Miss America - a BDSM Vampire Tale

by Chrissie Bentley

  He heard me out, and then laughed. “Travel, I’ll grant you, can be tricky. It must be forty years since I first came to this community and, like you, not once have I seen the world beyond. Yes, I miss it. But think on this. You are now forty-two years old.” Shit, I thought as he paused – probably for that very reason - I’d completely forgotten to even wonder about birthdays. No wonder Penny still thinks she’s nineteen!

  He continued speaking. “Since you left college, you left the United States just twice, once for a two week trip to England, once for a week in Spain. Both journeys were arranged through your workplace. In fact, the only other time you’d even left the northeastern seaboard in all that time was to attend a high school reunion. You say you love to travel. But you don’t act on it.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised his hand gently. “Allow me to continue, please. I am not criticizing you. We all have ‘loves’ that we do not consummate, sometimes through fear, sometimes through embarrassment, sometimes through pressure of work, other commitments, responsibilities, so on and so forth. For everything in life that we leave undone, there is a perfectly sound excuse. “But what you are saying is, we prevent you from doing something that you only got around to doing twice over many years, and then only because your career demanded it of you. Balance that against all that you are permitted to do here, that the outside world actively legislates against you doing – sleeping as late as you like, reading a book for as long as you want. Spending your days following your own pursuits, rather than those that society demands that you carry out.

  “You spent years working in job for a living. Here, your expenses are non-existent; consequently, you do not have to work. But, if you choose to, you may – your love of writing is a case in point. Need I go on?”

  “No, Sir.” “No. And as for your other remark, that sex is too easy to find. Well, I think that says more about you than it does for anything else. Besides, not everybody with whom you talk has automatically become your

  bedmate. Myself, for example. Magdalene. There are dozens of people with whom you spend time, talking, playing games,

  exercising, discussing books, with whom you have never had a sexual encounter. Even your friend Suzy… I believe I am not mistaken in saying that you slept together first, and the friendship developed afterwards?”

  “That’s correct, Sir.” “Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Life here is what you make it. Just like it is outside. The only difference is, here we believe that life is to be lived according to your own dreams. Out there, they insist that it’s to be wasted according to other people’s designs. Now tell me truthfully, which do you prefer?” And when I didn’t answer, he reached out one hand and tousled my hair, exactly like a grandparent would. “Your heart answers one thing, your upbringing answers another. Never mind. We all have wrestled with that same dilemma.

  Thankfully, it is a bout that most of us win.”

  I looked at him. “May I ask…” “May you ask about those who don’t win? But I told you about those unfortunates back when you first came to us. Those are the people who never settle, never make friends, never learn to let go of their past so that they might revel in their present. And so they are passed from community to community, in the hope that, one day, they might find happiness… or, at least,

  something that will pass for happiness. And if they don’t…”

  “Used up and useless,” I said quietly. The Magician laughed. “You were paying attention, weren’t you? Finally we pass them back into the society they have spent so long pining for, where they discover that, not only is the grass not greener on the old side, but there was never any grass there to begin with. Here, we nurture our old, our sick, our disabled, our… if you like… insane. I don’t think I need to tell you how they are treated outside? And before you condemn us for simply throwing people back, remember this. We never ask them to leave. Quite the contrary. We go to extraordinary lengths to persuade them to stay. But they make it very plain from the outset that they have no intention of doing so.”

  “I heard a story… somebody escaped once. He was killed by his own father, and the police covered the whole thing up. Even from the father.”

  The Magician’s eyes twinkled. “I heard that same story, albeit with the appropriate period details, when I first came here four decades ago. And there is an old chap who you may have seen in the library, always sits in the same corner reading nautical yarns; he first heard it thirty years before that, from someone who heard it half a century earlier. Who knows? Maybe there is a grain of truth in it somewhere. But when the only escape story anyone knows is one that’s been circulating since the age of Queen Victoria, that should tell you something.

  “Look, if you’re interested, next time you visit the library, ask to be shown into the records room. You’re not going to stumble across any great secrets. A lot of it is dull as ditchwater. But there are three or four remarkable histories kept there, and a number of diaries that I know you will find quite fascinating, following in their footsteps as you are. Oh, and if the attendant there gives you any trouble, tell him I sent you along. It’s about time I gave him a fresh beating.”

  He left with me wondering quite how to use his recommendation to my advantage. I didn’t actually know his name.

  It turned out that I didn’t need to. “You’re Merlin’s little project, aren’t you?” a surly, beetle-faced man pouted as I approached his eerie. Merlin, Dumbledore, the Magician; apparently he made the same powerful impression upon everyone he met.

  I nodded. “I wish to see the records room.” The little man repeated my words back, mockingly, almost as if he hoped that I would report his bad manners back… oh, I get it. He did hope that. He collected a pass key from a hook on the wall, ushered me into his own inner sanctum, then down a flight of metal stairs that rang different notes as we descended.

  “Doubtless somebody thought such a cacophony was an attractive notion,” he murmured by way of explanation. “I find it distracting. Thankfully, not many people come down here; and why would they? There are books enough for everyone upstairs.”

