- 3 -

The hum of the engine built to a steady drone, and Laura felt a low vibration through her lower body, then was pressed back into the chair as the chocks were kicked loose and the Douglas airliner swung round to make its way across the field at Le Bourget.  It was raining slightly, already pitch dark in the early evening. The lights of the Paris control tower and the Air Terminal were remote in the mist. At the top of the tower a red beacon pulsed its morse message into the dark mist, and radio operators huddled over glowing tubes to manage the traffic of the busiest airport in the world. 

Inside the cabin, a blue-uniformed steward of Imperial Airways, Ltd., politely cautioned everyone to remain in their seats. The plane taxied, swaying slightly before turning into the wind. Laura felt the pitch of the props become higher, and felt a little thrill as the tail of the plane rose. Then they were rushing down the runway, and with a slight lurch and a sickening drop the twin-engine liner was airborne.

Inside the cabin it was warm and well lighted, and the new Douglas liners were remarkably quiet compared to the old Trimotors.  Padded leather seats with no wicker. The Steward served cocktails while the pilot climbed above the low lying clouds, and swung their ship to the east. Above the cloud cover it was still twilight, and Laura could see a dozen other aircraft, circling the field awaiting their chance to land. Some were silver specks against the fading red glow of sunlight, others were nothing more than dots of light in the east.

"Not much to see tonight," commented the man at her right, handing her a Gin and Tonic. She had barely noticed him when he sat down, but now she turned to look at him. His accent was strongly english, with the sort of monotone accent one came to expect of the educated middle class. He was clean shaven, and wore a tweed jacket, and a brown fedora. He struck her as something between an academic and a businessman. After a moment, she realized that she faintly recognized him. It was embarrassing of course as it became increasingly clear that he recognized her. 

"How d'ya mean that?" asked Laura, in what she hoped was a game and intimate voice.

"Well, there's overcast. So we won't be able to see much other than cloud tops. The flight across the channel can be very striking, really…if one can see."

"I s'pose so." Time to brazen it out. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

"I think so. You're Laura Becker, the writer, aren't you."

"You're half right," she said. "I'm Laura Roth now." It was always amusing seeing what men made of this.

"Mmmhmm..." he said. "We met at the Trocadero in London about three or four years ago. I was working for BBC Radio at the time." That would make him a friend of Paul's. Journalists had an endless assortment of friends in the Broadcasting industry. 

"Ahh...well, it's nice ta meetcha again, Mister....?"

"Sedley. Jamie Sedley."

Laura needed a segue, and seldom missed anything in conversation. "So you said that you were working for BBC Radio then. Whassat mean you're doing now?"

"I'm up in North London actually, at Alexandra Palace."

"Is that a tourist attraction?" asked Laura. "I don't think I've ever heard of it."

"It's the television studio. I got moved to the Television branch of BBC, and then moved over to Marconi-E.M.I."

"How is the television business?"

The man chuckled. "Booming, I suppose. Have you seen one?"

"I saw one in New York a couple months ago at the RCA Building. But it was just a demonstration."

"Was it any good? That's very similar to the system we use." 

"Really." 

The man chuckled. "Sorry, I'm an electrical engineer. I'll go on about cameras and such. But it's a decent enough business to be in. Definitely the direction of the future. In five years, I daresay nobody will be listening to the radio at all any more. Anyway, Alexandra Palace is the big studio where all the broadcasts are done. Except for live broadcasts and such…"

"Live Broadcasts?"

"Oh yes. When we carried the Coronation last May, there were anywhere between ten and fifty thousand people watching. Back then we were we broadcasting programmes for two hours around four in the afternoon, and then about nine in the evening. Now we're broadcasting a lot of the day. Except Sundays."

"Interesting. What sort of things get broadcast."

"Oh same as on radio really. Plays, variety shows. All sorts of things."

"So what took you to France?"

"Why the plane, eh-what!?" he found this very amusing and Laura rolled her eyes. "Seriously though, we're working with a couple of French companies that want to license our Emitron cameras. They break down, and I go over and show them what they did wrong."

Laura laughed appreciatively. After a few moments, Sedley thought of a new tangent of conversation. 

"So what brings you to Britain?"

"Just visiting a few friends in London."

"Oh, I should say, after I met you I actually read Ambition of Heracles." People who had read her books always stated this as if it were an accomplishment, like scaling the Eiger. 

"That was written a long time ago," smiled Laura.

"Very keen writing."

They chatted amicably. Laura was always embarrassed by anyone who remembered her solely for that first novel. It had been popular, and widely reviewed, in the spring of 1929. It was cynical and brutal and realistic after the style of the day - owing a lot to Fitzgerald and a probably still more to Hemingway. But it was before the divorce, and before the Depression – the world’s and her own. It was crap and she knew it.

