Mara surveyed the scene with horror. Black candles, an inverted crucifix, the stench of blood not long ago shed – all of these signs told her that she should run, try to escape the madman and his piercing blue eyes.
‘Our bargain. Remember our bargain,’ whispered Helsing, slipping an arm round her waist and sliding his hand upwards to clutch at the firmness of her right breast. ‘If you want information – and I know that you do, desperately – then you must give yourself up to me, utterly, to do with exactly as I please.’
She nodded, and began to undress.
‘For the good of the Fatherland, I shall obey you . . .’
Helsing had already unbuttoned his flies and was fondling his prick before her, as though daring her to admit that she could not go through with what she had promised. And yet she must. And . . . he was a handsome man, though his eyes were filled with evil. It would not be unpleasant to have him enter her body – if she could banish the fear from her mind, the fear of what perverse fantasies might seize control of those strong, cruel hands . . .
Without warning, he was upon her, scratching and biting her delicate flesh, and making her cry out with terror and pain. His fingers seemed to probe into her every nook and cranny, each orifice explored and defiled by sharp fingernails which tore and bruised as they satisfied their prurient curiosity.
And then he forced her to her knees, sobbing, and prised open her mouth, thrusting his tool between her lips and making her gag as its head touched the back of her throat.
‘Swallow it down, little whore!’ he cried. And when Mara looked up at him, she saw not the blue eyes of Otto Helsing, but the mad, burning coals which had illuminated the Master’s evil face. She tried to escape, to draw away, but he was relentless. His cock rammed into her again and again, until at last she felt it judder and semen flooded her mouth, tasting bitter on her tongue.
And she knew that this was just the beginning.
That afternoon, Mara underwent sexual humiliation the like of which she had never imagined. Helsing buggered her with his ornate black candlesticks, buggered her till she bled and begged for him to stop. He stuffed her cunt and arse full of candles and stretched them beyond endurance, bruising and tearing the delicate flesh – until at last pain became pleasure and she came to an enormous, crashing orgasm which left her lying, spent, upon the floor.
‘Foolish girl,’ smiled Helsing, zipping up his flies and buckling his belt. ‘Did you really think you could fool me with your childish lies? And did you really think your arguments, even if true, could sway me?
‘Child, I have only two things to say to you. The first is that I hated Adolf Hitler and would do nothing to further his cause. His relics I cherish for their magical power but the man . . . he was a jumped-up corporal, with the mind of a peasant.
‘The second thing is this, and it is the truth. I tell you the truth because I like you, for all your pathetic trickery, and I like your spirit, Fräulein Fleming. I do not know what became of the Phallus of Osiris, but I should dearly love to own it. If you succeed in finding it, remember that you will not get a better price for it from anyone.’
He gathered together Mara’s clothes and hauled her to her feet. Opening the front door, he pushed her out, dazed, naked and sore, into the chilly November afternoon.
‘Go, foolish girl. I have enjoyed our little games. But remember: you must not come back unless and until you have found the Phallus of Osiris. Otherwise, be very sure that I shall destroy you.’
The following morning Mara awoke to the sound of a gentle knock at her door. She sat up in bed, wincing as she remembered the previous day’s ordeal and the painful, humiliating games that the seductively evil Otto Helsing had played with her body.
Drawing the covers up round her naked breasts, she called out:
‘Komm!’
The door swung inwards and a young boy tottered in, trying desperately not to spill the tray of orange juice, coffee and fresh rolls.
‘Guten Morgen, Fräulein Fleming,’ the young lad greeted her, blushing to the roots of his fair hair as he saw that, beneath the sheet, Mara was naked. ‘I hope that you have passed the good night?’ Mara smiled at his confusion, thinking how different he was from Otto Helsing. He had an open, honest face.
‘I slept very well, thank you,’ she replied; and she pointed to the bedside table. ‘Perhaps you could put it down there? I wouldn’t like you to drop it!’
The lad obeyed and was turning to go when Mara patted the bedcovers beside her.
