And tonight, she visited once more. …In my office, in its heritage-listed Art Deco building right in the heart of the city. It was simply me indulging this fantasy lifestyle of mine; now that I could – ever since I sold my finance advising business. That is to say, ever since I sold the advising business my uncles actually started that ended up in my hands – the hands that were now at this moment touching the most incredibly expensive Demetre Chiparus statuette as it lay resting on my office desk, of the kneeling Isis; a small though heavy and solid mixed-media piece realized from the earlier etching by the Russian Ballet designer-genius Leon Bakst. Half-sitting, half-kneeling Isis, winged arms dramatically outstretched, and upturned palms holding two bronze bowls…

These days I neither have the ambition, nor the interest, nor the commitment to any of the formal pursuits of the family of years gone by.

In any case, now I have my time satisfyingly taken up with friends of the extreme ultra quality female kind. But real friends. Not those, as Karl Lagerfeld puts it, who are of the kind waggishly that he calls, ‘expensive friends.’

A lover of mystery thrillers of the Twenties and Thirties – Philo Vance, Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade… That’s me. All these things provided me with the ‘art’ of attracting the truly beautiful and the real and the wholesome, if admittedly also the sexual, real friend, here and there.

I run these little fake ads in Craigslist, you see, and places like, that from time to time:

‘Bored rich guy with pencil thin mustache and office in Art Deco mid-city building. Dress up and come see me and be my fake detective client with a deep mystery to solve.’

xxxxx

Her name was Christine Merriwether, and she was one of my friends – a lot like me, in many ways. Of course also rich (although this was not a particular pre-condition for anything), though not a socialite, not involved in philanthropy or anything even remotely silly and self-absorbed like that. As with myself, she too could have been prey to a bored life, except of course that neither one of us was that unimaginative.

The theory for this coming evening was that she was going to be arriving at the office, dressed to kill – in the literary sense only, you will appreciate.

xxxxx

And so I waited until the evening came. When the already long enough city shadows began exponentially growing everywhere quicker, deeper, taller, darker and the very first bright neon lights started to come on glowing in the still simmering infra-red dusk, I waited still some more.

How long would I have to wait for her?

I decided to go clear the post box at the front of the building.

The small burled steel plates on the heel top pieces of my winged Gaziano and Girling spectator shoes made a lot of noise on the marble hallway floor outside my office as I walked to the line of boxes up against the black and white checker-pattern glossy ceramic tiled wall inside of the glass front doors. There were a few pieces of junk mail, three utilities bills, no letters, and one smallish packaged item.

I opened the package and took out the object within – a miniature Nikon Coolpix S1100pj. There were sticky notes on it. It was clearly meant to be switched on and whatever had been loaded on it watched. I turned down the main office lights and projected the video clip onto a clear section of wall near the side of my office desk.

It played film of a shortish man, black haired, holding an old Thompson drum-magazine sub-machine gun, firing off a dozen rounds at a Bianchi Cup-style circular metal standing target and making a helluva racket. And then some voice-over audio ran… ‘I read your ad and decided to seek your help. The estate of my late grandmother – an actress of the Twenties and Thirties – has left me with substantial money and one rather unusual item. Which is not the collector’s relic that you see me here firing off, LOL. The item in question about which I am communicating its nature to you, is specifically a hand-written letter addressed to one Harry Houdini, from Howard Philips Lovecraft.”

The man doing the voice-over continued, now with a certain tone of droll irony, it seemed to me: ‘…Please help me. You must help me. You described yourself in your advertisement in a certain most compelling way. Firstly and principally, that you are very wealthy. Others I believe, would be far too easily motivated by money to comprehend the truth about the matter that I am raising with you. I realize that you only wanted to play a game. But do think of it as just a game then if you must. It will certainly in any event be of no avail to approach things from the perspective of complete reality as you thought you once knew it. For ever since I myself – who had previously considered my own outlook to be extremely down-to-earth – first opened the contents of the sealed letter, and read the short pages therein -, strange and at the same time fantastic things have been happening all round me and I am convinced by these things that what Lovecraft spoke of, are in fact all real matters, factually existing, and that his private and confidential judgement about them – which he secretly revealed to Mr. Houdini – was true.

