Chapter 11
He met Martha Gordon three days later. He had used almost all his money and was sleeping in the soft, plowed earth of a peach orchard trying to hide as much as possible from those who might become suspicious. Suddenly he was awakened by a hard and very unpleasant pressure against his Adam's apple.
He looked up and nearly fainted away again. He was looking along the top of a double-barreled twelve or fourteen gauge shotgun that ran up to the not unattractive, square-jawed face of a very determined woman.
"Well?" the woman demanded.
"Well, what?" he stammered.
"Don't play games with me, Bo," the woman said. "This here's my property. My orchard. I don't take too kindly to poachers around here."
"I wasn't poaching, ma'am. Honest. I just come off the road to get some sleep."
She took a pace backward and motioned for him to rise to his feet. As he did so he noticed she was a woman of perhaps forty with a trim athletic figure obviously used to lots of exercise. Her dark hair was un-lined with grey. It swirled like an ebon cloud around her arrogant face.
"What's your name, Bo?" she demanded.
"Whyley, ma'am. Billy Joe Whyley."
"You have any money?"
"I got a dollar--"
"Want work?"
"I guess so."
She prodded him with the shotgun. "You get on up to the house there," she nodded toward a huge white building just beyond the line of orchard. "Get yourself a basket and start picking these peaches."
It was certainly better than getting blown apart with a shotgun. Almost gratefully, he scampered through the orchard toward the house. His plan, if he consciously had made one, involved getting one basket, returning to the orchard and working his way through the trees toward the highway, then just moving on.
He would have followed it just that way if he hadn't looked up to his first peach tree and seen the bare legs of a young woman. He followed their alabaster smooth flesh over calves and knees, up to smooth thighs and found he was looking through the opening of a pair of denim shorts to the flash of white panty that covered what he was sure must be the softest, most welcoming lovemound in the entire United States.
He was just about to speak when he was prodded forward by Martha Gordon's shotgun.
That day was a horror. He didn't even want to count how many bushels of peaches he picked. Later, when he staggered to the house all he could think about was collecting his wages and somehow getting back on the highway.
Martha Gordon was standing at the kitchen door. She didn't wait for him to speak. "You get cleaned up," she ordered. "We'll have dinner in half an hour."
Mystified, but too exhausted to think clearly, he stumbled to the room she indicated, took a hot, pain-erasing bath in the huge tub and changed into his last clean shirt and trousers. A moment later, he stepped out of the room and met an ancient black woman who led him to a dining room. The elegantly furnished chamber looked as if it had been taken from a moving picture about the Civil War.
The mahogany table was long and on it rested two high silver candelabra. Martha Gordon sat at one end of the table. The black woman seated Billy Joe at the opposite end. From where he sat he could not really see all of Mrs. Gordon because of the candelabra, but almost immediately she began to talk, his experience told him exactly what was on her mind.
"I have been waiting for you," she informed him.
"Oh?"
"Yes. Somehow I knew you would come during picking time."
"Really?"
"I have certain intuitions, you might say. That's exactly why I pushed you away from Ruth."
"Ruth?"
"Ruth is my daughter, young man. The girl you saw in the tree. We live alone here trying as best we can to maintain some of the rather fragile standards of better days.
"No men around?"
"Colonel Gordon has gone to his final parade."
"Dead?"
"Yes."
"Oh?"
Silently as a ghost, the black woman served them both and then disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen.
"Let's not play childish games, young man. You can hardly be that stupid. I'm a mature woman with fairly exacting--perhaps even peculiar--tastes. You are a young and attractive man obviously without a place to sleep or money to spend for one. I will pay you well for your services."
"How long you want me to stay around?"
"Until I tire of you or your ability to satisfy me."
Billy Joe was thinking of the young woman he had only partially seen in the peach tree. He wondered why she was not at the table, but he realized that the longer he could remain at this strange house, the more chance he would have of seeing her again.
"Okay," he said.
"Fine," Mrs. Gordon said. "I don't know how much you know about women--women who are used to rather exacting pleasures and then through circumstances are denied those pleasures--but I will instruct you in how to please me. If you do, in fact, please me, you will be well rewarded after we pick the last of the peaches tomorrow. If you don't...." She shrugged.
There was something ominous, something macabre and threatening about the woman that Billy Joe didn't like, but again he thought only to make the most of his strange situation and then go as soon as he could. Still, he wanted to ask her about her daughter but some form of intuitive fear told him any questions regarding the girl would be less than welcome.
