The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Read online

  I too shed one or two tears. Then I lie back on the bed and fall asleep. I dream of a man coming into my room and having sex with me, forcing my legs apart, taking me.

  But then I realize: a man really is fucking me. He is young and handsome. He is not naked but I am naked, and we are on the big wooden bed covered with soft, rich quilts. He is on top of me and inside me. I am being raped, and yet I am not: I agreed to all this. I agreed to the Sixth. The man spends himself. I am naked and he has finished. He buttons himself. He turns away and leaves the great room. His footsteps echo in the vastness of the vaulted hall.

  And that is it. The kykeon spirals in my head.

  Did that really happen?

  It really happened. I might be half delirious, but it happened. In desperation I look around for the simple black dress but then the handmaiden returns, opening the door and crossing to the bed. She gives me more kykeon.

  Then she puts her fingers inside me. Checking me? For what? Then two girls follow her, crossing the mosaic floor, and they make me lie down while they put lubricant inside me. Then another pointlessly handsome young man comes in and fucks me silently. And I just lie there, staring at the ceiling and weeping. I weep for it all. For the sex. For the girl I was. But mostly I weep for Marc.

  I don’t know what is happening or why. I have lost any sense of myself. The hours turn into a day, or two days, or three. I am consistently drugged—again and again: to the point of stupor. The boundaries between me and the world have gone. This is it. I am dying. I see now why people die in the Sixth. Part of me wants to die. I have been kidnapped, and it doesn’t matter. I eat fruit and bread and then I fall asleep. I am quite exhausted.

  I do not know if it is morning, but hours later I am woken by the girls and they put me in a fierce blindfold and give me more kykeon and I am taken from the bed and bathed. Thereafter I am led back to the bed and I lie there, mumbling and crying, then not crying anymore. Now I sense some women touching me?

  I sense soft women in the room, smell their perfume. They are licking me. Touching me. Licking me persistently. Then they give me more kykeon and the drug mixes with the sex, and I surrender. I cannot go on, they have defeated me. The caresses are endless, and tender, and pointless.

  At one point I orgasm, convulsively, but it is reflexive, not emotional, I come only because my body is told to come, my mind is elsewhere, my soul has fled, my soul is not here, it is not me being fucked and massaged and kissed, it is someone else, some silly American girl. Alexandra Beckmann. I dimly remember her.

  The hours. The many, many hours. I am given food that I have to eat blindfolded. Another girl massages me, rubbing calming oils on my skin. I lie there, blindfolded and naked. A man comes in and I am forced to suck him. So I suck. Robotically. My sight has gone. I suck him some more. Then the girls assist me across the hall into the bathroom, where they bathe me, sluicing me with warm water and caressing me with sweet foam.

  I can smell the lovely soap, it reminds me of the soap Marc gave me, from Florence, and I cry again. I cry hard, and the girls lead me in my blindfold back to the bed. They wrap me in a soft bathrobe and then—for the first time in what feels like days—they remove the blindfold.

  After so long I can see, once again.

  Enzo Paselli is standing there. But after all this time, in the darkness of the blindfold, the soft light of the great room is too dazzling. As my eyes adjust, Enzo is little more than a black silhouette, yet I can recognize the shape. Small and old and powerful, and malign.

  He gazes my way.

  “Marc Roscarrick is dead.” He shakes his head, and sighs. “You must have known that. You must have known that this was a real possibility. I am sorry.”

  I stare at him. I have no anger left, I am completed, I am drained. I shake my head. Maybe I did know. Maybe somehow in the last seventy-two hours—or however long it was—I learned that it was all a game, a theater of deceit, and that Marc was already gone.

  Enzo squints at me.

  “You knew he might be dead, you knew you were taking a terrible risk for the merest chance—yet the tiny chance that you could save him, for that slender chance, you were prepared to risk your own life?”

  I nod. Dumb. And mute. Defeated. Marc is dead. Of course he is dead. It was all a lie, but I wanted the lie. And now I am feeling something like relief. I don’t mind if I die now. It is over. I gaze around. There are other people in this room. Older men and older women. Like witnesses. Like members of a jury, dressed like a jury. They are condemning me. Let them do it. Everything is smoke.

