But after what one critic described as “a breathtakingly operatic feigning of grief” it was exit Constantina, and without even so much as a canapé, let alone a wake, she had cast the first soil onto the polished oak of the departed Greek’s liner-sized casket, and then vanished into her smoked-glass limo to head for Heartbreak, never to be seen again.
♦♦♦♦
The press hunted for her on an almost daily basis, of course, and Francis, the building’s white-gloved doorman, could have retired a very comfortable man if his integrity had not forbade him from accepting the ‘donations’ of hungry reporters and curious socialites alike over the ensuing years. But, thanks to his loyalty, Constantina’s rocky fortress remained impregnable, the apartment itself presided over by the tubercular Maria, her personal maid, who took deliveries at the service entrance and kept the corridor to the grand front foyer as virgin to unwelcome footfalls as her father had guarded her own unsullied coño many decades before back in her native village in Costa Rica.
Which is why Gertrude Maloney couldn’t understand why she was being invited to interview the elusive Black Widow.
She read the letter again, taking in the eccentric handwriting scrawled across the expensive cream vellum with an almost fawning tilt:
“I have been out of the public eye for too long and I find that it is time for my come-back. But I feel that I need to tell my side of what is by now a very fantastical story, and would seek the talents of someone like yourself to tell my tale for me before I reappear. I have read your work and am impressed, and, should you be willing, I am prepared to put my life, as it were, into your hands and allow you to complete a manuscript on my behalf for the publishers Messrs. Ardback and Dustman, who will negotiate an appropriate fee with you.”
Trudy scratched her head. She had graduated from journalism school a scant three months before, was working in a late-night pizza place to pay back her student loan, and, to date, had published two articles in a mid-list women’s magazine, one on stain removal, the other on folk remedies for thrush. Neither of which were likely to have attracted the notice of the likes of Constantina Cavarlini, and yet here was the letter in her hands, penned on thick hand-made paper that would cost more than the weekly wage of the average hoaxer.
Intrigued, she rang the main switchboard at Ardback and Dustman, and, to her astonishment, was put straight through to a senior commissioning editor. Yes, they had negotiated with Miss Cavarlini to publish an account of her life, and, yes, Miss Cavarlini had stipulated that she, Gertrude Maloney, should write the said account on her behalf and that a contract was waiting to be couriered at Miss Maloney’s earliest convenience.
“But why me?” she had asked in a totally unprofessional outburst, and the cold editor had permitted himself a soft burst of laugher.
“My dear girl,” he had said amusedly through slightly pursed lips, “if Constantina Cavarlini had stipulated that she wanted her autobiography ghosted by Juan-the-pool-boy we would have agreed to it, and had forty-thousand orders for advance copies two hours after we announced it. So please do not flatter yourself that it’s your superb résumé — or lack of one — that’s landed you this job. You’re in as long as Constantina wants you in. So don’t displease her, whatever you do. Oh, and did I mention there’s a modest four-figure advance? It’s not much but it should take care of that pesky student loan of yours. Check your bank account, I think you’ll find you’ve been adequately compensated.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Trudy stammered.
“Don’t say anything,” the editor replied, dismissively. “Oh, and just a little word of advice. Obscenely rich people are used to getting their own way, uncontested, at all times. So do what you’re told like a good girl and there’ll be no tears before bedtime. Constantina’s expecting you at her house this afternoon. Don’t keep her waiting.”
♦♦♦♦
She could hear them all whispering in their plush and cosy little apartments, tiny rodent-like voices scritch-scratching away like little sunbed-tanned mice as they watched her approach the private elevator that led to the penthouse, their curious eyeballs glued to their shiny brass peepholes as she walked boldly past, exuding a confidence that she certainly didn’t feel.
Trudy was still sure that it was all a mistake, but she had written a cheque to her loan company and mailed it before she set out. A huge lump of apprehension formed in her throat as the big brass doors of the elevator sighed open and sucked her inside, its hidden machinery whooshing her silently up to the top floor in a brass and mahogany cage like something out of a Jules Verne fantasy.
