‘I have arranged for you to meet him at eight o’clock this evening, at the Ramses Hilton. I understand from my sources that he has rather . . . specialised tastes, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Well, whatever it is that he’s into, I’m sure you can handle it, can’t you, Mara?’
He stroked Mara’s cheek and she felt the cold chill of his gaze enter her soul, like a creeping paralysis.
‘Conquer the slave, my darling Mara, and you are sure to conquer his master.’
Mara waited in the foyer of the hotel, nervously smoothing the folds of her dress. She’d made sure she looked her best. She seldom wore make-up but tonight she’d applied glossy crimson lipstick to her full lips. It made her feel like an upper-class tart . . . but then again, wasn’t that what she was supposed to be tonight?
That afternoon, Heimdal had taken her to a designer store and bought her the dress – a daringly low-cut gown in emerald-green raw silk which clung to her curves and emphasised the swell of her magnificent breasts. Her mane of black hair was piled high, with little tendrils left free to straggle carelessly across her tanned shoulders. She felt out of place, unwillingly moulded into something that she was not: a custom-built vamp.
She found herself wondering which of the tuxedo-clad men coming out of the lift would turn out to be the Honourable Tony Wentworth, Cultural Attaché at the British Embassy in Cairo. He was sure to be a grotesque old roué.
The group of men moved past her without pausing, though several of them cast appreciative glances in Mara’s direction – mentally undressing her, wondering what it would be like to run their parched tongues over her juicy breasts, down over her belly and in between her thighs.
A fountain played in the centre of the foyer, small golden fishes flitting to and fro in the bubbling depths: a touch of purest kitch in this sanitised Western oasis. Mara looked away and out into the cool of the night, watching small boats glide past in the royal-blue dusk, their lights twinkling in the dark waters.
A voice jolted her back to reality.
‘Miss Fleming?’
She looked up, instinctively raising her hand to her throat, checking that the talisman was still there.
‘Mara Fleming, yes.’
‘Tony Wentworth. Delighted to meet you. Shall we go in to dinner?’
He was a middle-aged man, perfectly respectable as far as Mara could tell and not the least bit odd in appearance. About forty-five, dark-haired, with touches of distinguished grey at the temples. Not ugly – in fact, quite nice-looking. Medium height, slim waist, nice tight backside. Mara quite fancied him already, in spite of her misgivings. Perhaps Heimdal had exaggerated, out of malice. Perhaps he had just got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
She followed Tony into the restaurant, where half a dozen grinning waiters fought to outdo each other in ingratiating politeness. He shunned a table by the window, opting instead for one of the booths in the corner furthest from the door. The booth was partitioned off from most of the restaurant and only dimly lit by a single wall-lamp. Perhaps that alone ought to have alerted her.
The food was good if stereotypically European and Wentworth was an interesting conversationalist. Mara began to relax a little, forgetting for a while what she had been brought here to do. It wasn’t until she felt his foot exploring the inside of her thigh that she remembered that she was here as his whore. Only, instead of money, she was going to be paid in something far more valuable: information.
She glanced up at him and saw that he was smiling, but cruelly now, like a cat who has caught a mouse and intends to play with it thoroughly before killing it.
He leaned forward across the table and slid a finger down her cleavage.
‘Take off your dress.’
Mara stared at him, incredulous.
‘I . . . what did you say?’
‘I said, take off your dress, sweetheart. Pull down the top. I want to see your tits.’
‘Someone – a waiter – might see . . .!’
He grinned broadly.
‘Yes, indeed they might. Don’t you think that adds a little spice to the game, Miss Fleming? Now, be a good girl and do as I say. I’m getting a little bored with your conversation, fascinating though it is.’
Trembling with apprehension, Mara slipped the straps of her dress down over her shoulders, wriggled her arms out of them, and took hold of the embroidered silk top of her green evening dress.
‘Do it.’