  “You have almost completed the Sixth. This is close to katabasis.” He clicks his fingers and a handmaiden approaches. “There is one more ritual. And then you will be released. And you will be a true initiate. Very few complete the Sixth and survive. This is why Marc never told you of the Sixth; he wanted to protect you. To save you from this hollowness. This terror.”

  I can’t even cry anymore. I watch as the people file out of the room, followed by Paselli and the handmaiden. I am on my own. So very alone. What have they done to me? They have, finally, made me careless of death. What is death? What was it? Just a passing change. I know that I loved Marc, I loved him truly. I was prepared to risk my life for him, my beloved, and they cannot take that away, they cannot deprive me of this one last shining fact, which is all that is left of Alexandra Beckmann: I loved and I was loved.

  Everything passes, everything must die, just as everything must be born, but these are just the symptoms of an illusion: the passing of time. The moment itself is timeless. If for one moment you loved, you truly loved, and you were truly loved, then you are in love forever. And death is defeated.

  I remember the Sansevero Chapel. And the rising Christ. I remember Marc and me in Venice, happy in the Ca’ D’Oro, gazing at the Mantegna painting. Nothing but God endures, the rest is smoke.

  And now I remember that Pindar quote, and I understand it. I wholly understand it.

  Blessed is he who, having seen these rites, undertakes the way beneath the Earth. He knows the end of life, as well as its divinely granted beginning.

  I have undertaken the way beneath the Earth, and now I know the end of life. And I am not scared. Not anymore.

  Sometime later, the door opens, and the girl in the white dress crosses the patterned floor. She is carrying some clothes. She hands them wordlessly to me: they are my own jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. My old clothes, now washed. I put the clothes on. The girl waits, and nods, then shows me the blindfold once again.

  The blindfold.

  Obedient and submissive, I sit on the end of the bed, allowing the girl to tie the blindfold around my head. It now feels like the blindfold that precedes an execution. Perhaps they are just going to shoot me. So be it.

  I allow myself to be pulled out of the great echoing room and guided along more corridors. I have stopped crying, the last tears have been shed. Marc is dead and little else remains. Nothing but God endures; the rest is smoke.

  We climb some steps. I am pushed into another room. The door closes behind me, the girl is gone. Yet I sense I am not alone.

  Someone else is in this room.

  I hear a voice, a deep, soft, firm, male voice.

  “Chi e? Chi e qui dentro? Who is it?”

  A deep, soft, firm male voice.

  I rip away my blindfold.

  Marc Roscarrick is sitting in a metal chair, handcuffed to the steel armrests. There is a trace of dried blood on his face; he is faintly bruised around the eyes. He is firmly blindfolded. He is shouting now, he is sitting over there. And he is alive.

  I run to the chair. I reach around to release his blindfold, fumbling with the tight silken knots. He breathes in sharply, scenting me; suddenly his face is amazed, unbelieving.

  “X? Is that you? X? It can’t be? X? X? X?”

  I
release the blindfold and he stares at me.

  “But, X—they said you were dead.”

  He is very close to tears, I can see it in the trembling of his mouth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WE BARELY HAVE time to talk before Enzo Paselli walks in. He is with two younger men.

  Enzo stares at me.

  “Marc Roscarrick came to us, he wanted to ensure you were protected from the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta. We said we would not harm you if he agreed to do the Sixth. We told him the Sixth could be fatal. As we all know. Because in the Sixth you accept death in exchange for love.”

  I gaze at Marc; he is shaking his head, in shock perhaps. I look back at Paselli.

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Understand? These are the Mysteries.” Paselli shrugs. “But you should know this. As I have ascended to the top of the ’Ndrangheta, I have begun to detest the way the mafias have corrupted the Mysteries, used them for their own greed, to enrich themselves, to enslave our politics, in Italy and elsewhere. The Mysteries are a great and noble gift from the ancients. And the Mysteries are being abused.”

  He crosses the room and he leans over Marc and turns a key in the handcuffs. Unshackling him. Marc, in jeans and grimy white shirt, rubs his wrists. They are red raw.

  Paselli continues speaking.