‘You must know certainly that Lovecraft himself claimed to have discovered a secret book by one called the ‘Mad Arab’ – Abdul Alhazred – in which were written certain wicked incantations. Forbidden arcane words – that opened portals to a certain specific deep and dark, primal and evil entity, living in Tartarus. And by employing these incantations he was able to compose his most mysterious tales of horror from what ensued and what he saw, in visions. He had found an addendum work too, one which contained the opposite form of incantation, supposedly in a pre-Arabic tongue, that was known only to the most powerful Pharaohs, and which granted them to perform the most amazing miracles of wealth and majestic prodigies of building and secret sciences. The incantations, the words themselves, are a talisman – that is to say, as you know, a thing that actually possesses the force it is intended ordinarily to merely represent…’

As the words trailed off at the end of the soundtrack, my office door eased open with the friendly face and charming figure of the beautiful Sarah Patterson standing in the doorway.

“You’re supposed to be Christine.’ I said, I suppose pouting. “I was waiting for Christine. Where is she, do you know?” I asked somewhat foolishly; of course she knew. Sarah and Christine were, um, close. As in close in that way.

What looked like a parchment piece of talisman paper fell from the underside of the small cam-player, with the single word or name ‘Asenath’ on it.

xxxxx

The chrome standing office fan was making its characteristic mesmerizing sound behind me: ‘a-ru-ru, ar-rrrurrrhu, ar-ru-ru’ – swirling a very mild breeze of air all around the room although the atmosphere itself was still rather thick, warm, humid. The gas flame genuine antique art deco light by the famous Scottish architect and Savoy theater designer Basil Ionides, protected behind its old fashioned and thick glass shroud, and mounted on the wall above the filing cabinet, didn’t flicker at all. Only a small moth, fluttered around and around the outside of the by-now hot glass covered gas light. It circled in time with the whirring fan, it’s tiny furry napped moth wings glowing their reflection-enhanced natural honey golden yellow, just like the color of the flame within the glass.

The lower half of Sarah’s cream silk dress with the embroidered Halfeti roses contrasting their velvety black on it’s … was flowing all around her thighs and hips; the upper half held itself tightly stretched against her torso, her breasts, with the halter straps. Her dark grey nylon stockings covered the creamy whiteness of her skin beneath her skirt from halfway down her thighs to her legs and her feet in black velvet strap-y high-heeled custom-made Voloshinas.

I was never very sure exactly how much of Sarah’s eyelashes were actually her own, they were dark and long and she had fairly strong eyebrows too. I had never seen her in a shower or bath, nor just out from one. Never seen her in a swimming pool nor in the sea or at a beach except one time late at night and even then we were walking along a beach-side promenade only and never ventured onto the sand. ‘Professional territoriality’ was her excuse when I asked her why she didn’t go onto the beach with the others.

Come to think of it, I had never seen her fully nude; not in even just reasonably bright light.

To some extent sex with Sarah was always like sex-by-numbers, almost like fucking a machine – and then again, not. She was a machine in the sense of something highly-organised, well-planned, all-inclusive, precision-perfect, and driven by an obviously flowing and quite powerful and smooth energy. Athletic? Definitely. But more than that. It was almost as though she was able to turn on a lot of emotions of many different colors and complexions at will. No one else I’ve ever been with has been able to do that, or even does it intentionally, really. Not as a pre-condition to orgasm – it’s usually the other way around; they are chasing the sexual stimulation, the orgasm, and then maybe emotions turn up on the strength of that.

But this girl, this woman, was entirely different.

This girl, was like a teppanyaki master – precise pours of moisture and liquid, exactly the right amount of heat, neat deft swipes of the flat blade around the edges of the heat center so that no splatters were left going to no clear purpose… Flourishes in streamlined movement; not mere economy of movement.

Not clean though, funky. Even extraordinarily, funky.

She had me lie on the desk, with one hand holding onto the edge, and she raised one leg and placed her shoe onto the edge of the desk, actually trapping my wrist between the tall heel of her shoe and the flat pad.

“Where’s Christine?” She murmured. “She’s right here.” She pointed down between her spread legs. “Can you tell?”