‘Why not sit down? I could do with a chat.’
She could see from the front of his uniform trousers that the youth was already excited by what he could see of her body, so she took hold of his arm and pulled him down, forcing him to sit on the bed beside her. Then she dropped the sheet, exposing her magnificent breasts to his disbelieving gaze.
His jaw dropped open and he began to babble incoherently in German.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ soothed Mara, silencing him with a kiss full on his trembling lips, her tongue wriggling impishly into his mouth and seeking out his. ‘I won’t harm you . . .’
Taking hold of his hands, she placed one on either breast and showed him with gentle circular movements how he could pleasure her and make her nipples stand erect. As he toyed with her titties, she leaned forward and took hold of his zip, tugging it down and feeling inside for the gap in his pants that would lead her to his penis.
She found it and pulled it out with a little cry of girlish delight. He was whimpering now, his face buried between Mara’s breasts as he continued to play, almost mechanically, with her nipples.
It was a good-sized prick, nice and firm – as you would expect from a sixteen-year-old lad – and circumcised. Mara allowed herself a little shiver of pleasure: there was something wicked about a circumcised prick – the way you could run your tongue over its every nook and cranny, exploring it without any modest little cloak of flesh getting in the way. She began to manipulate it – and the inevitable happened. He gave a convulsive shudder, and came all over her hand.
Immediately he tried to pull away from her, deeply ashamed of what had happened.
‘I . . . I am so sorry . . . please don’t tell anyone.’
‘It’s all right, nothing bad is going to happen to you,’ repeated Mara, unfastening his trouser belt and pulling his trousers and pants down below his hips, the better to toy with his manhood. ‘We’ll soon have you ready and willing again.’
And she bent and took his half-erect penis into her mouth, savouring the salty taste of fresh semen on her tongue, fondling his balls and wondering at their mobility within their little velvet sac. As she sucked she felt his shaft stiffening once more into eager rigidity with all the swiftness of extreme youth.
‘I want you to fuck me, little boy,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Do you understand me?’
He nodded, too embarrassed or too overcome to reply – she couldn’t tell which.
‘Tell me truthfully: have you ever fucked before?’
He shook his head.
‘I . . . I have never seen a woman naked before. I touched my Aunt Gerda’s breasts once . . . no more.’
‘Then I shall guide you.’
Mara pushed back the covers and signalled to the youth to lie on top of her. But he was clumsy and his untried penis could not find its way to her rapidly moistening crack. Gently, she took him in hand and guided him to her hole.
‘Now!’ she whispered.
He thrust into her, clumsily but with the great energy of a young animal in its first rutting season: the juvenile stag mounting his first hind and discovering that it is wonderful, and that no matter how long it goes on it can never be long enough.
Mara answered his awkward thrusts with her own: slower and more sinuous, controlling his movements so that he would not come until she was ready for him. He felt pleasingly large in her tight cunt and her own orgasm was hastened by the delicious thought that her cunt was the first this ea
ger little ramrod had ever breached.
‘I . . . I’m coming!’ cried the youth, and poured out his tribute, just in time to feel the rhythmic contractions of Mara’s cunt as she climaxed beneath him.
He left with apologies and thanks, and a damp, darkening stain on his uniform trousers.
When he had gone, Mara noticed a slim brochure lying on the tray underneath the glass of orange juice. Strange – she could have sworn it wasn’t there before. She picked it up and read it. It was a guide for visitors to the Berlin Ägyptisches Museum – the Museum of Egyptology.
Why not? she thought to herself. Since nothing is going right, I might as well do some sightseeing. Maybe the museum will give me some clues about the Phallus of Osiris.
And she got up and went into the bathroom to turn on the shower.
Mara liked museums. Not the modern sort, with interactive displays and mechanical dinosaurs; but museums of the old school. She loved the musty smell, the glass-fronted mahogany cases, the feeling of being in a time warp.
