Gothic Blue Read online

  ‘Who is it?’ she whispered, rolling her hips and feeling hot darts shooting through her belly. ‘Who is it?’ she said, louder, then bit down abruptly on the question when the closed door of the folly flew open, and the wind seemed to fling Jonathan into the room.

  ‘My turn now,’ she said as he reached for her. In her somewhere was the urge to do something outrageous: to drop her knickers and pee in front of him – she knew that he would love it – but the fact that this was somebody else’s property cooled her madness. It was enough just to break in and shelter there.

  ‘Hurry then,’ urged Jonathan, his penis already rising up.

  Out among the trees the blackness was bordering on total. By the light of the flashes, Belinda picked her way to a clearing a short distance from the folly and started unfastening the buttons of her shorts. As she peeled them down her thighs then hitched down her panties and squatted, the incongruity of what she was doing made her laugh.

  God, she was wet through in the middle of a rainstorm – why was she so delicately tugging her knickers out of the way and only exposing her bum to the elements? In a few quick movements, she stripped off all her clothes: trainers, socks, T-shirt and shorts, pants and bra. Naked, she stretched her fingertips towards the raging sky, then parted her legs and angled her hips.

  The release of her water was a relief so intense she almost climaxed. Whooping with manic joy, she felt the hot golden flood cascade down her smooth, shining thighs and blend with the rain on the grass.

  ‘There! Are you satisfied?’ she cried to no one in particular, then almost immediately felt a sense of being watched again. During the next lightning flash, she looked down at her own body and saw it lit weirdly, as if by a strobe, with streaks of blue radiance glancing off her wet skin. Her erect nipples shone like a pair of black jewels, and her pubis was a dark, eldritch smudge. ‘Watch this!’ she called out to the lightning-filled sky, then pushed her fingertips inward through her sodden female curls to seek out the tiny treasure within.

  Gasping, she worried her clitoris roughly until she came, beating her hips to and fro through the downpour and the storm, then rising up on her toes as she peaked.

  ‘Yes!’ she called triumphantly. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ As her pleasure swooped and spiralled, the black sky seemed to answer, as if roaring out a climax of its own.

  ‘Who were you yelling at?’ enquired Jonathan as she re-entered the folly. He was lying on the divan and his hand was near his crotch, so Belinda guessed he had been caressing his penis. He snatched away his fingers as she approached him across the tiles, as if not wanting her to think he needed manual stimulation.

  Belinda knew she didn’t need it. Her climax in the forest had primed her erotic spirit, and her sex felt empty and in need of male possession. Half throwing herself on to the divan beside Jonathan, she crawled on to her hands and her knees and offered him her body in the most enticing way she knew. Poised on all fours, she undulated her hips, her thighs wide apart and her vulva bare and gaping. Her whole body was wet but her female flesh was wetter still, and she knew that with the next bolt of lightning, he would see that.

  Right on cue, the sky opened and pealed, and with a hoarse cry, Jonathan hurled himself upon her.

  He slid in with such speed and to such a depth that Belinda was pushed forward and squashed under him. As he pounded her and pushed her, she gnawed the old velour beneath her and gouged it into bunches with her fists.

  Gentle Jonathan seemed possessed with the same storm demon that she was, and his thrusts were savage and unfocused. He was hurting her but she was loving it. In seconds, she was soaring back to a climax. Rotating her hips, she shoved her bottom hard against him, then reached in between her legs to rub her centre. As his belly slapped her buttocks, she felt a flash of inner lightning, and as she climaxed, she stifled her screams in the soft grey cover.

  ‘Lindi!’ she heard Jonathan sob, then felt him lunge, then lunge again, as he jerked inside her. She was squashed like a star as he shuddered out his pleasure, but in her ecstasy there was no awareness of discomfort.

  Floating in stillness and contentment, she felt Jonathan soften and slide out of her channel then roll over to lay his body down beside her. Remotely, she perceived the brutal storm was over.