 Sedley apparently knew a lot of folks in literary and entertainment circles in London. For an engineer, he was well connected, and had a very liberal education. From his conversation, and general attitude, she began to suspect he was queer, which did not bother her particularly. Possibly he was just a good gossip, with an affinity for the literary. He apparently knew Somerset Maugham passing well.

When Sedley began a sentence "So, I say, this may be a tender subject, but I'm keen to know," she braced herself for a direct question about Paul. But what he had in mind was worse. A question about Heracles. 

"....was the whole episode with the young Officer based on a real life character."

"No, it was based on something that happened to a friend of mine," Laura lied. But the thought threw her into a black reverie. She paid little attention to what Sedley was saying. Eventually he did ask about Paul, and without much mercy she explained that he had been captured by the Insurgents, and would likely be killed if she couldn’t manage to get him back. 

"Air raids are probably the biggest threat," she concluded. "Both sides are taking prisoners out and shooting them after air raids. By the hundreds."

"Well, by the scores, anyway," Sedley rejoined. "Do you know Gamel Woolsey?"

Laura shrugged. "I think I met her once or twice. She had an affair with Llewellyn Powys."

Sedley nodded. "Whose wife is Alyse Gregory, the editor of The Dial. Which you’ve appeared in." 

Laura nodded. "I went out to lunch with Alyse when I was in London a few years ago."

"Anyway, Gamel’s a poet and novelist. When the war broke out, she was living with Gerald Brenan. He’d been involved in a love triangle with Dora Carrington, the Bloomsbury painter. The two of them went down to Spain to forget, and I think to live happily ever after."

"They picked a helluva spot for it," said Laura. 

"Indeed. They’re back now, got out through Gibraltar without much effort. They stuck it out for about a year, got back in early or mid `37, I should think. They got bombed a bit when they were there. Gamel’s written a splendid little book about it, which she’s working on publishing as Death’s Other Kingdom.

"Title from T.S. Eliot," said Laura.

"Very good, you win first prize," replied Sedley. "Anyway, I’ve heard a bit of the manuscript read aloud, and there’s one idea that I thought was fascinating. Gamel is talking about the fascination with war atrocities. I mean, that’s principally all we send journalists down there to cover. Anyway, she’s talking about the stories that are obviously false. Naked nuns being run… raped and run…over with steamrollers, for example.” She noted how Sedley stuttered a bit over that line, wondered if it were the British affectation, or it somehow excited him.

“She points out that the nuns are always naked. And she points out the lust with which we devour such stories. She calls it the "pornography of violence." 

Laura nodded. "Well, there’s no doubt we have a fascination with that sorta thing. And Freud would probably say it borders on the sexual. A product of repression maybe?" That was pap, but this was airliner talk.

Sedley wavered his hand, seeming to indicate partial agreement. "Maybe. But she certainly hit the nail on the head when she pointed out how fascinated we were. Yet I doubt I’d be very excited if I were in Paul’s shoes."

"It’s difficult to rectify our fascination and interest in cruelty and bloodletting with the actual horror of it. Certainly it’s entertainment. Look at the old Romans who went out to the coliseum to glory in butchery. There’s a certain part of us that’s very aroused by cruelty and pain."

"Mmm hmm..." The conversation wandered off along other lines, but the words "pornography of violence" stayed with Laura long after the plane had descended through the Anglian fog and the tires squealed against the asphalt of Croydon.

*  * *

Jeanne climbed the stairs to the apartment slowly. She was terrified, and that sent a warm electric pulse from her cunt to her throat with every step. She had taken a long time, dressing herself prettily, carefully brushing liner onto each eyelash, knowing that looking stunning would not dissuade him in the least and that the delay would only enrage him further. She walked up the steps, a beautiful thing to be broken. He could not afford a girl who dressed so prettily, the makeup had all been given to her by her mistress.

She imagined how she would look, lying crumpled, crying on the dirty floor of his flat, and her throat clenched with such excitement she could not speak. She ached for it.

She knocked on the door, and he opened it, then walked away without looking at her, as if she were some casual visitor - as if he had let her out only for a moment to get the morning paper. He was working with something, some papers, on the linoleum table in the kitchen. She came in and stood in the little entry area of the place. 

He took his time with what he was working on, and then stuffed it into a brown folder, tying the string around it. He spoke without looking for her.

"You took your time getting here. Where were you yesterday?"

"Laura is back."

"Baiser ce conasse."

"I did. Fuck her."

He was toying with her, and in her impatience she sought to provoke him.

"I'm sure you did. You're a slut."

"Any girl who would go with you is a slut, Marc."

He cleared the slight distance from the kitchen in three steps, and raised his hand. She turned her face to take his backhand on her jaw…it whipped her head around and his return slap caught the corner of her lip, left her tasting blood.  Salt in her mouth. 

