaming from the nightmare that clutched my brain like a vise.

  “Chloe, Chloe,” Max whispered softly, having heard my screams and coming to me. He’d not slept with me, but in the bed in the next room. He had his arms around me, his lips tenderly to my ears, which stung like they were on fire the way they burned hot. “Chloe, Chloe, it’s just your dreams, just your dreams.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I was at my telly, peering into the black and white screen, when the message popped up in color. I smiled, having just retrieved a major section of my personal writings that I thought I’d lost. I quickly went on to other things, knowing when I had a moment I’d go back to the next treatise I was writing for the paper. Max didn’t know about this one, and I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t try to get it published without telling him. After my last successful plan to gain his passwords, I was leery of doing it again, now that my relationship with my boss and master had changed. Though I still intended to get this piece in the paper one way or another.

  “Ms. Duchet?” the mail boy was at my side.

  “Yes,” I said looking up, absently taking the package he handed me.

  “You have to sign for it,” he said.

  Sign? That seemed odd. I never signed for packages, then too I never remember getting something personal. This 8 x 10 inch parcel was marked with a confidential sticker. That was enough to finally draw my attention from my work.

  As the mailboy left my side, I tried opening the package, my fingers tugging at one end, but it wouldn’t give. My scissors slipping under the tape, I carefully snipped it, and finally drew the two sides of the parcel apart. Something wrapped in tissue was wedged inside. Pulling it free, I realized there were two books. A paper fluttered to the floor and I bent down and scooped it up, suddenly taken with the idea that I needed to keep this mystery to myself. Grabbing the parcel and the dropped note, I casually made my way to the end of the office and an empty conference room. The door closed behind me. I felt more comfortable peeking at the package’s contents in private.

  “My dear, Ms. Duchet,” the note began. “Please forgive the informality of sending these volumes to you without warning; but I feel that I don’t have much time left to find someone suitable to keep them.

  “If you’ll bear with me, I’ll start at the beginning, introducing myself as Sophie Ruel, granddaughter of Rowena Dulciat and Ruel, the founder of the modern Prussian state.”

  Sophie Ruel, Rowena’s granddaughter. With the shock, my heart began to beat so rapidly I thought it might jump into my throat. Shoulders shaking, fingers trembling, I looked beyond the note to the two worn volumes in my hands. I recognized the first as Rowena’s journal, written in long hand. The original? And the other, a second journal perhaps. My eyes burned with tears so I could hardly read the remainder of the note.

  “I came upon these journals amid my grandmother’s personal items, which she’d secretly stored in the house where she and my grandfather lived until their deaths. She told me of them with a solemn promise extracted from my twelve year old understanding, that I should return to the house when I was over the age of consent and retrieve these volumes to keep. She said not to allow her own daughter, Labonnae, to see them, telling me that my mother would not understand the contents, but that, in time, I would. In my youthful idolization of my grandmother, I took her words as fact and kept them as my special secret. Such was the relationship I had with her. Then, I knew nothing of her past and how she came to know my grandfather.

  I have kept this diary of her later years, as well as her earlier one. She told me the first was published to great thunderclouds of controversy and banned in many places while it was revered by those who truly understood its message. She told me how she parted with her precious words, scared that she’d never see them again, and then how one day, after it was finally in print, an anonymous Frenchman knocked on her door and handed back the original handwritten version. I could tell by the look in her glassy eyes that man had brought her a piece of herself she’d thought lost.

  I have read the original and the second, though I haven’t known what do to with them, until I saw the articles you printed. Your words so reminiscent of Rowena Dulciat’s, I knew these volumes belonged to you. I trust that you will know what to do with them. Quite truthfully, they scare me, for all they imply about my grandparents and the savage facts about their lives. That she was such a warrior for truth still amazes me. When I knew her, she was simply the dear woman who stroked my head when I was sick and read to me fables from an old book.

  Knowing that you have these, I’ll go to my grave with a peaceful heart. I was beginning to think that I’d have them buried with me. And yet, I’ll never forget the day she confided her secret to me. She told me that she’d be needing these books in another life when she returned. Such a dreamer! She could see such things. I advise you not to be surprised if a woman in another guise shows her face to you some day and asks for her property to be returned.

  If I were you, I’d keep your knowledge of them quiet, but I trust you’ll make the right decision regardless. In any event, I hope they will not be a burden but a blessing.

  I go now in peace. Affectionately yours, Sophie Ruel.

