The King in Yellow Chapter Nineteen

COLLECTION

The receptionist glanced at Zora’s documents and stamped her register then reached back without looking to pass her the room key.

“Wake up call?” she asked, brightly.

“I will be leaving in the small hours.” Zora replied. “That’s why I’m paying in advance”.

“Of course, of course” the woman said and turned her attention back to the evening newspaper then, suddenly, looked up and fixed her with a curious stare. “Excuse me for asking” she began, hesitantly, “but you wouldn’t have a married sister named Zora, would you”?

“I cannot think of anyone with that name in my family” Zora answered, easily. “Do I remind you of someone”?

The receptionist turned her newspaper around on the counter and pointed at one of the faces in a spread of photographs commemorating victims of the recent landslide in the Svitavian Heights. “She looks very like you” she said, blushing slightly “so I was worried you might have lost someone”. It was the photograph from Zora’s state identity card.

“I see.” Zora replied. “Bless you but, no, it’s just a coincidence”. She smiled winningly, took the key and headed to her room to wait. On the stairs she encountered a thin and haggard man, shabbily dressed, coming the other way. He blocked Zora’s path and stood arrogantly looking her up and down.

At last he spoke, evidently satisfied with what he saw “Come to room fourteen at eleven”.

Zora looked away while she hurried to compose herself. She had not expected to be confronted with any decisions after finding the Yellow Sign but this man could be involved in her collection or he could be a random stranger in search of street-walkers. And then she realised that it did not matter – that nothing that could happen to her now would ever matter.

“Room fourteen” she confirmed.

“How much extra for special services?” the man asked, his lean face twisted into an evil leer. Zora fluttered her lashes and favoured him with a coarse smile.

“No extra” she purred, feeling dirtied.

At five minutes past the hour, Zora went to room fourteen. The thin man answered her knock in a string vest and stepped aside for her to enter. Slamming the door closed behind her he tore the handbag from her grip, secured her wrists in a pair of steel cuffs and pushed her face against the wall. He pulled up her skirt and forced two fingers brutally into her arse then began pumping them in and out. She let out a strangled cry of pain and shock. With his fingers still hooked inside her he drew her into the room, bent her over the dresser and continued his violent fingering. Zora put her cheek to the chipped veneer and groaned. Again, he dragged her across the room and pushed her to the floor before the bed. Looking back at him over her shoulder Zora saw the riding-crop and arched her back, spreading her knees apart to present her ample arse for punishment. He lay on with a will and she bit down hard on the cold chain between her wrists to keep from screaming as twelve bright stripes were carved into her yielding flesh. There was a brief respite while he dragged off his trousers and pants, then he pushed her over onto her back with his foot and squatted above her head, pressing his lean crotch to her face. Zora rained hot kisses onto his balls and along the crease of his arse in a frenzy of submission and allowed her chained hands to roam down over her belly to pinch at her clit. He made her spend a long time licking and sucking at his arsehole while his fist pumped his hard cock and she writhed sensuously beneath him with a cruelly slow finger sliding in and out of her cunt.

Just as her moans became throatier and more urgent, he jumped up and dragged her by the hair to throw her face down over the edge of the bed. With one thrust he drove his dry cock deep into her arse and began to buck his bony hips furiously against her. Zora’s face twisted in agony and she sank her teeth into the sleeve of her jacket, growling, while his knob pounded into her. The old bed rattled and creaked for many minutes until he grunted and his spunk splashed over her cheeks and thighs. They moaned together. After a while he re-lit a half-smoked cigarette, rolled over, and unlocked the cuffs. Zora smoothed down her skirt and collected her bag. She saw a handful of banknotes on the bedside but just blew a kiss to where he sprawled on the bed, naked from the waist down, and went back to her room to wait. Not a word had been spoken since they had met earlier on the stairs.

His room was in darkness when she passed it in the dead of night and slipped out of the hotel to be collected in a back street.

In the convent Katya wept with frustration as she watched, inverted, while the men slaked their lusts on the headless corpse of their victim – the same pale body which had been pressed so tenderly against her own moments earlier. She blinked away the tears and her eyes fell on the head labelled “Elena” hanging in the centre of the wall facing her. Some craft had preserved the beautiful features as though in life, as though her mouth were ready to speak, or to kiss.