  He departed, clanging his way back upstairs with deliberately cacophonic footfalls; I waited for the ringing to recede, then confronted the room.

  With whitewashed walls and an old linoleum floor, and no larger than my own apartment, it was a far cry from the proud, vast rotunda upstairs. The books themselves were arrayed on metal storage-style shelves, arranged according to subjects listed on a yellowed sheet of paper taped to one of the racks:

  GENERAL HISTORIES...

  STAFF…STUDENT MEMOIRS... PHILOSOPHIES. ..Alongside that, someone had scrawled “Give a Kunt a Kane and suddenly she’s Kant”…

  NOTES & QUERIES...

  CORRESPONDENCE... and so on, a dozen or so categories, ending up with FICTIONS.

  I wondered which the story of the mythical escapee would fall under – either the first or the last, I guessed, but I decided to start at the very beginning, and with the song “Do Re Mi” now reverberating around my brain, I selected the oldest-looking of all the books on that shelf… then replaced it because I couldn’t read Latin. Three similarly weighty tomes later, I finally found one in English.

  I was only two chapters into it when Beetlebrow reappeared. “I’ve been called away. If you’re still here when I return, fine. If you’re not, be so kind as to return the books to their shelves and the key to its hook.” He handed me a large, old-fashioned metal key; I looked at it in something approaching wonder – it was the first one I’d held since I came here. But of course he read my thoughts. “Don’t even think about it. This is the only door it fits.” He stretched his thin lips in something approximating a smile. “I should know. I’ve already tried it everywhere else.”

  I returned to my reading. The book was infuriatingly vague in some details – names, locations, that kind of thing. But it was incredibly detailed in others, and I was grateful for the past researcher who left a notebook and pen on a
neighboring table. I might, as so many people had been at such pains to inform me, never be able to get out of this place. But at least now I might find out exactly what I’d got into.

  One of the funniest sequences in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the one where one of the Knights of the Round Table is lured to a remote tower, there to discover an order of nymphomaniac nuns who insist on him whipping them before they will aid him in his quest.

  Rewind around a thousand years, to the mass of city states and societies that we now lump together as Ancient Greece, and it turns out that wasn’t such a far-fetched fantasy after all.

  What did I know about Ancient Greece? Not much. They were Greek, they were Ancient. The Trojan War. Alexander the Great. A bunch of playwrights and philosophers, and more Gods and

  Goddesses than you could shake a long stick at, who spent their entire time either having sex, having fights, or devising cruel and unusual punishments for one another. Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hera, Aphrodite...

  Empousa. I did not know the name, and pulling a chunky looking mythology from one of the reference shelves, it appeared that I was not alone in my ignorance. She wasn’t one of the frontline goddesses; she wasn’t even one of the minor ones. Her mother was Hecate, and that name I did know, if only for its inclusion in sundry cheap horror novels I’d read over the years, a Black Magic hellcat who... I read on, intrigued, suffered more from bad press than bad character.

  Hecate was a virgin Goddess, but she had a child, Empousa. Whose other parent, Mormo, was also a woman, a dark spirit who traveled the nocturnal world, biting and feasting on badly behaved children. A vampire. Empousa simply followed in her footsteps. Except she didn’t go for children. She went for men. Young, strong, vigorous men. Men who could offer her more than mere blood.

  My hand was already at my neck, at the still vibrant hickey that must now be a year old. But my thoughts were locked onto that visit to the Big Hall. Back before I knew the game, back when I was still a frightened outsider. Sucking a cock... biting it... draining it. At the time, and ever since, I just assumed... and now I comprehended the asininity of my assumption. The fact that he came in my mouth was not what allowed me to accept the fact that he bled there as well, did not trigger some deep psychological defense that allowed me to relish the familiar as a way of repressing the horror of the gore.

  It triggered something else entirely.

  Something that had always been within me. Something I had always known. Had always fantasized. And had never once allowed to step out into anything even remotely resembling the bright light of my own consciousness.

  I packed away books, locked the door and made my way back to my room.

  I needed to write. I needed to dream. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Even from the outer chamber, I could hear her anger and, believe me, Her Majesty’s rage was not something you wanted to witness first hand. Still I had been summoned and, ducking past the eunuch who stood in the doorway, his face betraying his nervousness despite his attempts to maintain his usual passivity, I entered.

  The Queen sat at a table, her dark eyes fiery, her mouth a tight slit across her beautiful face. I stood silently, even after her hand swept some documents to the floor, waiting until her glance fell upon me.

  “You took your time.” I apologized, although I had no idea whether it would do me any good. But she simply shrugged. “I suppose you’ve heard? I suppose everybody has heard by now.”

  I nodded. Gossip moved quickly around the royal court, and it moved even quicker when

  Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ, Cleopatra VII Philopator, was its topic. “They say...”

  “They say,” she interrupted, “that I sucked off fifty Roman noblemen in one night.” She paused. “But they don’t say that I sucked each of them in such a different fashion that every single one of them so envied the others that, had I only had a mind to do so, I could have sucked them all off again before the night was through. And still had them begging for more.”