A metallic voice down a speaking tube greeted her as she alighted, heavily accented and old, like something from the tomb. “Miss Moll-ony? Come straight along the corridor, if you please. Madame is expecting you.”
Trudy looked up at the long lobby ahead with not a little trepidation in her pounding heart, the plush carpet thick like green lichen under her feet, the walls tactile with heavy flock wallpaper, an ancient botanical design like thorns that thickened as they stretched up to the invisible ceiling. Old glass wall lamps shaped like flaming torches protruded to light her way with little pools of warm yellow, but the deeper and deeper she ventured inside the labyrinth the more it felt like stepping into a dark forest with no way back to the world of natural light again.
And even if she left a trail of crumbs, would not the flock of scrawny bird-like ladies from below come and peck them up with their sharp beaks and beady, watchful little eyes?
And then the Gingerbread House appeared before her, a massive door fashioned from beaten metal, its surround an elaborately carved replica tree, hewn from some bog-blackened ironwood, its features gilded painstakingly in glass-like enamels. Luscious tropical fruit hung invitingly round the doorway, birds of paradise swooped down from the lintels as though frozen in time, and, near the ground, shadowy fairy folk peeped from between the entangled roots.
Taking a deep breath, Trudy reached out to ring the bell, but the door swung open of its own accord and there, spot-lit theatrically in the centre of the huge hallway, stood an obese old woman, her long and very thick grey hair braided and piled like coiled snakes on her head, her face a mask of powdered white, eyebrows completely shaved off and then painted back on with an unfaltering hand. Her neck and shoulders were like a thin woman’s, and she had no breasts to speak of, but her stomach and abdomen swelled out in front of her as if she’d been inflated and her hips were huge, making her body roll from side to side as she advanced with her hand outstretched.
“Come in, my dear,” she said in a thin, cancerous voice, pure Grey Gardens; Katharine Hepburn with a liberal dash of Jackie O. “I am Constantina Cavarlini, I bid you welcome.”
Turn around and run, a voice inside Trudy’s head whispered. Forget the debt and the career and just run the fuck away before it’s too late! But a thin, colourless woman in a maid’s uniform had already shut the heavy metal door behind her and she fancied she could hear the very tumblers turning as Constantina Cavarlini took her hand and led her into the depths of her softly breathing Lebkuchen Cottage.
♦♦♦♦
It seemed that she was to be resident in the penthouse, though she had no memory of ever agreeing to this. But a comfortable room with a soft goose-down bed had been provided, and Maria, the thin maid, brought endless trays of mouth-watering patisseries to her as she worked at her laptop, tip-tip-tapping Constantina’s ramblings into a cohesive story each night. There was no internet connection, of course, and Trudy’s cell phone was unable to pick up a signal, but she found herself blissfully overcome by a feeling of deliciously sensual ennui, and she luxuriated in the unexpected isolation from her former life of constant emails and text messages.
“So, my dear, tonight we will discuss my lovers. That will be of interest to the reading public, will it not?” Constantina announced as she curled, cat like, into her large sofa, a tiny espresso c
up of something dark and creamy in her hand as she watched Trudy like a patient tabby staking out a mouse hole.
“Oh, I think that it will be the most popular chapter in the book,” Trudy agreed, feeling a hot flush of excitement wash over her as her employer’s gaze, not for the first time, appraised her hungrily. She was a generously built young woman of twenty-three with white skin and dark hair, bounteous breasts and full sensual lips that no one had been kissing these last few months — a state of affairs that made even the attention of a misshapen old woman oddly titillating to her.
“So, what do you want to hear about? The feeble fumblings and desperate pantings of the profoundly rich old men that I endured to buy this golden cage that surrounds me now? Or does your heart leap at the prospect of learning my darker secrets? The stories of the fat whores I have enjoyed clandestinely in back alleys off Times Square; or the buxom waitresses, still redolent of fried food, that I lured back here by the service elevator and licked and sucked on this very carpet…. Ah, that excites you, does it not?”