Some miles distant, on an isolated farm in the Svitavian foothills, a video camera was set up with the bare brick wall at the side of the barn as a backdrop, and Kristina stood in front of it holding a newspaper wrapped in a sheet of green sugar-paper - the front page of some future edition of the Morning Post would be imposed on it later.

“The Circessya Liberation Army regret that they cannot permit me to leave their custody until a full statement of their demands has been published in the Morning Post and the Evening News” she read out, deadpan. The camera was turned off.

“And that is all?” asked Tural suspiciously. There was a hard edge to his voice.

“Just that” Rashid insisted. “For us, this is nothing. The video is a ploy to mislead whoever is looking for her. At five this morning they will collect her and the tape – and the camera; we only have to keep her safe until then. Brothers - this is easy money”.

“But we don’t know who the fuck they are” put in Mikhail.

“That is best for everyone” Rashid replied. “I’m not curious about them at all, and nor should you be”. He stood and looked around the dark farmyard. “Bring her inside the house”.

Mikhail slid his Uzi along the kitchen counter and grabbed a bottle of cherry vodka by the neck. “I say we have her now” he declared, to no-one in particular. Rashid and Tural stopped in their tracks; Kristina walked nonchalantly past them to take a seat by the stove and slipped off her heavy overcoat.

“We are contracted to deliver her as we found her” Rashid said, emphasising each word with a stab of his finger. Mikhail dragged a chair towards him and straddled it, taking a swig from the bottle.

“And we shall” he said.

“We are professionals” Tural stared him down “We’re not street criminals who cannot be trusted alone with the merchandise”.

“It’s not the same” Mikhail persisted. “The woman…” his voice trailed away as he turned to see what had distracted the others.

Kristina had pulled off of her miniskirt and was sitting back open-legged on a wooden stool dressed only in an open-cup leather basque, high boots and her piercings and tattoos. Her crimson nails tugged at the steel rings in her nipples and she ran her tongue over her parted lips.

“He’s right – there is nothing to stop you” she said, huskily. In the deathly silence that followed, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled over the worn floorboards to where Tural sat. He watched her climb up his thigh to unbutton his shirt and then gasped as she fastened her hungry mouth over his nipple, sucking wickedly while her hands quickly pulled out his cock to stand erect before her. Grinning up at him, she licked the length of his shaft then lapped lingeringly all around the head, tantalising him with her tongue-stud and running her hands over his abdomen and chest. He glared down at her peroxide spikes, bobbing up and down now as she sucked his cock deep into her hot mouth.

“Enough!” Tural barked. Seizing Kristina’s shoulders, he pulled her away from his groin and pushed her back over the edge of the table. He un-holstered his semi-automatic and bent over her, pushing her legs open to force the ugly blue-steel nose of the loaded pistol into her tattooed cunt and her hips rose to welcome it. His fist pumped hard and fast; she threw her head back and groaned, digging her fingers into the flesh of her breasts.

“Anything you want” she panted. Mikhail’s hand closed around the nape of her neck and he dragged her head and shoulders towards him to feed his cock between her waiting lips. She snaked an arm around his hips to pull them closer together and fed on him hungrily. He slapped at her breasts making the inked flesh swing and shiver then dug his fingers into them and squeezed fiercely. Tural hauled off his jeans, rose to his feet and hauled Kristina’s ankles up to his shoulders. He leant forward and began to drive inside her with long strokes. She grunted around Mikhail’s cock and pushed her hips back to meet his attack, slamming the table to and fro.

They fucked faster and harder until at last Tural fell back onto his chair, panting and red-faced. Kristina reached one hand over her pelvis and ribs to collect up his spunk and licked it from her fingers, smiling lustfully as Rashid’s erection loomed over her face. Mikhail moved around to take Tural’s place between her thighs, but he spread her crease open with his thumbs and stabbed the head of his cock into her arse.

“Here is what this little Lilith needs” he grunted as he forced himself deep inside her. His flat stomach slapped against her firm, round cheeks and he began to growl to the same rhythm, “Whore! Bitch! Slut”!

“Yours! Yours!” she cried, until Rashid pulled her mouth to his groin and she wrapped her lips around his stiffness.

All three took her arse. Tural was the roughest – he wrapped his hands around her throat to drag her whole body backwards and forwards onto his pounding prick making her breasts shiver in time to his thrusts and wrenching hoarse cries of pain from her. At the end, all three spent over her face and chest and left her lying used and degraded on the table-top, a beatific smile on her lovely, bespattered face. From time to time she ran a finger through one of the pools of spunk decorating her inked skin to suck at it and she kept the little finger of her left hand flickering softly over her aching clit.