She liked the Ägyptisches Museum. As she laid her hands upon the glass fronts of the cases she could feel some of the vibrations coming from the objects within them, her psychic powers bringing her once more into contact with the past. Two simple statuettes entitled ‘A married couple’ . . . she touched the glass and a vision of sun-burned sand filled her head; a vision of a man, naked to the waist, fashioning the figures from wet clay. She moved on and the pictures changed. A child’s toy, food dishes, funerary trappings that filled her head with pain and her lungs with the suffocating stench of death.
But nothing to give her any clues about what she was seeking.
At last, she stopped in front of the museum’s most famous exhibit: the sublime, painted head of Queen Nefertiti. A beautiful woman’s portrait in clay, only half-finished before the craftsman abandoned his task. The head gazed back at her, its one painted eye seeming to dare her to unravel the mystery. She stretched out fingertips to touch the glass . . .
And a hand touched her shoulder.
‘Fräulein Fleming? I think I may have information which is of interest to you.’
8: The Tomb
Mara suppressed a gasp of surprise and turned on her heel.
She found herself looking into an old, wrinkled face with twinkling dark-brown eyes. A face framed by a straggling white beard and a small skull-cap. He wore the sombre black garb of an elderly Jew.
‘My apologies for startling you, Miss Fleming. I had no wish to alarm you. My name is Abraham Weits. I do not think that you will have heard of me.’
Mara shook her head, still dazed from the shock.
‘Herr . . . Weits? How do you know my name? And what is this information that you are offering me?’
Weits laughed and Mara glimpsed the brownish stumps of broken teeth, lurking like crooked tombstones in the black cavern of his mouth.
‘Offering, Fräulein Fleming? Yes, I have a proposition to make to you but I am not offering the information to you as a gift. Shall we call it barter, a fair exchange? For it is plain that each of us has something that the other wants . . .’
He rested his gnarled hand on Mara’s sleeve and she wanted to push him away, to tell him that she did not need his information. Instead, remembering the importance of her quest, she made an effort to smile and replied:
‘State the nature of your proposition, Herr Weits, and name your terms.’
‘Patience, my dear Miss Fleming. First, I have a little something to show you. If you would be kind enough to wait a moment?’
He glanced around to verify that they were alone in the gallery, then rummaged in the pocket of his faded black jacket and took out a key – rusty with age and rather insignificant in its design. As Mara looked on in amazement, he took a step towards one of the mummy-cases which stood against the wall and moved it a fraction to the right – just far enough to expose a small section of the oak-panelled wall. He appeared to insert the key into it – though Mara could see no sign of a lock.
With an almost imperceptible whirr, the panel slid back, revealing a short passageway, at the far-distant end of which Mara could see a yellowish light burning. She shivered and drew back, suddenly remembering the hidden room in Winterbourne where she had suffered so many terrible ordeals.
‘Enter,’ invited Weits. ‘There is no need to be afraid. I will not harm you. After all, as you can see, I am just a frail old man – what could I do against a strong and beautiful young woman like you, Fräulein Fleming?’
Although she did not trust him for an instant, Mara knew that she had no choice, she would have to play his game. She stepped through the hole in the panel and into the passageway beyond. Weits followed, and the panel clicked shut behind them. They walked down the murky passageway and entered a brightly lit room in the middle of which stood a comfortable leather armchair. The walls were lined with books and a table at one end of the room seemed to serve as an altar. In the middle of the stone floor a chalked pentacle surrounded a silver swastika.
‘This is my realm,’ explained Weits. ‘For almost half a century I have lived here, within the very walls of the museum. The fools! They have forgotten all about the secret rooms and passages. Not one of them has ever asked himself why the layout of the museum does not quite match up to their mathematics.
‘Yes, I have lived here since my beloved Führer’s death in 1945 and I have continued to carry out the duties with which he entrusted me.’