She could refuse. She could get up from this table and walk out, go back to the hotel, tell Heimdal she couldn’t go through with it. But there was something about Heimdal that frightened her, something she was sure hadn’t been there before. All the genuine softness and understanding had gone out of him, replaced by a phony attentiveness which frankly made her flesh creep. If she refused him this, maybe he’d refuse to help her any more. He might abandon her here in this strange country, without money or other resources save her body. Besides which, she had left the Phallus with him at the hotel. What if he took his revenge now by leaving with it, hiding it from her?
She tugged at the silk bodice and it slid down with a whisper of silk, leaving her naked to the waist, her breasts thrusting free. The muted lamplight played on her flesh like a lover’s caress and Tony Wentworth settled himself back in his seat to watch.
‘What . . . what do you want me to do now?’
‘Well, let me see . . . Have you ever heard of body piercing?’
Mara stared back at him, sick at heart, unable to speak for fear of what he would say to her, what he would make her do to herself.
‘You haven’t? I hear it’s very popular. Young ladies like yourself tell me that they so enjoy having their flesh pierced. Would you enjoy that, Miss Fleming? I must confess that the idea quite excites me. And a little bird tells me that you have already taken the first steps towards experiencing this delightful art-form.’
Mara stared at him, wondering how he could have found out about that night on the hillside in Budapest, when the gypsy king’s wife had pierced her clitoris. It was obvious, of course. Only Heimdal could have told him.
The memory of the pain was still fresh in her mind, even now: the terrible intensity of the burning as the sharp golden wire pierced her tenderest flesh. She wouldn’t let him lay hands on her . . . not on that most intimate and sensitive and precious part of her womanhood! No – not on any part of her!
‘Now, now, don’t fret, my dear. I’m not going to pierce your clitty for you again. Well, not yet, anyway. The night is yet young. Let’s start with something a little less difficult, shall we? How about your nipples? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A little golden thread through your nipples that you could play with? Just think of the wonderful sensations you’d feel.’
Mara sat in speechless misery as Wentworth reached inside his waistcoat pocket and took out a thick, pointed darning needle, threaded with fine gold wire.
He placed it in the palm of Mara’s outstretched hand, and she sat staring at it for several minutes.
Tony leaned across the table again and hissed:
‘You’d better get on with it, my dear. The waiter will be here any moment with the dessert.’
As she still did not move, he continued.
‘Do it now, Miss Fleming. Push the needle through your right nipple.’
Terrified, she pressed the tip of the needle against the sensitive flesh of her nipple. A sharp pain shot through her and she hesitated.
‘Push it in; right through the flesh, from side to side. I want to hear you describe every sensation as you pierce your flesh.’
Mara obeyed, tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks as the sharp point burrowed into her flesh and she clenched her teeth to stifle her cries of anguish. She pushed it in, slowly and inexorably.
‘Speak,’ commanded Wentworth. She saw his arm moving and realised what he was doing. He was unzipping his flies and wanking himself off under the table. ‘I want to hear your pain, feel your pain, share the pleasure of y
our pain.’
‘It . . . it is like a terrible burning,’ gasped Mara. ‘As though a burning dagger were piercing my flesh, not just the flesh of my breast but the whole of my being. I can feel the pain everywhere – in my breasts, my belly, my thighs, my cunt . . .’
She gasped, unable to speak any more, as the needle emerged from her flesh and she drew it through, pulling the golden wire behind it. A little trickle of blood was winding down her breast, like a crimson thread, matching exactly the colour of her lipstick.
‘Good, good,’ sighed Wentworth, evidently much excited. ‘Now I want you to tie the gold wire into a little ring and manipulate it – tell me what that feels like.’
Mara removed the needle and formed the golden wire into a ring, as he had instructed. Already, the burning of her pain was beginning to turn into a very different warmth. Wentworth was smiling, knowingly now.
‘It feels . . . like the whole of my body is on fire, with such a delicious warmth.’
‘Lift up your skirt and spread your legs,’ instructed Wentworth.
She reached down under the table and pulled her skirts well up onto her thighs.