Finally, the throbbing of an engine broke the silence outside and she heard the Circessians speaking in low voices; Pierre appeared in the doorway and she rose to follow him.

Meanwhile, Leon walked over to where Katya hung upended, keening with frustration. He was still naked and bloody from his encounter with the decapitated victim, and he carried two huge, red candles and a petrol-lighter. Without a word, he forced the candles into her arse and cunt – pressing down deeper into her cunt because it was so wet and slippery – then lit them both and left the room again. Very soon she was writhing and twisting in her chains as the fierce heat of the molten wax rilled between her legs and down over her smooth, tanned skin.

By three o’clock that morning, Eva’s friends were preparing to leave for their own hostels and bedsitters to get some sleep before morning classes. A mixed gang of six final-year students from her own course were the last to say goodbye, exchanging hugs and kisses with her at the apartment door and chattering excitedly.

“You absolutely must be there” a vivacious redhead insisted loudly. “One year from today, in the Blue Parrot. It will be such fun”.

“I’ll have no stories to tell if I don’t get the train into Europe in three hours” Eva laughed. There was a final round of goodbye kisses and the guests went off – more quietly, for the neighbours’ sake – down the stairway to the street.

Pavel closed the door behind them, and he and Eva sat down amongst the plates and glasses. He was no longer smiling.

“Then do it” Eva challenged him, in response to his silent look of accusation.

“You know it’s not possible” he said quietly, looking down at his shoes.

“But it is” she returned, leaning eagerly toward him and taking his hand. “I have to be on the roadside uphill from the railway station at five in the morning. I don’t have to be alive”. Her fingers went to the buttons of her blouse. “We could go there now, and you could carve your name into my womb”.

“I want to” he said dully, still not meeting her eyes.

“Then why don’t you”?

Eva stopped under a stunted birch growing through the wire fence behind the marshalling yards at Mirenburg Commercial. On the other side of the road was a vast expanse of weeds and concrete which had been awaiting detoxification and development since the asbestos plant was demolished. They were as far from a living human being as it was possible to be within the old Stadt boundary.

“This is the rendezvous” she told Pavel, and she dropped her shoulder bag at the roadside. He watched as she put her beret and jacket into it, then her blouse and jeans and trainers until finally she stood naked before him in the moonlight. Pavel looked around nervously; there was neither sight nor sound but the murmur of a soft breeze through the trees lining the deserted road. Eva reached into the bag and drew out a long hunting knife. He stood dumbstruck. Slowly and deliberately, looking him in the eye, she lay back in the long grass; taking the hilt in both hands she pressed the point of the knife to her belly. Her bosom heaved and her young body undulated sensuously.

“Do it” she begged him, huskily. “Plunge it into me”. Eva insinuated the blade across the exposed flesh of her stomach and chest as she spoke, tilting the handle towards him. Her hips and shoulders rolled. “Stab me” she closed her eyes, transported for a moment by the intensity of her situation. “Stab me” she repeated, moaning, “over and over again until my lifeblood soaks you. Use me and leave me here by the roadside”. She pushed the blade into her lightly-muscled stomach, not quite breaking the skin. “Do it” she purred. He sobbed.

“I cannot” he choked. “Even now, I cannot”. Eva pressed the knife-edge to her nipple and held it there, feeling the cold steel on her silky skin. She let out a loud sigh, and then spoke.

“It doesn’t have to be you”. Her heavy-lidded eyes gazed into the darkness behind the branches with a faraway look as she drew the knife-point over her flat stomach down to her gaping cunt. With slow, tiny movements she pricked at her clit, now sliding the blade to and fro, now pressing the cold edge softly into the moist folds of her labia. Pavel turned and walked away, leaving his fiancée writhing nude on her back at the side of the road, eagerly awaiting her murderers.

Katya was wakened from a reverie by a sudden crack beside her ear. The candles had both burned down and left her caked with red wax from her crotch down to her ribcage and down to her shoulder blades. She opened bleary eyes and lifted her head to see the nude figures ranging around her helpless form. The men held long whips of various materials and patterns. Two women were with them. She recognised them; they had been hanging in her place earlier but now were bathed and oiled, their hair dressed and their lips and nails painted. Naked, there was little to distinguish them except that one had bright blue eyes and the others were a limpid brown. They were both meat.