  I smiled, I could not help myself. The first question any girl was asked when she was first signed into service here was, how much did she enjoy giving head? And the world would know her answer at a glance. The girls who loved it were the ones who painted their lips. The girls with no taste for it walked the corridors unadorned.

  Κλεοπάτρα’s lips were always painted. So were mine, for that matter, and I confess to these pages that when I first heard the gossip, my pussy moistened at the very thought of my Queen’s accomplishment. Fifty men! And Roman men, too! Even the common soldiers who guarded the emissaries and diplomats who were constantly swanning around the court were out of reach to a mere serving girl like myself, no matter how high in Κλεοπάτρα’s favor I had risen... and I had risen high, I understood that, for who else had she called for in her moment of fury?

  Not Berenice, with her fat legs and sagging breasts. Not Octavia, the Roman wench who was a gift from some admirer or other. Not even Arsinoe, her sister. No, she had called me, and her smile as I stood a few feet to her side warmed me as much as that knowledge.

  Her lips were deep red. Mine, paler, less full, less... what was the expression? Voluptuous. That is something else the Romans gave given us, a range of words that taste so delicious that you want to use them all the time. She was looking at them now.

  “How many men have you taken into your mouth?” I blushed and paused, although I had no need to count. “Seventeen,” I said softly. “But not in one night.”

  “Half an hour’s work,” Κλεοπάτρα smiled back at me. “Forty minutes if you find one that is especially pleasurable.” She rose and crossed the room to the balcony, stepping into the sunlight and gazing down into the courtyard. I followed her uncertainly, but she grasped my arm as I came in reach and, pulling me to her side, inclined her head towards the river.

  “The palace will be busy tonight,” she said. “At any moment I expect to see the sails of a great ship making its way toward us. A trade delegation. An important trade delegation.” And she emphasized the words. “I would like them to discover that I am not the only woman in Egypt who the gossips can call ‘the great swallower’” - and a sidelong glance from those lovely dark eyes shocked me as much as her words. Was there nothing that had been said about her that had not made its way back to her hearing?

  “I am yours to command, Your Majesty,” I said mechanically, and her eyes flashed for a moment. “I am not speaking to you now as a hand maiden,” she said slowly. “I am speaking to you as a beautiful woman, one who has excited glances from many more visitors than you might ever imagine. Including many of those who will be with us this evening.”

  My surprise must have registered on my face, for she laughed aloud. “Of course you were never told of this. The affairs of state are known only to those who need know them. But you, my sweet, silly, girl, are more of a bargaining chip than you realize. And if, in making that bargain, you can have some enjoyment for yourself, well all the better.

  “Last month, it is said, I sucked off fifty Romans in one night, and no doubt history will recall that as much as any of my other achievements. Tonight, with your assistance, I intend to see that total doubled.” And drawing me closer, she put her lips to my ears and, with a giggle that I had never before heard her issue, she told me her plan.

  The evening started raucously and grew wilder. The Romans may have enjoyed positions of power and respect back home, and conveyed themselves with fitting dignity while they discussed the trade and affairs of state that had brought them to our land. But the drink flowed freely tonight, and the food was so fine that even their jaundiced eyes bulged with surprise and delight.

  They bulged, too, at the sight of their hostess, Κλεοπάτρα, enthroned and glittering with the most precious jewels that could be imagined. But only jewels. She was naked, and one hundred pairs of Roman eyes stared across the room at her, drinking in the breasts that were perfect in size, shape and symmetry; at the torso that was tight and lea
n despite childbirth; at the hips that seemed to sway invitingly even when she sat perfectly still... and they craned to see more, too, but Κλεοπάτρα was not on the menu tonight. Not yet, anyway.

  One hundred men, seated in rows, ten to one side of a table that faced towards the Queen in a rough semi-circle. And I entered, unseen, from one side of the room, my eyes drinking in the scene before me. The men varied in age. Some were old, as Κλεοπάτρα had warned me, and she laughed as they did so, because she said they’d be quick. Others were young, still wet behind the ears, learning their trade from the elders who sponsored them. And they, too, would be quick, for the most part, teenaged hardons that had barely been touched by any hand but their owners, and had almost certainly never been kissed.

  It was the ones in the middle that I needed to work on, the ones with experience of all I could offer; the ones to whom I needed to prove I was best. And when I asked how I did that, with just the knowledge that I had, Κλεοπάτρα placed her hands on my shoulder, then drew me close for a kiss. “You will know. And they will let you know.”

  I knew. I slipped beneath the first table, my knees cold on the floor despite the soft matting beneath them. The view was surreal. So many legs, and I knelt before the first pair, trying to recall the features of the man who they belonged to. Dark, I thought; dark hair and dark eyes. His toga was crimson, denoting his rank... and I raised it, unsure if he knew I was there.

  His cock hung soft and for a moment I hesitated, before reaching gently for it and caressing it. I felt it twitch as its owner shifted in his chair, and for a moment I thought he was going to stand and protest. But no, he simply edged forward on his seat and I tugged at the thick flesh, watching as the skin only reluctantly pulled back from the head. I closed my eyes and engulfed him.