Immediately, she felt a bare foot climbing her leg again, and remembered that time in the library – it seemed so very long ago now, like a scene from another world and time – when she had masturbated Andreas with her foot and he had pulled her, laughing, onto the polished wooden floor, where they had fucked like guilty children, terrified of discovery and yet stimulated by that very terror.
She was terrified now, too. And excited, beyond belief.
The foot was between her thighs now, exploring her cunt-lips and forcing its way between them. She was wet and he slipped into her easily, his big toe finding her clitoris and skilfully rubbing the tiny gold ring which still pierced it.
Footsteps sounded behind them. The waiter was returning, with their dessert. Wentworth smiled at Mara’s confusion, offering no words of encouragement. Still he was wanking her, teasing her into paroxysms of desire.
There was no time to pull up the bodice of her dress. She seized the white velvet stole she had worn when she arrived, and wrapped it hurriedly around her shoulders, hiding her martyred breast. But she could not quite so easily conceal her unwilling excitement, unable to escape from the power of the all-conquering, despotic foot.
The waiter noticed Mara’s halting breath and tear-stained cheeks.
‘Is Madam unwell?’ he enquired, solicitously.
Wentworth made no attempt to bail her out, so Mara replied, rather jerkily:
‘Madam is quite well, thank you. Please leave us.’
The waiter set down the dishes and went off again, no doubt puzzled by the sight of a tearful white woman, clutching a bloodstained white wrap to her bosom.
Wentworth brought himself off with a low grunt of satisfaction and, in their silent corner, Mara heard the quiet splash of his semen onto the tiled floor. A few seconds later, she felt her own orgasm approaching, and sank back into her seat with a sob of guilty ecstasy.
Afterwards, Wentworth allowed her to dress and took her to his room. There, in the darkness, he stripped her and tied her to the bed with leather straps. To her surprise, he did not fuck her but summoned the boy who cleaned the shoes.
He arrived, an unprepossessing sixteen-year-old clad in the hotel’s dark-red livery.
‘I wish you to fuck this Englishwoman,’ Wentworth instructed him. ‘There is money in it for you if you do well. And you need not show her any undue gentleness. I wish to derive pleasure from the spectacle.’
The youth grinned. He had evidently carried out Wentworth’s commissions in the past and was accustomed to his unusual tastes. Without further ado, he took off his belt and used it vigorously on Mara’s defenceless body, raising red welts on her tanned flesh.
Wentworth settled himself in an armchair, took out his penis and began to masturbate as the Arab boy laid down the strap and took off his trousers and pants in readiness for his conquest.
He fucked clumsily and Mara winced as he forced himself into her, like some over-eager young animal moved only by the thought of his own pleasure. But he fucked with self-restraint and did not allow himself to come until he was certain that his master had derived full enjoyment from the spectacle.
Afterwards Wentworth fucked the boy, clearly deriving even greater pleasure from the tightness of the lad’s arse than he had done from the contemplation of Mara’s humiliation and discomfort.
When it was all over, he cut through the straps which held Mara to the bed and gave a humourless smile.
‘Women in general displease me – all but the most alluring and the most lascivious. You have not displeased me. Heimdal spoke the truth when he told me of your beauty and your enjoyment of unusual pleasures. I shall therefore give you the information you seek.
‘LeMaitre is no longer in Cairo. He has gone on a journey to Luxor, to view the ancient ruins of the Theban necropolis as a guest of the Egyptian government. The day after tomorrow, he will be visiting recent discoveries in the Valley of the Kings. If you seek LeMaitre, you must seek him there.’
Luxor was a disappointment to Mara: jammed full of tourists and ugly hotels, and hardly in tune with her idea of a noble and ancient civilisation.
The letters of introduction which Wentworth had given them got them through the security cordon, but they arrived at the hotel too late: the official party had already left for the mortuary temple of King Seti I, a couple of hours earlier. They must make their own way to the Valley.