There were breaches of short dark hair stubble visible along the edge-lines of her stretchy filoselle fabric lilac-colored panties, with her swelling twin parallel crescent labia pushing outwards noticeably against the narrow crotch segment.

But I couldn’t tell. Sarah was wearing that Guerlain La Petite Robe Noire Perfume Intense, so that all I could smell everywhere was this strong and powerful fairground cotton candy rich-girl perfume aura, and bright carousel lights, and girlish blueberries, and velvet rose, and the only musk note I could detect was a typical perfumer’s white musk and even that was overlaid with this fairly masculine cologne-style, fresh citrus-y, orange sherbet bergamot. All sugary, vanilla, pretty, sweet, girlishness. No darkness at all. Sure I could see hints of her cunt hair, and her panties did nothing to hide the size of it under the fabric. But this was a bubblegum scene, all very innocent and naive if not for the underskirt vision and the little tiny hints of nasty.

…And then the thunderstorm suddenly hit. It came in furiously like a modern advanced technology fighter jet, quietly at first and then screaming in and thundering right through your body. The first hint was visual only, from the flashing smile.

It was like as if some innocent was approaching a ghost pepper or higher, for the very first time: at first glance everything looked tame enough, simply reddish, merely like a fruit, even at first taste just sweet to the tongue and mouth. And then everything went insanely out-of-control.

Wagyu, sashimi, surf clam, and Yamazaki whisky…

Lots of flavor, yes of course, all mature, heterocyclic nitrogenous uric effluvium, acrid, Persian blue salt taste – sharp saltiness – a still-preserving-the-desert-heat, light flaked salt with its high loft… And then all of the stars of celestial heaven. All, the stars… The last thing I remember was seeing this massive dusty glittering serpentine swathe of seemingly every single star and constellation in the night sky above – before something else happened and I was no longer there in the office; I was somewhere else, amid billowing Turkish pink silks and breathing air of a deeply luscious, deeply luxurious thick syrupy sweet muskiness and rose, and eating fresh roasted Persian pashmak strands flavored and scented with candied orange peel smoky charred from flaming Yamazaki whisky being slowly dripped, still burning in globs, all over it.

…Skin touching warm soft pink skin. All the pores right up close, next to my eye, crystal clear, and a warmth like soft glowing amber. Her eyes, dark almonds accentuated lengthwise with kohl eye-liner. Her arms both outstretched, I could sense her underarms, and following the crescent line of her arms, I saw her upturned hands, cupped, holding a river of stars flowing, and completing a complete circle half of physical body and the other half of glittering constellations all following in celestial order.

And there was the medicinal, slightly acrid, burning, sharp, sss-tang-y Hojari from Oman right there in juxtaposition to the insinuating odor of lubricious hairy female slit.

With the exotic vision and atmosphere there slowly grew within me a feeling too – altogether both primal and quite atavistic. I was conscious of a strong sexual hunger and desire taking over my mind, conscious that my physical member itself was extremely hard and literally painfully erect, a stiff hose pipe directed straight upward, with an enlarged swelling sensitive end at the top, and underneath curved like forged iron beneath my balls all the way to my perineum. She let me inside of her. Everything was swirling around my head and all I could feel consciously were my lower body moving with a mind of its own and its penis thrusting and sliding and pumping urgently to get rid of the seemingly endless pressure down there. I came and everything slowly was going black on me; I came and came and came and was gasping for breath exhausted but still I could sense the sweat of her skin on my tongue and parted lips. Then I must have fainted.

xxxxx

“John. John…” A hand was shaking my shoulders. I felt myself taking a big breath. “John. Wake up.”

“What the fuck?!” I muttered. I knew this was Christine crouching next to me. “Where’s Sarah…”

“What do you mean? What Sarah? Sarah’s not here. She’s in San Francisco with the production. You’re delirious.”

Christine stood up and went to the cabinet where there was some bourbon. “Here. You need this. I need this! What the hell happened? Did you knock your head or something?”

I wasn’t that delirious; I still thought she had a great ass as I watched her from behind, back turned to me and unscrewing the top of my bottle of bourbon.