  Wiping my tears with the back of my trembling hand, I took a deep breath not knowing where to begin. The urge to rush home and bury myself in
the pages was so strong, I was sure that I’d flee the building. But then I felt someone behind me, and on instinct turned around. Max was standing over my shoulder, having entered the room so quietly I didn’t know he was there.

  I jerked letting out a little scream realizing his eyes had been glued to the note in my hand.

  “Shush!” he said coming around. He knelt on one knee in front of me, his hand taking mine in his as the two rested on the journals. There was no way I could hide the truth from him.

  “You saw this?” I asked, offering him the note.

  “Most of it.” He glanced at it again quickly and then back at me.

  “And, what do you think?”

  “I think the journals belong to you.”

  “And why’s that?” I asked.

  “I am a man driven by fate, just as you are a woman driven by yours.”

  “Are we the incarnation of these people?” I asked looking down at the books.

  “Does it matter if we are? Or does it matter more that we have finally come together where we belong?”

  “You’ve felt that?” I asked.

  “I think you would have, too, if you allowed yourself to feel it.”

  “And how long have you known?”

  “Since that first sparring remark, since the first time I looked you squarely in the eyes, since the moment I detected the cloud of irrational rage rising in us both.”

  “Why do we detest each other?”

  “Perhaps we don’t,” he countered that thought. “Perhaps we never did.”

  I’m not sure why, but staring into Max’s face, the thoughts coming into my brain were precisely clear. Where I refused to listen in the past, I was listening now, hearing what the voices in my brain were trying to tell me, what my dreams had tried to impart in their nightmares.

  “Her child? Her daughter? A reincarnation of Rowena herself? I’m not sure I am any of these. But I know that she resides in me, Max. You’ll have to live with that.”

  “Yes, I’ll have to live with that,” he answered me, his gaze steady and certain without a trace of haughtiness.

  ***

  My days are filled now as Rowena’s once were. I read the old journal and the new one. It’s hardly new having been written so long ago. I thrive on every word of truth her hand penned, just as I thrive on my own words. I write and publish bits and pieces that the world can handle. Though the world’s a different place, and these are not revolutionary times, I cannot stop the activity that I was born to pursue. Just as he controls so much of my life, just as Boheme controlled the flood of Rowena’s visions to the world, Max has taken control of the words that I write. We are unified in this mission.

  And he comes to me now in our private times, as despicable and as gentle as his counterpart Boheme, as savage as his mentor, Ruel.

  In the nights after the journals appeared his dominance over me became more pronounced, but I didn’t fight it anymore. The surrender was inevitable. All that he designs for my body, imitating Rowena’s tortures, plays out on me, to bring us pleasure and my mind more thoughts to write about the next day.

  One night I remember above all the rest, he took me into the dungeon of the house, a place I’d never seen. To my shock this underground cavern was as detestable in an old world sense, as the dungeons of medieval times. He told me later that the house was deliberately build on the site of an 11th century castle, the dungeon rebuilt but remaining true to the original. The stones there are mossy from dampness, and though it was summer and a sultry humid day outside, this chamber gave my naked body a cold chill.

  “It’s too bad there are no carnivals anymore, no places where I can take you for the public to view, where your lust can be a statement of the truth.”

  I might have agreed with him, thinking of Rowena’s carnival, but his mood scared me. How dark my master and my lover became in the shadows. How so unlike the man I worked with in the newsroom. Then I suppose, I too am a transformed woman when I’m on the verge of sex.

  I knew he’d bind me. I’d been bound many times before, my psyche feasting on the way that kind of capture forces every sexual desire to the surface. He used ropes this time when he usually uses leather straps or metal chains. They were bound about my ankles, about my wrists which were strung up taut, and about my waist where the ends were looped through hooks embedded in the wall on either side of me. My breasts were bound with criss-crossed ropes. Sticking out from my body, they looked crude and unnatural, turning flushed from the tight constraint. Clamps attached to the nipples dangled down heavily, tugging so the pain was constant. More ropes were run through my crotch and pulled tight as though he intended to cut the skin. He made certain that I was as confined as possible, unable to move without causing horrible distress. More pain, and more tears constantly threatened to spill from my eyes.