They finished the meal in silence and then sipped coffee. Finally, Mrs. Gordon spoke.
"Come," she said as she pushed her chair back. "We shall have a far more pleasant dessert in the master chambers...."
He followed her as she led the way through a magnificent foyer and up a wide flight of sweeping stairs that curved to an inside balcony. Amazed at the grandeur of the house, he was also struck by the fact that it was not in the best of repair, but he said nothing as she led him up the stairs, down the length of balcony and through a huge door.
They stood in complete darkness for a long moment. Then she shut the door behind them and after many seconds, flicked on lights.
The huge chamber was dimly illuminated by a wash of blue and red light which gave it a rich and sensual glow. Yet there was something decadent about it as well. There was something unreal and perverse about the atmosphere.
As his eyes accustomed to the dimness, he distinguished the outlines of a huge canopied bed, the four posts of which were statues of naked men and women in twisted and erotic poses. The far wall of the room was covered in thick velvet drapes and the chamber smelled of sensuously perfumed incense.
"Do you like my little chamber?" Mrs. Gordon asked.
"Well ... I...."
"You will," she said. "Come...."
With a firm, demanding pressure, she grasped his wrist and led him toward the bed. As he neared the great mattress he saw that the inside top of the canopy was -lined with mirrors, but before he could comment, she spoke.
"I want you to take your clothing off ... all of it," she said. "then you will lie on the bed and I will touch you."
Billy Joe shrugged. It takes all kinds, he thought as he pulled his shirt tail out and unzipped his trousers. A moment later, he was absolutely naked lying on his back in the huge bed. Above him he could clearly see his own reflection.
Martha Gordon stood beside the bed. Her eyes were wide, feasting on his naked form.
"You have a well-formed body," she said. "One that could give and take a thousand pleasures."
He reached out to touch her leg.
"Don't!" she snapped. "Don't dare to lay your hands on me."
She stood glowering at him for what seemed like an eternity. Then her face relaxed slightly. "It is I," she finally said, "I who have waited too long for a young and masculine body. It is I who will do the touching. I will caress every part of you in my own way and as you feel the sensations I will give to your mind and flesh, as you watch my hands in the mirror above you, you will suffer unbearable urges. Then I will watch you as you squirm for release in my flesh, but you must not touch me. You must not touch my body until you have my permission."
He nodded in agreement as she leaned over him almost brushing his face with her covered bosom. She flicked a switch at the top of the bed. The room was filled with strange musical sounds played on instruments he had never heard. There was the illusion of human gasps and sighs and the slappings of flesh on flesh as though a hundred other couples were with them in the chamber sharing their passions and their flesh in barely controlled abandon.
She flicked another switch and the dim red and blue lights in the room seemed to move. The illusion was a series of flickering shadows as though the chamber were lit by blue candlelight. The twisted shapes of the naked shadows that formed the posts of the great bed seemed to move in sensuous abandon. The illusion was one of a great orgy in which flesh twisted on flesh and lip pressed tightly to lip.
"You see," he heard her voice from the distance. He could not see her now, there was only her shadow, somehow menacing, yet still promising a strange reward. "It will be pleasant. Hear my lovelies licking one another. They like the taste of sweet flesh. They like to feel a man's rigid hardness in their fingers. You see, you are looking at my lights and hearing my sounds and you are rising hard and firm to my very special occasion."
In the flickering dimness, her shadow moved. He realized she was stripping out of the long dress she had worn at the dinner table. But her movements were elaborate, almost ritualistic as her lean body swayed from side to side.
A moment later she stepped from complete shadow into the flickering light beside the bed.
"I'm beautiful," she said. "Don't you think I'm beautiful?"
He grunted.
"Don't you want to touch my flesh?" she teased.
Again he grunted.
Actually, he thought, she was a fairly good-looking woman. Her body was taut and lean and well-muscled for her age, but he had seen many bodies before hers. He was more fascinated by her movements than by her mere appearance.
"But you must not touch my flesh," she whispered. "Only I can touch myself. See...."
She ran her hands over her hips and stomach and lifted the undersides of her breasts. She murmured soft words of passion to her own flesh as she lifted both nipples high and extended her tongue to touch first one and then the other.
She swayed beside the bed and, as she caressed herself in the flickering blue and red light, she stared down at him. "You are hard," she said. "You want your hard male flesh in my soft cradle of passion, but first I must be free of my own needs. It has been a long time ... a long time since I have had my satisfaction."