Trudy was aware that her face was flaming, and she stared at Constantina with a horrified fascination.
“Oh yes, my dear, we had you investigated before you came and I know everything about you,” the old woman said quietly. “All those scandals that your father spent so much money trying to suppress when you were at college, and why he now refuses to acknowledge you as his daughter and leaves you to settle your own tuition fees, while he proves his manhood with his new wife and tries to forget the images of his child that crowd his brain every waking hour. His own daughter! Doing such things in the arms of other women. Your roommates, your tutors, even the woman who cleaned the bathrooms. Where did you have that one again, I forget?”
Trudy looked at her feet. “In the shower room at the dorm. She said I forced her…”
Constantina laughed. “Ah, they all say that when they are caught,” she said quietly. “But, come come, don’t look so sad. I have always known what you are. That’s why I insisted on having you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are like me. Insatiable. I had to have someone who would understand my hungers, and who better than someone who shared my own appetites. They humiliated you, didn’t they, with the shame and the disgrace, and the threats of ostracism. So you have denied yourself, lived the life of a nun in that little rat-infested basement you inhabit. But it’s no use, is it… You still yearn and you still hunger, and not for men with their puny egos and precarious cocks. You need what I need — that sweet and honeyed nectar that only an excited pussy can produce. And you hunger for it daily. Am I not correct?”
A million protestations and denials flooded through Trudy’s brain but she could not shape her lips to speak any of those lies again, not after the endless string of promises and the therapists and lectures and reprimands.
She nodded. “You are correct, Constantina,” she said in a small and tremulous voice. “I hunger constantly for the sweet taste of pussy and I am… quite insatiable.”
“And how long since you last imbibed?”
“Three months, seventeen days and five hours,” Trudy replied, her cunt on fire as Constantina’s hungry eyes ate her alive.
“Ah, for me it is nearly twenty years,” said Constantina, licking her lips, her mouth watering like the wolf’s in Grandma’s bed.
“What big teeth you have,” Trudy suddenly said with a tremor in her voice, her nipples painful and sticking up under the thin fabric of her t-shirt, all her skin tingling, her cunt pulsing like a heart beat.
“All the better to eat you with,” whispered Constantina, sliding across the deep-pile carpet like a stop-motion limpet.
Trudy unfastened the stud on her Levi’s and yanked down the zip. “Then will you? Will you please?”
Constantina’s head was in her lap, her gnarled hands tugging at the waistband of Trudy’s jeans. “Invite me to dine,” she gasped. “You have to say the words or I cannot eat you. Invite me in…”
Trudy arched her back and lifted her ass off the chair as Constantina yanked her jeans and panties down in one desperate tug.
“Say the words,” she gasped, her eyes consuming Trudy’s big pussy, the mound huge and pronounced, the open slit aroused and inviting, her dark hair thick and mysterious.
“I. Invite. You. To. Dine…” Trudy gasped as the last shreds of her self-control departed from her, and quick as a flash, Constantina’s lizard-like tongue shot out and buried itself in her wet slippery crack, the old woman hungrily lapping up all the sweet nectar she had craved for so long.
♦♦♦♦
Trudy had had strong orgasms that seemed to take her out of her body before, earth-shattering climaxes that left her gasping like a landed fish on the sun-baked struts of an old pier; but nothing prepared her for the intensity of feeling that she experienced when Constantina went down on her and made her cum. Her pussy was swimming with juice long before her employer’s mouth began to consume her ravenously, the old woman too desperate to tease. Trudy started to cum as soon as Constantina found her engorged clit and sucked hungrily on it, transporting her to another world as she began to thrust and buck and everything around her went dark.