I tried to explain, both for myself as well as her: “This guy sent me some extracts from a private original copy of some rare, in fact unique, I think, letters by H. P. Lovecraft to Harry Houdini.”

Picking myself up slowly I leaned back against the front of my oak desk. “It’s got these incantations in it that he said he didn’t understand – couldn’t decipher.”

“And they made you fall over and hit your head?” Christine laughed.

“I got knocked out all right.” I said. “And then, the next thing you know, I was in this dream in which your friend Sarah was an Egyptian goddess, and er, and, um.”

“And then you guys fucked like you always do. That figures.”

“Lovecraft in this document says these incantations are going to make the person who understands them, rich.”

“Yeah well you’re already rich. How much richer do you want to be?”

She gave me the bourbon in a glass.

“The fellow that sent me these letters – he knows, he knows I’ve already got dough. He wants to know what I think about them.”

“So what are you going to tell him?”

“I don’t know…” I murmured slowly, and rather quietly.

But it was in that moment then that I suddenly thought of a song by Morrissey which entered my immediate consciousness, my conscious mind…

And I grabbed her, took her by the waist, felt the swelling and powerful hips under my large masculine hands. If I knew who she really was, yet I didn’t care at all. The music all around in the atmosphere was too compelling, too powerful in its own way against her usual well-balanced aloofness and the sexual distance caused by her intellectual nature. Even so there was never any sexual frenzy with Sarah. She was always calm and clear-headed even in the middle of everything.

This time was different by quantum levels of significance; and quantum levels of height and depth. The sexual ambiguity of her inner personality was exposed to me now as something other than a simplistic male-female/female-female dynamic – no, nothing had changed as far as the calmness, the equanimity, but the whole meaning of it all had changed because of the range, the reach, the abstract limitlessness down there in the deep darkness of who she really was.

Who was this friend of mine? Who helped me from some invisible strange place beyond our world?Who claimed her own wisdom possessed but only a wily cunning and artifice not a luxury of weapons or wealth of provisions… And yet still her beat was always unconquerable, the notes of her particular music notch-y and somewhat unpredictably capable of suddenly slipping sideways, and she herself harmonized with everything and with nothing all at the same time. Now I could see her in the party of the Thiasus after all, albeit in disguise.

She was the one who knew the primal serpent who curled around the base of the tree, none other – none other than she knew it so truly intimately; why, where, how, and even what.

The heady intoxicating wine of the celebrating victors, was nothing to her. Her eyes were always clear and grey and piercing. Reveling in their returning from a strange, distant and fabled place they slyly called ‘India’ although it wasn’t India, the inebriated party witnessed nothing they could be trusted to report on faithfully in the cold light of day.

She wore Roberto Cavalli designed panther print underwear, which was just another give-away to her true identity.

Sometimes those who are extraordinarily sensitive are mistaken for people who are really quite shy. What other reason would a powerful individual have for being so full of defenses and reluctant to be seen or questioned about their motives? Or else was it that she – Christine – had she been possessed or inspired by some powerful ancient spirit, and was she now still? …Such that it had made things seem all swapped around? I did not know for sure. She – Christine – was a friend. And I was her friend, and between real friends all things are possible. So now I was going to fuck her and she was going to allow herself to be fucked and I still wanted us to remain friends afterwards. How was this going to be possible – I was usually quite aggressive with women and often even intended to hurt them enough to make them feel their submission to a hard male penis. Of course male! It wasn’t a tautology. There were female-wielded instruments.

It was only when I felt with my fingers around the lips of her sex, wet and slippery inside, her sister god’s gift, its characteristic sign drifting to my limbic brain through the warm air in the office, and as I sensed the short inguinal hair at my fingertips, that she said in clear enunciated words: “I am your friend, John. This is what friends are.”

It may have been the widened eyes, the firmness of her commitment in the tone of her voice, the strength of her vaginal muscles, the ability she seemed to have to grip down there almost like a hand was surrounding my hardness and holding it as I moved my penis in and out of her; she seemed to be able to control me holding me continuously on the edge of coming.

Vagina is the threshold between the internal and the external. Something about it is a truthful expression of the individual soul; because what is within is told materially, sensually, without. And is thus also able to be judged by the living conscious human soul in the material realm.

THE END