She swayed back and forth beside the bed as Billy Joe watched in absolute amazement. He could not understand what pleasure she was really getting from her performance. He looked around the room. The illusion was still there of hundreds of couples joining in depraved sexual abandon. The music, although low and scarcely audible, had an intensity to it that seemed to play directly on the libido.
He turned back to where she still stood beside the bed. For the first time he noticed that she held a long and thick artificial penis in her right hand.
"This...." she said to him. "You may touch this. Feel it." She thrust it toward him allowing him to run his fingers over the flesh-lined plastic. It was larger than a normal man both in its length and thickness.
"Now...." she continued. "Now I will look at your body and cool myself with this weapon of love."
He saw her squat slightly, noticed that the lips of her vagina were already glistening with the wet drops of her highly aroused passion and then stared in amazement as inch by slow inch she pushed the shaft of the artificial penis higher and higher into her body.
Her teeth were tightly clenched either in pain or complete ecstasy and her eyes were narrowed as she stared at him. "You see," she kept repeating, "you see how big it is. How my flesh grasps it and pulls it into me. You see how I can have my pleasure and watch you too."
"Oh, sure," he managed.
"Now...." She took a pace toward the bed so that she was standing just beside it. "You do it. You push it in me and rub me."
"Me?"
"Yes. Yes, but you must not touch my flesh, only the shaft. And when I order you to stop, you must stop immediately. Do you understand?"
"Sure," he said. He rolled on his side and grabbed the huge thing which protruded slightly from her vagina. He shoved it deep inside her, felt her gasp of mingled pain and pleasure and then withdrew it. He shoved again, this time pressing the top of the instrument high up against her more sensitive parts.
She grunted.
He pulled it back and shoved into her again--in and out and in and out. And with each thrust, she swayed before him threatening to fall and crying out in sounds close to--if not actually like--pain.
Her breath came in short puckered gasps. He knew he was bringing her to the peak of pleasure which, in her own strange way, she was striving for.
But then with abrupt suddenness, she pulled away from him. He held the artificial penis in his hand and she was standing about two feet from the bed smiling 'in a strange, almost demented, way down at him.
"Oh no," she said. "Oh no. I will not orgasm that way. No. I must touch you first. I must plate my hands and my juices on every part of your body before I climb to the peaks of personal pleasure meant only for me."
A moment later she had crawled onto the bed. She was kneeling at the very foot of the bed caressing his feet. In the mirror above him he could see her hands touching the soles of his feet and then her head lowered and she was actually licking his feet, sucking his toes and making little ripples of impossible pleasure scurry up his leg and gently bombard his already aching groin.
As she flicked her tongue over his toes and between them, as she licked the soles of his feet and ran her long fingers over the insides of his calves, she occasionally would pull away from him.
"You see," she would say. "You understand now."
But he didn't understand any more than that she was an extremely strange woman who enjoyed getting her sexual satisfaction in a very weird way.
Yet she kept licking his feet. Then slowly moved her oral ministrations over their arches and to his ankles. Her fingers inched higher along the lines of his calf as she kept repeating, "You see, now. You understand how it is."
Finally, he said, "No. No, I really don't."
She lifted her head. She stared at him a long time before she spoke. "Look up there." She indicated the mirror above the bed. "See for yourself. You are at my mercy. You are my slave and I am going to caress and lick every part of your beautiful, young, male body. Then I am going to devour you with passion so that your thrills will be my thrills and you will know my desires. This time, I will lick and caress you and next time you will know how it is done--how it must be done--for me. You see," she murmured as her tongue again darted out to caress the inside of his right leg. "You see...."
He grunted. He understood about as much as he would ever understand about the strange Mrs. Gordon. He decided to lie back on the bed, let her lick and caress her way up his body and watch the contact of their reflections in the ceiling mirror.
She was a genius at prolonging sensation. Still insisting that he could not touch her with his hands, she licked and kissed her way slowly up his legs past his knees to the insides of his thighs. She had been licking and kissing for over a half hour before she was in a position to circle his groin with her head.
Still the insane rhythm of the erotic music filled the room. Still from a hidden tape or record came the sounds of empassioned sighs, strange gasps and exotic stringed instruments playing tunes that could only have been composed for wildly abandoned lovers.
Her head hovered over his erect member and he looked down his own body to see her gazing at it but she neither touched it with her hand nor her mouth.