  He abused my ass, first whipping it soundly. That procedure done, he flailed my shoulders. The submission beat into me, I began to feel the thoughts pour into my brain, ones that lifted me from the scene for just an instant, before another stroke of the lash brought me back into my pained body. Repeating his efforts on the front of my body, my already tortured breasts took more, as each cut of the lash that struck the clamps made me cry out. I pleaded with him, but he remained firm in finishing the master’s ritual, which required the last place struck—my pubis—be struck until the skin of it was raw and the clit peeking through sent brilliant lightning to the center of myself.

  As he walked away from me, I smelled a strange odor, and was afraid for an instant that it was my own flesh burning, but that was a premature thought. It was just she smell of the iron getting hot in the fire, the one that my master drew from the embers and showed me. His initials on that rod glowed red before my eyes.

  The prayer on my lips was inaudible.

  “A brand beside the first one,” he informed me. “Mine.”

  Moving to my backside, he found the mark and in an instant it was over, the smell of my flesh drifting to my nostrils before it passed on. With this mark I knew I was forever his.

  I had little time to assess the impact of that moment, Max was anxious to finish what he started. And yet the only orgasmic end that followed was Max’s fingers thrust inside my rear door. If he could have fit his entire hand there, I know he would have.

  “I should find a woman made for this,” he whispered to me as he fucked me hard with those invading fingers.

  The slut that I am, I imagined two women, and two small fists pummeling me hard—though I’m afraid that reality often fails in the face of a good fantasy.

  The moment of orgasm went on as if it would not end. And I don’t remember all that came afterward. Only that Max’s arms were around me, his spirit hovering, taking charge of body, mind and soul. I know he made love to me on a cold stone bench, that other men appeared, offering me cocks that I pleasured without protest. I know that I ended this carnival of sex in the warm bed we shared, with my lover’s hands reminding me with each caress how he’d abused me and how that abuse has turned to love.

  In the whispers of lovers between nightfall and dawn, Max told me that he’d read Rowena’s journal when he was a child in his father’s shop.

  “I knew someday she would come to me,” he said. “And I knew when I met you that she’d arrived.”

  Out of the dark wilds of our frenzied love, I knew then that Max Gatov is my Boheme and my Ruel, and I’ve become his beloved Rowena.

  I kiss him now with my whole heart, thinking that I know now what Rowena knew about sex and visions and love. So intricately entwined, like lovers themselves, these are what the world clings to, what beyond all strife and emotional torture we bear, make the journey of life worth the ticket to travel on these paths, so we can take the learning of our days into the home outside this world where our spirit happily abides.

  My mentor’s vision has come true. Rowena has returned in me, and a thousand times over in the guise of a thousand women who have followed her into their own passion
s.

  More Erotica from Lizbeth Dusseau ….

  SILENCE IN THE CELLAR

  “In summer, Bella’s inn by the lake vibrates with the carnality of a whorehouse in any season.” The young widow, Bella Fauré, wants only to run her beloved Inn by the Lake and enjoy the men she entertains on the side. Her favorite lover, Daniel, listens to her carnal tales and takes notes for an erotic novel of her stories. But there’s a dark side to Bella’s life and a reckless past. Blackmailed by her husband’s brother, Claude, she plummets into his world, forced to satisfy his sexual revenge. Though she despises the man, she is driven by a body that enjoys the extremes of lust. Claude tortures her in cellars, attics and ancient boathouses, with whips and bondage and the exhilaration of pain. Her sex life overwhelms the imagination. A novel brimming with tender sensuality, and yet it blooms from the darkness of S&M, Dominance/submission, female bisexuality, graphic anal sex, spanking and multiple partners.

  JOCELYN’S REBELLION

  With Jocelyn Killian’s high-profile consulting business taking a sudden nose dive, the sassy redhead turns into one rebellious lady, running away with her scoundrel lover from the past, Ian. While Jocelyn’s on her impetuous erotic ride through Europe, her husband, Reggie, turns to another submissive woman, and it looks as if the dominant/submissive “match made in heaven” is forever doomed. Only their dear friend, the irrepressible Alexandra, holds out any hope that their uncommon relationship can survive. In this wild tale, it’s not just Jocelyn rebelling, but the sensuously submissive Alexandra who once again pays for her lusty excursions in infidelity. She too wonders if her perpetually rocky romance with her husband, Will, can survive. This novel would not be complete without plenty of spanking, bondage, anal sex & a host of graphic dominant/submissive sexual encounters to ignite the reader’s wickedly naughty fantasies.

  For a complete catalogue of Erotic Fiction…

  Pink Flamingo Publications

  P.O. Box 632, Richland, MI 49083, 1-877-629-0051

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