“Lash the wax from her flesh” said Grigori and a whip sliced through the still air to land across Katya’s upper thighs in a blinding white flash of agony. She opened her mouth to cry out and the second stroke - of many – cut into her lower belly and around her hip and arse. It took many minutes before she had a long enough respite to draw breath and scream and longer still before they were satisfied that every scrap of wax was gone from her burning skin.

She was gasping to regain her breath after a long, desperate howl of utter abandon when the two women stepped forward to un-cuff her ankles and lower her gently to the floor. The men gathered around and watched, their whips trailing from their hands, as the two settled down either side of her and dipped their heads to lick the angry welts and cuts on her back and arse. They stretched their necks over her, pressing tender kisses and soft fingers onto her burning flesh. They waited calmly while Katya was rolled over and laid outspread to accept the same slavish attentions to the wounds on her abdomen and thighs. She looked past them to where the three stood looking coldly down on her then smiled, closed her eyes and growled as sharp teeth teased at her aching nipple and the tip of a moist tongue fluttered swiftly over her stiff clit. Katya sank back as though the limestone flags were a feather-down, voicing her arousal in a long, soft cry.

The panting of the three entwined women had become rapid and urgent when Andrei reached down and pulled the blue-eyed girl to her knees by the hair. She tilted her head back to watch him brandish a straight-razor, flicking it open. The other woman raised her face from Katya’s crotch and together they looked on, enrapt, as Andrei seized his victim firmly and touched his shining blade to the elegant sweep of her throat. He put a hand to her cheek and lifted her chin, exposing her willing flesh.

“The Pallid Mask” she cried as her arteries burst open over their bodies, into their mouths and down their chins and breasts. No sooner had the torrent died than his strong arm slashed the razor through the flesh of her belly and her steaming innards splashed over them too. Katya threw her arms around the brown-eyed woman’s neck and pulled her close. They shared a mouthful of blood in a long, wet kiss then she pinned Katya down and licked her face clean, kissed her fiercely on both nipples, and ducked her head to lap at the gore pooling in her navel.

“Now it is your time” said a male voice and Katya opened her eyes to see the brown-eyed woman kneeling astride her chest, her head resting back on Leon’s hip and a length of whipcord drawn around her white neck. They smiled into each other’s eyes and he began to pull the garrotte tight. Her mouth gaped and her eyes stared but she used all her failing strength to saw the trailing end of the killing rope violently to and fro over her clit. Katya was both terrified and madly excited by Leon’s easy cruelty in prolonging the strangulation by loosening his grip at longer and longer intervals until the death spasm seized her. Then a spray of ejaculate and piss from the jerking corpse drenched her face and she licked her lips.

“Frig!” growled another voice and she gratefully sank her fingers inside her bloodied cunt, grinding her hips. She looked from side to side, gasping and purring and tracing crimson smears over her bosom and face as she trailed handfuls of blood up to her mouth. Leon pushed past a twitching corpse and knelt beside her, pulling at his erect cock. The others joined him. Crying out in ecstasy Katya lifted her hips from the floor and drove her fist into herself, driven over the precipice by the hot spurts of spunk from the three men spattering across her quivering breasts.

“In that bag,” Grigori said, standing over her with his softening cock in his hand “you will find your clothes and purse - and some fifty denier stockings. Over there is a bathroom where you must wash yourself and change. Be ready in half an hour”. She nodded, and he played a stream of piss over her face and chest. Katya sat up, blinking, and twisted around in the spray - the others also took aim and together they sluiced the spunk and blood from her striped flesh while she turned her head from side to side, catching what she could in her mouth and swallowing thirstily.

Then they dragged the fresh bodies back to the kitchens and she prepared to leave.

Dawn was just breaking over Mirenburg’s deserted outskirts when the sound of an approaching diesel engine broke the silence surrounding Maria’s dacha and she set down her novel and went to the window. A dark-green military transport drew up outside and a tall, shapely woman emerged from the hatch at the back and walked up to the cottage carrying a handsomely-bound volume under her arm; Maria met her at the door. Without a word, the woman took a slip of paper from the pages of the book and handed it to her – it bore the Yellow Sign. Maria accepted it with a trembling hand and closed the door behind them.