"Oh, no, my beautiful young boy-man," she cooed as she looked at him. "Ah, no, my sweet slave of passion. That will be later. Then I shall show you through your own sensations how to care for and minister to my body, my body that will be burning in slow and scalding fire for your embrace. But not now, my pretty ... not now ... "
She brushed her lips down over the tight muscles of his abdomen, licked her tongue into his navel and slowly stroked and caressed every part of his torso, bringing him mini-spasms of pleasure so intense he found it difficult to keep his eyes open, to watch the moving images in the mirror above him which added yet another dimension of ecstasy to their coupling.
Then her face was next to his and she was whispering. "Still. You must lie perfectly still as I caress you and savor the sweet man smell of your lips and body."
Her lips and tongue were in his ear, then over his eyes. She crossed to his other ear and caressed his nose and mouth with her lips. She isolated parts of his face, never kissing him full on the mouth but rather taking a part of his upper lip, running her tongue under his nose and then moving to caress only the lower lip.
The wet erotic snake of her tongue slid over his chin and down to his neck, as her fingers ran gently over first one and then the other of his nipples.
Slowly, with absolutely torturous movements, she slid her head down again, licking his sides and his ribs, caressing his nipples with her mouth.
He had never been so thoroughly aroused in his lifetime without experiencing release. Every fiber of his being was tingling for primary sexual contact and yet there was something about her that actually did frighten him. He was convinced that if he did not obey her orders exactly--did not lie there perfectly motionless no matter what shivers of passion she sent scurrying through his nervous system--something unknown and horrid would surely happen to him.
Her mouth was on his abdomen now, licking, caressing as her palms slid over the muscles of his buttocks and thighs.
Then, suddenly as her tongue darted into his navel, he felt the intensity--the almost painful touch of her fingers just barely making contact with the underside of his shaft and exploring the flaccid skin of his scrotum.
He sighed in intense pleasure as she lifted her head away from him so that she could look down at him. "Oh, no, my sweet beautiful boy-man," she said. "Oh, no, you must not move. Now we are coming to the final scene of this part of our drama. Now, I am going to show you everything a woman can do to a man if he is her absolute slave."
Her fingers kneaded the flesh of his scrotum. There was a cruel intensity to their pressure, yet he realized she was being very gentle. It was the threat behind her movements - the feeling that if he violated her wishes in any way--she might, quite literally, tear him apart.
"Yes," he gasped ... yes...."
"Yes, my sweet, pretty with your hard, hard manhood waiting for its perfection. Let me show you ... you'll understand then. You'll understand then...."
Her hands slid along the insides of his thighs and caressed his scrotum. He closed his eyes. He lay back on the soft and welcoming sheets of the bed and there was nothing in the world but sensation--pure, uncluttered, sexual sensation.
The music throbbed in his brain. He heard the sighs and heavy breathing of a thousand couples wallowing in euphoric abandon. There was a swaying blue and red light and a safe and sweet woman smell in the room.
Somehow, he knew even as she was touching him with her hand she was gazing at him planning ... eagerly lusting....
And it was there again ... the room in Charlottesburg ... dark and warm ... with erotic music coming from the club across the street ... and the flashing blue and red of the neon sign.... It was there again more clearly than it had ever been ... the door opening and the beam of light darting into the loft room....
...The shadow of a woman standing there for a moment ... and the light shining through her thin nightgown revealing her shadowed nakedness beneath....
...A heartbeat of fear and then the sweet, familiar smell he had savored so many times. The door closed and warm darkness blue and red neon from across the street and the flickering shadows from the great glass ball that revolved in the center of the dance hall there ... the groans and sighs of exhausted couples clinging to each other in a dancing marathon and the sexual sounds of a slow saxophone backed by wire brushes sliding sensuously over a snare drum....
...The soft shuffle of feet on the floor and the long moment of waiting for what he knew would happen yet what he could never have known.... The opening of his eyes and seeing only the shadow ... knowing somehow who owned the shadow and knowing he had to be asleep.., had to remain unknowing ... throughout what was to happen....
...Now it was exactly the same as it had been then so many years ago.... The woman's smell in the room and the flashing lights....
He opened his eyes just once and saw her shadow and the twined shadows behind her of the erotic bedposts. Then he closed his eyes.
It was the dream again....