He took her by the shoulders then, and slammed her hard against the wall with a low growl. She looked into his eyes, which were black with anger. Pinned he shook her. She did not know what he said to abuse her exactly, she only knew the feeling of his hands on her arms, encircling them, his body pressed close to hers. The heat of him was melting her. She was a child's snowball expended against a wall, melting slowly and trickling away. 

He released her and she fell, not all the way, but crumpled on her knees against the wall, sobbing. With hysteria, with relief that the storm had finally come, with fear of what he would do to her. 

"Get up!" he hissed. She made no move to do anything. She was beyond any action or self control now.  She had expended the last of it running up the stairs to his flat and had nothing left. She was his object.

 He grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her to her feet, propelled her towards the mattress that lay on the floor. It smelled slightly of must and sex. She felt him kneeling behind her, and heard metal, felt him push up her skirt over the cheeks of her ass. She never wore panties, and it took no effort for her to be revealed to him. He pulled her roughly to her knees and she felt him behind her but made no effort to look at him.  She knew he had taken off his belt when the first line of pain fell across the back of her thigh. 

She felt herself grow remote as he began to whip her, felt herself pushed beyond something. The pain was terrible, as leather creased her flesh. Lines of pain danced across her ass, the back of her thighs, and her back. She collapsed as he beat her, drove her hips against the edge of the mattress, and felt a warm heat stirring within her.

Her cunt was seeping against the mattress by the time he seized her roughly by her hips and drove his cock into her. Detached and far away, she wondered how much of the smell of sex that came from the old mattress was because her juice had spilled on it that way, kneeling as he beat her, or collapsed with his cum leaking out of her.

She rode the edge of the warmth and pain down his shaft, felt the climax dig through her gut so rough that she cried out from how hard it was.  Somewhere else, she felt the sharp edge of it, felt herself straining down onto his cock, her ass-cheeks pressed against his hips. His penetration was the catalyst, but not the cause for her climax. It was a culminating violation of her body, at the same time filling her, bringing her into some distant contact with her lover who had only been an outside stimulating force before. She was barely aware when he came, could not feel him and only knew from his groan, was aware of nothing except the hollow shocks still running through her body. When he had finished she slumped down onto the mattress, sobbing slightly.

He went to the kitchen, and brought back a dirty glass. He raised her shoulders, and put it to her lips. 

"Drink this…"

It burned like the belt on the way down. Vodka, an affectation from his Communist affiliations. He poured a shot for himself into the same glass and drank it. She slumped against him, feeling the perspiration cooling on her body, and he put an arm around her, almost tenderly, and gave her another shot. 

She lay on her back across the mattress. The radiator heat in the flat was not powerful enough to warrant opening the window, but it was hot and stuffy with the windows closed. Her panting slowly stilled, and she felt everything within her coming to stillness. 

She imagined that this process could keep going, until her breathing stilled and she became not dead but nonexistent, simply ceased to move while the rest of the world continued on its way, flying on aeroplanes, metro trains, and moving stairways. 

"I want to die." She said this to no one in particular, but Marc heard her, and she knew he would and she knew what he would do.

"Are you sure?"

"What do you think?"

"Do you want to play?"

"What do you think?" Her tone was shockingly hateful and bitter. 

He got up and went into the kitchen. Under the counter she could hear him moving a loose board, and he came back carrying a small revolver. It was old, and poorly made with visible defects in the casing. She heard a rasping click as he shut the cylinder. She had no idea if he had put a bullet in the gun. That was his prerogative. She never asked him, though sometimes she tried to guess later if he had or he hadn't. 

"You go first."

"Why. You’re the one who wants to die?"

"You showed me the game."

"And you became addicted. That’s your fault. Anyway, it’s a double risk for me. If I kill you, then I die, or go to Devil’s Island."

"That’s your problem." All her lethargy was gone now. She was on edge, intense, aware of how long it had been since she had a fix. The dirty sheet had come partially off the old mattress while Marc was fucking her, and the mattress beneath her skin chafed her, as if it were sandpaper. She was on her knees, in his face, filled with a dangerous kind of energy. In this state she had once nearly broken his wrist. She grabbed his arm. "Do it!"

He grinned, and put the revolver to his temple, careful to point the muzzle backwards, into his skull, so as not to suffer a deflected shot. He looked at her, and squeezed the trigger. It took a lot of force to make the old gun’s hammer rise and fall. There was a snap, and she saw a flicker in his eyes. It told her little, but it enabled her to believe the gun was loaded.

"I have a better chance now. One in five."

He made to hand her the gun, but she pushed it away. "No, you do it."

"Why should I."

"Because I take your shit. Because I still come here."

"You come here for a little horsey riding."

"You don’t give me enough for that. Anyway, if I die, you’re dead. You’ll go to Monsieur La France." 

"We don’t have executions in this country anymore. I’ll have to get another bullet and kill myself. Or else go to Russia. Otherwise, I’ll die of malaria building highways in Guiana."