The notorious ‘people ferry’ across the Nile was crowded, not just with people but with chickens, boxes of dates and even the odd goat. Heimdal complained incessantly all the way across and even Mara was feeling disgruntled by the time they reached the other side.
Because of their official documents they were spared the traditional tourist ordeal of queuing to buy tickets at the kiosk. But nothing could spare them the horrors of haggling with the car-drivers and donkey-boys who pestered them from the moment they stepped off the ferry.
‘I’m not travelling on a donkey,’ thundered Heimdal. ‘And neither are you. Let’s find someone with a decent car.’
Unfortunately, the best the locals could manage was a battered saloon of indeterminate age and make, though Heimdal did manage to negotiate a very fair price. Crammed into the back, they lurched from side to side as the driver wove his merry but uncertain way along the road, swerving at regular intervals to avoid small boys, livestock and cars moving towards them, equally erratically, from the opposite direction.
It didn’t take long to reach the Temple of Seti but again they were too late. According to a group of American tourists, the official party had moved off for the Valley of the Kings about half an hour previously.
A few miles further on, they hit the burning white expanses of the Valley of the Kings: a steep and completely barren valley, with innumerable royal tombs cut into the limestone hillside, their numbered doorways like neat puncture-wounds in the flanks of a mummified carcass. A line of gleaming-black official limousines reflected the morning sun off well-burnished chrome.
Their driver parked near the rest-house, and they paused gratefully for a drink of water before paying him half his fee and telling him to wait for them.
They set off up the valley, having discovered that the official party were being given a tour of the tomb which had recently been discovered at the very far end, halfway up the steep rock face, between the tomb of Tuthmosis III and two other, unfinished tombs.
As they reached the far end of the rising valley, they saw what they were looking for: a flight of rickety wooden steps covered with an impromptu scrap of tatty red carpet leading up to the sightless eye of a recently opened tomb, about halfway up the hillside. Two armed guards stood outside the entrance, their sub-machine guns slung across their arms in readiness for any attempt on the lives of the Prime Minister and his aides, who were talking in a group to one side of the tomb entrance.
Mar
a and Heimdal showed their passes and were saluted respectfully.
‘Where is Mr LeMaitre?’ asked Mara. ‘We have an important message for him.’
‘Mr LeMaitre and his personal assistants have gone back into the tomb, to take a closer look at the very fine wall-paintings,’ replied the guard. ‘You will probably find him in the furthest chamber, the Pharaoh’s burial vault.’
He handed Heimdal an electric torch and they stepped gingerly into the gloom.
‘Be careful,’ remarked the guard. ‘It is very dark, and you might have an accident.’
The entrance led into a narrow passage, unlit except for one or two very temporary inspection lamps slung from pins knocked into the ceiling. The roof was low and even Mara had to stoop to pick her way along the rubble-strewn passageway. Evidently this was a very recent discovery indeed and few tourists had as yet passed this way.
Mara glanced at the paintings as she passed: white stars on a dark-blue background; pots of green papyrus; Pharaoh in his sailing-barge, gliding down the river that led through the underworld; Isis and Osiris, fucking together on the banks of the Nile. The Eye of Horus glared down upon her from the ceiling, as though keeping a special watch on her.
She heard voices – at first faint, but then gradually getting closer.
‘We’re catching up on them,’ she whispered. ‘I must hurry.’
Nervously, she patted the canvas bag slung over her shoulder, in which the Phallus lay, safe in its box. What would she do when she finally came face to face with the body of Andreas Hunt, under the sway of this new and very powerful persona? Would she have the courage and the strength and the instinct to use the Phallus on him, to cast out the usurper and return Andreas’s soul to his body?
She cast the thought from her mind, aware that she must act first and think later.
They carried on down the corner, Heimdal leading the way with the torch as they crossed a rickety footbridge over a sheer forty-foot drop to a pit below.
‘Glad you’re not a tomb robber?’ whispered Heimdal as they reached the other side and looked down into the vertiginous ravine.
The Phallus of Osiris Page 29