...The tender touch of a woman's fingers on his arousing manhood ... The soft sigh and the.... increased tempo of her breathing over him ... fondling and caressing ... feeling the tingling of his aroused flesh as it responded eagerly to a gentle but greedy touch ... a touch that could not be denied....
...The zephyr of fresh air that scurried over his bare stomach and then ... then....
...The impossible heat of mouth and tongue sinking down ... sinking over his shaft.. . pulling it deep in the safe warm cavern of womanhood and sucking gently ... greedily on the aroused flesh....
His passion surging to arousal.... The music throbbing in his ears ... lights swimming through his head and soft groans and sighs.
...Then cold ... impossibly cold as the mouth left him ... Eyes opening again ... The shadow above him ... Gossamer folds of nightdress gone ... huge jutting breasts with brown-red nipples pointing to him ... woman's thighs gripping his hips in soft demand and again the wet ... This time the real wet of a welcoming channel built only to receive his member and surround it with moulten, hot, pink flesh craving for release of its own....
He lay still--absolutely still. The dream merged with the reality of the strangely erotic room and the almost crazed, demanding woman who had now straddled him and placed the tip of his hard shaft against her dripping labia. She sank down over him and, for an instant, he opened his eyes in terror dreading what he would see--who he would be coupled with in swaying abandon.
But he saw only the mirror above him and her coal black hair--the flashing lights like flickering pink and blue candles--a flame not of a taper but of the very body, the very soul of the room.
Her back was in the mirror as she straddled his body. Like a picture in slow motion, he watched above as she rode his shaft of manhood like an amazon of old cantering forth to battle on a great charger that would lead her to glory-and immortality.
"Yes," she murmured. "Just like that. Just like that ... and sleep ... in peace ... sleep...."
Even the words seemed to be the same as those of the long-ago dream.... Sleep ... the woman had said as she rode his hard member and filled his flesh with the want of her own ... sleep ... she had crooned almost as if singing a lullaby to him as her wet flesh churned like a human maelstrom over him ... rolling ...surging ... welling up in impossible encompassment so that not only his penis but his whole body seemed drowned in the moulten fire of flesh that craved satisfaction more than anything else in the world....
...Nothing was important but the strange all-new experience that was to come.... His body tingled and felt impossibly good all over... His arms and legs began to expand.... A great sensual balloon within him was filling with an unbelievable rising that would soon bring him to the very summit of the heavens and pour forth his very life into the hot flesh churning above him....
...Then he could feel it ... the knowing of the thing within him about to erupt ... And above him the single word ... "Yes ... Yes...." repeated in a droning monologue ... "Yes ... Yes...."
...Then the surge ... the release ... the abandon and the terror ... sweet heaven's gates opening and washing over him ... Breasts slapping soft against his chest ... the woman above him spasmed too ... His tingling ... throbbing ... spurting shaft could feel the spasms of her inner flesh as she gripped and released him ... gripped and released ... Her nipples flopped against his chest ... her breath came heavy in his ear....
..."Yes, Billy.., yes ... "
And then he knew ... the dream ... the reality....
"Oh, my God," he gasped. "Oh, my God!"
The answer came to him in a horrid flash of stark remembering coupled with the abandoned beautiful spurt of his release into the strangely depraved woman over him.
But could he blame her for her peculiarities, knowing now just who had walked into that loft room in Charlottesburg so many years ago?
Finally, he knew why he had always sought out older women--widows who would help him on his search that was as unreal as the lie he had built around himself. He knew at last the reality of the shadowed figure who had crept into the loft, who had tiptoed across the room each night for months, who had caressed his young manhood and then taken it into her mouth to bring it almost to the point of ejaculation and had then straddled it and thrashed against his supposedly sleeping body. He understood why they had both been lying, creating a dream in order to deny the stark horror of the reality. That shadowed greedy woman was not just an ordinary boarder in the cheap rooming house.
No.
He knew now. He also knew the dream was real, for in some strange way, the pattern of Mrs. Gordon's perverse room followed almost exactly the pattern of that loft so long ago. And, in some freakish way, every one of Mrs. Gordon's movements had been exactly like those of the phantom woman in his dream.
Only, he knew now, she was no phantom. That woman who had come to him then, who had brought him to first surging release and had returned night after night to give him release and to take her own satisfaction from his young flesh plunged deep inside her, was real. It was she who had created his pattern of sexuality based on older women--women like she had been at that time--
That phantom, that dream....
He shuddered.
She had been his own mother.