"Your future is not something I really give a fuck about. Do it when I say."

The need, and what had just happened to her made her strong. He shrugged as if to say "have your way and be quick about it." But he did what she commanded.

She laid back, and began to finger herself. He lowered the gun, and she felt the barrel against her thigh. It was cold, though not as cold as she expected. She felt Marc’s hand cover her thigh, lying on her skin like some warm object of lead. Up until now, she had felt absolutely nothing as a result of her own touch...in fact she could barely tell that she was touching herself. As he pressed the gun against her vagina, she felt a sudden thrill of excitement, kindred to what had surged through her when he had knocked her down earlier. Then as now, there was the thrill of what she was making him do, as well as the delicious pain of what he was doing to her. Before the pain was physical. Now it was emotional. 

She thought of oblivion, of sudden shattering death with a warmth built of long practice. She pictured her own body shattered by the sudden explosion, life torn from her in a roaring instant, the secrets of her inner self blasted across the dirty mattress. Blood matting the sheets, drying steaming on the radiator. Oblivion was a concept she felt in her soul, a piercing self-sorrow, consuming her forever. She had talked to Laura about this, and Laura had told her that she must feel about oblivion as some Catholic girls felt about union with Jesus. She suspected her feelings were more like those of nuns reveling in union with the Devil, allowing him to fill them with his cold black seed, while the dread of the inevitable grew within them. As a small girl she had read and fantasized about the tools and implements, her body broken by the wheel, pierced in many places torn with flaming hot tongs on her way to the fire.

She could not bear that much pain, but those childhood images, the images of the suffering Jesus on the Cross, the excitement of the pictures of the wound in his side and the thorns piercing his flesh welled up in her as Marc pressed the weapon into her. It was not uncomfortable – on the contrary, the muzzle was slightly rounded at the edges, and the site was a cheap afterthought...no more than a slight flange of metal.

Visions danced in her head, great dark beings with batlike wings folding darkness around her, evaporating her from within in the fire of their cocks. As a teenager she had gotten a battered book with pictures of old woodcuts and tried to summon Satan, and felt only emptiness and disappointment. Now she worshipped oblivion with more fervor than the atheist, Marc, but the images of that childhood fixation on all that was dark and wrong within her remained, filled her unbidden at moments like these with a warm, terrible, despair.

It took her only a few minutes to work herself to orgasm, and the index finger circling her clit had little to do with it. It was a mechanical link, a necessary physical attachment between the state of her emotions and her physical arousal. If she were less tired, she knew she could come after a while merely from fantasy. Now she wanted quickness, and her hand rushed her to orgasm. As she felt the first wave begin to break she got out a broken "now..." and felt his hesitation. He always waited some indeterminate time. That was part of the suspense. But he would obey her in the end. He would be her tool in destroying her own life. This was an act of self control. Self annihilation was the only avenue left to her. The only way in which she could be free.

The strength of the climax which flashed after the sound of the hammer fall shocked her with its intensity. Physically her body jerked, and she nearly doubled up, her face stretched obscenely. Somehow though the very physical strength somehow sapped the emotional intensity. She fell backwards, pushing his hand away, feeling the now alien object withdrawn from her.

"Wish I got that out of it."

"It looked better than it felt. I’m not responding anymore. It’s the shit that you feed me."

"Go straight. Christ knows I don’t make any money off of you."

"Fuck yourself. Get me some."

"You could say please."

"Fuck you you Communist bastard. Get me some or I swear by Mother Mary I will blow your fucking cock off myself."

Marc sighed, and went back. She knew he kept the heroin under the same secret panel as the cheap little gun. Sometimes he kept explosives there too. "Enough to blow up the block" he had boasted, though she doubted it. 

By the time he got back, she was shivering and covered with goosebumps. She wasn’t sure why, but the aftermath wasn’t the usual warm floating oblivion that came with her act of ritual self-destruction. 

He realized the lethality of her mood and said nothing. She raised a vein without effort, but was shaking too much to hold the needle. He punctured her arm and delivered the shot. 

She lay back, waiting for it to wash over her...She had held out too long. Horse was tricky. Too much and she didn’t want to fuck at all. Fucking was the only means she had to control her life, and being unable to do it drove her to a desperate circular depression. The last time, she had tried to asphyxiate herself in the bath, lived only because Laura found her.  

Too little, and her nerves were too raw to function, to react normally, she was a mess. 

Marc had taught her to play Russian Roulette, though she played her own variation. It was the closest she came to feeling alive. Sometimes afterwards she thought warm happy thoughts, and cried, and felt pain and loss in a way she didn’t allow herself most times.

 She still wanted to die, but the drug was taking effect now, and she didn’t really care. She didn’t care about anything. She curled up into a fetal ball, and smiled though she was not happy.