She felt her orgasm coming up inside her like an approaching express train in the night, felt its distant rumble, heard the metallic singing of the rails, then suddenly it was upon her, its power, its vibration, its scent and heat all engulfing her, and she was no longer of this world but running through ancient forests filled with fiery-eyed beasts who roared and howled her name.
“It is all right, it is all right,” Constantina’s voice whispered from somewhere very far away. “You are safe, they are not real.”
Trudy held the other woman tight. “What did you do to me? Did you drug me?”
Constantina shook her head, her thick grey braids looking almost jet black in this light. “It is always like this the first time with one of my kind, but do not worry, you will soon become accustomed to the intensity. Come, kiss me. Feel my heat, and let me restore you.”
Her lush full lips, redder and more luxuriant than Trudy remembered, were close, oh so close now, sweeter than sugarplums, sticky like sweetmeats, and the girl’s resolve melted like butter on a hot pancake as she pulled the older woman to her and kissed her hard.
And like the orgasm, it was mind-blowing, the kiss of the spider woman, venomous and deadly, but so sensual that Trudy never wanted it to end, wanted to suck on it and taste it until her dying day.
“Strip me,” she gasped. “Hold me naked against your bare flesh and fuck me with your devil’s tongue.”
Constantina smiled and obliged, ripping Trudy’s best t-shirt in two with the ferocity of her passion as she quickly denuded her, tearing off the flimsy bra and falling upon Trudy’s begging breasts with her hot molten lips.
Trudy was moaning, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” like a mantra, and Constantina was desperate to oblige. She tore her own black sheath dress off in a flurry of beads and buttons and stood naked before her conquest, her body deathly pale, almost blue-white, her modest breasts tiny and gynandrian, but the nipples definitely female and oh so aroused, her immense belly a swollen tundra of white.
“You’re not wearing underwear, you’ve wanted me all along,” Trudy gasped, her hands all over Constantina’s wide hips as she pulled her close, kissing and caressing. “I was so afraid of you when I first came here. But I soon realised that my fear had grown into desire. I so wanted you to want me, wanted to feel you and see you naked like this, taste your lips, lick your big fleshy cunt…”
Constantina groaned and ran her hand over Trudy’s pussy, her fingers slipping easily inside. “I sensed the desire in you when you first stepped over my threshold; sensed it even through your fear. I knew you would be the one, even then, and I wanted to feed from you at once. But I needed to be sure, so we kept you in your little cage and fed you up, fattened you
for the slaughter. And now it is the time, for you have fed me with your nectar and you hunger for mine…”
“Then no more talk. Eat my pussy and let me eat yours. It’s been so long and I need to taste you, feel your salt-sweet juices in my mouth. Oh my god, you’re so big and so wet and…oh my god…”
Her second orgasm was even more intense than her first, and this time she could smell all the rich loam of the deep dark forest, feel the texture of pine needles beneath her bare feet, see the fanged beasts as they reared rampant around her, their huge erect cocks red and slippery as they howled for her blood.
♦♦♦♦
“And now you begin to understand,” Constantina’s voice whispered as Trudy lay cradled in her arms. “And perhaps you have regrets, but do not worry, they will soon pass.”
Trudy smiled and kissed her. “I understand and I have no regrets. You are what I have been searching for all my life. I am yours, and you must do with me what you will.”
“Good girl,” Constantina replied, her once grey hair now glinting like gleaming ebony in the candlelight. “Then come, let Maria sup upon the scraps, for a loyal servant is always granted the crumbs from her mistress’s table.”
Trudy willingly acquiesced and opened her legs as the little crab-like figure of the maid scuttled quickly out of the darkness and began to lick her pussy, sucking up all the salt-sweet drops that Constantina had missed, hungrily swallowing every honeyed pearl.
“Will I die soon?” Trudy asked, the mouse-like nibblings of the maid’s feeding becoming soporific, like an opiate.
“If you wish,” Constantina said quietly. “Or you can choose to become one such as I. But have a care before you follow this path, my child, for you will find eternity to be a very long time indeed.”
In the Forests of the Night Page 6