“They sent me. My name is Yudif” the stranger said, taking her shoulders and kissing her. She was an attractive woman of the same age as Maria and also, the thought struck her, of the same height and size and with the same long, curling hair. They could almost be sisters.

“Your disappearance has proved to be most difficult to arrange” Yudif told her. “The security around government employees is always tight, especially for the more senior. It has been decided that your body must be found here”. She shrugged and smiled prettily “That’s all we need to know. Shall we go to the bedroom”?

Bemused, Maria led the way up the loft ladder to her stripped-pine attic bedroom. By the moonlight streaming through the long window she lighted an oil lamp and soon its warm glow spread over the white cotton sheets and brass-work of her single bed.

“That is absolutely perfect” Yudif said, eagerly. “Would you put the lamp in the window darling – near the curtains”? Maria complied then returning to her guest saw that she was unbuttoning her blouse. “You, too” Yudif smiled as she unhooked the fastening of her brassiere and held it out to her. “Lay your own clothes by the bed and put mine on. They will fit you”. She wriggled out of her suede skirt as she spoke.

Maria switched her outfit and stood obediently waiting for orders. Yudif was completely nude now. She embraced Maria, kissed her sweetly on the lips, and took her hand. “Your rings and this lovely bracelet” she explained with a smile as she removed Maria’s jewellery and put it on.

She looked on, burning with excited curiosity, as Yudif took up her book and lay down naked on the bed, settling comfortable as though preparing for a quiet evening. “I don’t understand” Maria complained, at last. “Whose remains are to be found here”?

Yudif propped herself up on one elbow. “They have swapped our dental records” she explained. “And these wooden cottages from imperial times are quite charming but everyone knows they are fire-traps. Tomorrow, why should anyone doubt that the corpse in your bed is your own”?

“So, must I kill you?” Maria asked her, hesitantly. “How”? Yudif stretched her long legs and sighed.

“No, darling.” she replied. “The King himself will do that” and she opened the book. “I am going to lie here and read the Second Act. No woman has ever survived the experience” her excitement was getting the better of her, and a delicious shiver ran the length of her beautiful body as she spoke.

“The mystics say that” Maria mused. “Scientists – when they even allow that the Second Act exists – explain it away as psychogenic death”.

“I have seen it happen” Yudif murmured. “The sister who gave me these pages died in glorious ecstasy before my eyes”. Her voice trailed off and her gaze turned inexorably to the text in her hand. Maria sank slowly into a chair.

“I’d love it if you would read aloud” she breathed.

“That is not your fate” Yudif said ruefully and began to scan the page, her face glowing with an uncanny fervour.

The silence was profound, disturbed only by the turning of the pages. After a few minutes Yudif became restless, pressing her thighs together and rolling her hips on the feather mattress. Her nostrils flared and her bosom rose and fell. She read on, her breathing becoming laboured. Her mouth hung open but her eyes burned into the manu***********. Maria watched with equal intensity, hands clenched in her lap.

On turning over the fourth sheet, Yudif groaned aloud and rolled onto her stomach, spreading her thighs apart and grinding her pubes into the eiderdown. Her luscious body writhed and twisted and the page shook in her shivering fingers until she set it down, reaching eagerly for the next. At the first glance, she tossed her head back and cried out “The scalloped tatters!” but she could not look away for more than a moment and soon turned back to devour the play just as avidly as before, her whole frame wracked with convulsions.

By the time she reached the last page, Yudif had rolled onto her back and lay spread-eagled, holding the book up in front of her face. Her cunt gaped wetly as she lifted her hips from the bed, gasping, panting and finally screaming "Not upon us, oh King! Not upon us"! Her body froze rigid, straining upwards lasciviously, and her eyes burned with an all-consuming passion. Maria cried out, too, and then Yudif fell back onto the white cotton, her face serene and her heart stopped dead. The leather-bound volume fell open on her white breasts.

Reluctantly Maria turned her eyes away, for fear of glimpsing the text of the Second Act before her time and went to the window. She pulled the lace curtain into the flame of the lamp until it caught alight and fire roared up to the ceiling. Satisfied that the conflagration was spreading she went down to the ground floor and climbed through the side window, leaving the door bolted behind her. The brutally ugly troop-carrier still stood outside, its hatch open in readiness. Maria walked gladly towards it in the grey morning light, fashionably dressed in the dead woman’s clothes.