The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,213

this?”

“Surely you want to observe pleasure,” she whispered, stroking my hair in such a way that I was very disturbed by it. “I am quite serious. Listen to me. You must experiment with pleasure to be certain that you do not care for it, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t. I wish to go.”

“No, Petyr. Don’t now,” she said as if talking to a child.

She knelt before me, looking up at me, her dress binding her naked breasts so tightly that I wanted to free them. “Drink some more, Petyr,” she said.

I shut my eyes, and at once lost my balance. The music of the drums and the horn was now slower and even more melodic, and put me in mind of madrigals though it was far more savage. Lips brushed my cheeks and my mouth, and when I opened my eyes in alarm, I saw the mulatto women were naked and offering themselves to me, for how else could their gestures be described.

At some remove Charlotte stood, with her hand upon the table, a picture in the stillness, though everything was now quite beyond my grasp. She seemed a statue against the dim blue light of the sky; the candles sputtered in the breeze; the music was as strong as ever, and I found myself lost in contemplating the two naked women, their huge breasts and their dark fleecy private hair.

It then came to me that in this warmth I did not mind at all being naked, which had seldom been the case in my life. It seemed quite fine to be naked, and that the women should be, and I fell into contemplating their various secrets, and how they differed from other women, and how all women were alike.

One of them kissed me again, her hair and skin very silky against me, and this time I opened my mouth.

But by then, you know, Stefan, I was a lost man.

I was now covered with kisses by these two and laid back on the pillows, and there was no part of my anatomy which did not receive their skilled attentions, and each gesture was prolonged and rendered all the more exquisite in my drunkenness. And so loving and cheerful they seemed, the two women, so innocent, and the silkiness of their skin was maddening me.

I knew that Charlotte watched these proceedings but that did not seem of importance any longer, so much as kissing these women and touching them all over as they touched me, for the potion I had drunk was working no doubt to remove all restraint and yet to slow down the natural rhythm of a man under such circumstances, as there seemed all the time in the world.

The room grew darker; the music more soothing. I grew more impassioned, slowly, deliciously, and completely consumed by sensations of the most extraordinary sort. One of the women, very ripe and yielding in my arms, showed me now a band of black silk, and as I puzzled what this could be, this broad ribbon, she put it over my eyes, and the other tied it tight behind my head.

How can I explain how this sudden bondage fanned the flame in me, how, blindfolded like Cupid, I lost whatever decency remained to me, as we tumbled together in the bed?

In this intoxicating darkness, I finally mounted my victim, feeling my hands fall gently upon a great mass of hair.

A mouth sucked at me, and strong arms drew me down into a veritable field of soft breasts and belly and sweet perfumed female flesh, and as I cried out in my passion, a lost soul, unquestioning, the blindfold was ripped from me, and I looked down in the dim light to see the face of Charlotte beneath me, her eyes closed demurely, her lips parted, and her face flushed with an ecstasy equal to my own.

There was no one but the two of us in this bed! No one, I saw, but the two of us in this little house.

Like a madman I was up and away from her. But it had been done. I had reached the very edge of the cliff, when she came after me.

“What would you do!” she cried miserably. “Jump into the sea!”

I could not answer her but clung to her lest I fall. If she had not pulled me back, I would have fallen. And all I could think was, this is my daughter, my daughter! What have I done?

Yet when I knew it,