  “I am now the Celenza of the Sixth: that gives me great power. The capos walk in fear of me, of what I know, because I know everything. We film everything. And, therefore, sometimes I try to use the enormous power of the Sixth for good, as it was meant to be used. But the Sixth is a daunting thing. It can easily go wrong. Marc’s wife insisted on completing the Sixth, despite my warnings. She went through what you both went through.” He sighs. “But I was right. She was too fragile, it unbalanced her, it made her fearless of death—or careless of life. She committed suicide on that hill, near Capua; she was not murdered.”

  Paselli pockets the key. He walks to the door, then turns and looks at me. And then at Marc.

  “Ever since that day, I have observed you from afar, Roscarrick, the way you assisted victims of the Camorra. I saw good there, true bravery. But I also saw danger, in this theater of masks.” Paselli gestures to his young male assistant, who turns and leaves. Paselli himself walks closer to the door. “And now you are saved. Both of you. The Camorra will not touch you; I will let it be known you are both initiates of the Sixth. They will respect that; even better, they will fear you—so you have power. I hope you use it well.”

  He stands in the frame of the door.

  “You will be kept here for just a few more hours, then you will be free to leave.” He stares directly at me. “Perhaps one day we will meet again, Alexandra of the Sixth.”

  He is gone. The door is shut. We are alone. Marc pulls me to him but we don’t kiss—we hug, tight, then tighter. I brush the dark hair from his bruised face.

  “Marc, what did they do to you?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “What does it matter? What did they do to you? The same as me?”

  I nod. And I kiss his forehead. And he manages to smile. For the first time since I entered the room, I see his glittering, happy, sad, lovely smile. And he speaks. “Oh God, X, I really thought you were dead; I thought it was all a trick. I didn’t care what they did to me.”

  He stands. He walks into the bathroom. I go with him, and he stoops over the sink. I dip a towel in warm water and wash the dried blood from his face. The wounds are not deep; the bruising is not so bad. He is unharmed, brutalized but unharmed. He is still handsome, still Marc Roscarrick; most of all he is still alive.

  For a few more minutes we wait, patiently, sitting on the bed, side by side. Then he says, “Let’s see if we can get out. I don’t care where we are, Palermo, London, Buenos Aires, I want to get out now. I want to breathe fresh air—come on.”

  Decisive, now, he takes my hand and we go to the door. It is unlocked. A dark stone corridor stretches into the distance. We walk along it, we find some stairs, then we find more stairs, and a wider corridor, barely lit by dim electric bulbs.

  “It’s empty,” says Marc. “They’ve all gone.”

  The building is indeed empty; it is also very old. I have worked out that we must be deep in basements, deep in ancient cellars. But we keep climbing stairs, until at last I see a small stone window, and through it maybe the distant ripples of moonlit waves—are we somewhere on the coast? And, with growing expectation, we climb two more flights of steps. At last we emerge onto a kind of terrace, washed by night and darkness, and we run to the edge and lean over an elegant stone balustrade.

  “Naples,” says Marc, and he is quietly laughing. “We’re in Naples.”

  He is right. I stare at the wide horizon in astonishment. It is the most beautiful view on earth: the noble sweep of the Bay of Naples, from the heights of Vomero to the Centro Storico, to the cliffs of Sorrento and Amalfi, and the dim and holy silhouette of Capri, glimmering under the stars.

  “I know this place,” I say. “This is the Villa Donn’Anna. In Posillipo. I came here once, to the beach.”

  Marc takes my hand in his. And we stare, still amazed, at the view. I look up at the trillionaire glitter of the stars, at Orion and the Pleiades; I look at the Constellation of Marc and Alex on Capri. The Constellation of Us.

  Quietly, I say, “What will we do now?”

  He does not answer. Instead he turns and, looking in my eyes, lifts my face to his and kisses me deeply, sexually, fiercely. And I run my white fingers through his dark and curling hair, because now I know the truth: nothing but Love endures; the rest is smoke.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A.J. MOLLOY is the pseudonym of a bestselling novelist who lives in London.

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  COPYRIGHT

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover illustration © by Rebecca Sandlant

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE STORY OF X. Copyright © 2013 by A.J. Molloy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-226852-5

  EPUB Edition © December 2012 ISBN: 9780062268518

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