Mara stared at him in confusion. Weits read the expression on her face and explained with a dry laugh:
‘Yes, Miss Fleming, I am a Jew. But I am also a devoted disciple of our beloved leader; for, hearing of my mystical powers and occult scholarship, he saved me from certain death in the camps and appointed me the keeper of his collection of magical artefacts. A job which I have continued to carry out until this very day . . .’
He took Mara’s chin in his hand and stroked her cheek gently. His breath was hot and acrid on her skin.
‘I know what you seek, the object of your quest. You seek the Phallus of Osiris.’
Mara’s heart was racing. ‘And you have it?’
Abraham smiled. ‘Patience, my dear. All in good time. But follow me and you shall see the evidence of my good faith.’
He pushed open a narrow door and ushered Mara inside. The room itself was long and very narrow, and Mara surmised that it must be located within the thick stone walls of the museum. The walls were lined with glass cases, each containing a magical item, painstakingly labelled. Seeing that Mara was baffled by the German, Weits translated the labels for her:
‘This one here is the foreskin of Napoleon, jealously guarded by the ex-Empress Josephine until her death and then bequeathed to a magical brotherhood in Paris. The next, there, is a fragment of the Spear of Destiny, sadly shattered and its fragments dispersed in an ill-judged magic ritual in the First World War. Whoever succeeds in recovering all the fragments and restoring the spear shall hold the key to world dominion. And this silver reliquary, in the jewelled casket, contains the ashes of the great magician Abra-Melin. All are relics of the most supreme magical significance.
‘And so you see, my dear Fräulein Fleming, that I am truly what I say I am. And what I offer you is a chance to obtain what you seek.’
Her knees trembling with fear, Mara forced herself to answer his piercing gaze.
‘I will do anything for a chance to find the Phallus. Anything, Herr Weits. Simply name your price.’
‘It is a simple exchange, my dear,’ he replied. ‘Your body – which I crave – in return for my co-operation, which I see you are most anxious to obtain.’
He had no need for sorcery to persuade his victim. For already Mara was undressing before him, there in the dimly lit treasure-store where Abraham Weits had for so long hoarded the magical spoils of a corrupt regime that refused to die. Abraham Weits – an old man, his body warped with age and his mind with the blind devotion of a victim for his torturer. A man who was now eyein
g her with unconcealed lust; and whose trembling fingers were rubbing the swelling front of his rusty-black trousers.
Mara slipped off her sweater and dropped it onto the stone floor and stepped out of her shoes. She shivered as she felt the iciness of the stone flags seeping up into her feet. Though she usually scorned underwear, something had insinuated its way into her subconscious and told her that today she should dress the whore.
And now she stood before Weits clad in black silk French knickers, black seamed stockings and suspenders, and a lacy black underwired bra which thrust her magnificent breasts upwards and seemed to offer them to him like twin juicy fruits at a banquet. The crystal amulet nestled in her cleavage, casting out multi-coloured flashes of light whenever she moved.
‘Beautiful . . .’ sighed Abraham Weits, seizing her by the hand and leading her through yet another door, into a tiny room almost entirely occupied by a carved wooden bed.
She sat down obediently on the edge of the bed and waited for him to join her. He began to undress, carefully folding his shabby but immaculate clothes and placing them on a table at the foot of the bed.
His body was old, yet there was a glittering vigour in his eyes. His prick curved upwards with all the enthusiasm of a young man’s, its circumcised shaft glistening with the moisture of intensifying desire. His bollocks were large and, to Mara’s surprise, almost hairless. Their twin globes hung like sap-filled fruits between desiccated thighs – almost as though all the life left in this aged body had become concentrated in the genitals, that last outpost of youthful vigour.
Opening the lid of an oak chest, Weits took out a collection of leather thongs, an Arab strap, Japanese love-eggs and a large ivory dildo, carved with Eastern designs. Anticipating what Weits intended to do to her, Mara made to lie down on the bed and offer herself up to the torture. But Weits shook his head.
‘No, no. You don’t understand. I wish you to use this . . . equipment . . . upon me, upon my body, for my pleasure.’
The Phallus of Osiris Page 14