  The sky was quiet and the air was dark, and she and Jonathan were alone in their round, white folly. The night was all peace, and half gone, but to her surprise, she still felt that she was being watched; scrutinised in intense detail, by a pair of eyes that seemed to observe her from within. Brilliant blue eyes that were both hot and icy cold.

  Chapter Two

  The Eyes of the Night

  ‘BELLE,’ THE SLEEPER murmured. ‘Arabelle, my love … Where are you?’ he asked softly, as in his still chest his heart began to beat.

  It had been so long, so very long, but suddenly and inexplicably she was alive again, her pleasure like a brightly-burning flame.

  How could this happen? he thought as his ribcage rose once, then fell, then rose again, and in his veins the sluggish blood began its flow. It seemed an ocean of time since he had last felt this power, and never, in all the many years of his existence, had he felt it from his sweet Arabelle.

  ‘Oh, Belle, how can this be?’ whispered André, sitting up with caution in his ancient, draped bed and gazing across the room through the filter of a dozen silken veils. He couldn’t see its outline clearly, but he knew that on the marble top of an antique sideboard stood the intricately-carved rosewood casket that was the repository of all that he had ever loved. He reached his hand out weakly towards it, then gasped and slumped back on the pillows. His energy was dim, and already drained after only the slightest exertion.

  Hardly able to keep his eyelids open, André stared across the room through the veils. There, in the shifting darkness, he saw a thin, blue radiance that surrounded the rectangular box. It seemed to be seeping out through the very veining of the wood and forming a faint aura, an inch-wide cerulean halo.

  But if you are still in there, my beloved, thought André in confusion, who is it that I am sensing outside? He turned his head on the soft lawn pillow-case, and looked now towards the window and its heavy velvet drapery. The thick, silk-lined curtains presented no barrier to his acute, inner vision, and he gazed out across the rain-lashed parkland and fixed his attention on the round white folly.

  Immediately, he felt life in his lifelessness; the primal force of sex that never failed to revive him. Beyond the pale, columned walls of the little white building, there was someone on the point of making love, and against reason that someone was his Belle.

  Fighting disbelief, hope and confusion, he struggled to focus and see her. In his mind there formed the image of how she had looked all those years ago, her lovely face at a very special moment. He saw her fine, harmonious beauty, the soft smile, and the delicate, almost tremulous sensuality of the first time she had permitted him a liberty.

  Embarrassed, yet somehow eager, she had unfastened the lacings of her gown and her chemise, then opened them to show him her bosom. Lying in his bed now, a thousand miles and two hundred years away, André could still remember his euphoria, his delight, his instant rousing at the sublime young beauty of her breasts. How perfect her shape had been: how dainty, how pointed, how fresh. He could still hear her sigh as she allowed him to touch her, and his own groan as his passion overcame him.

  He had loved her so much, and so much wanted to express that love with his body. He had been angry with himself for the brutishness of his lust, but had been unable to suppress or ignore it. Night after night, he had kissed her gently and decorously, his loins racked with craving. Night after night, he had retired to his bed and jerked his flesh to a long, solitary release with her sweet name and the word ‘love’ on his lips. They had been close, so close, to the night of their joining, when a dark, seductive evil had claimed him.

  ‘No!’ he cried, straining ineffectually and stretching out with his living mind towards the unexplained c
ause of his revival. Concentrating with difficulty, he retuned his vision on the interior of the folly, then gasped at the sight that assailed him.

  Belle, but not Belle. His lost betrothed, his precious flower, on the point of being possessed by another.

  Against his will, the image aroused him. Beneath his narrow, resting hand, his flesh stirred as it had not done in a long time. Like the miracle of life itself, his member stiffened and rose, far more vital than the rest of his body.

  Arabelle had changed over the centuries, he saw now. Her body was boldly naked and more fully formed, and where once her burnished hair had tumbled in a wave to her hips, it was now shorn to a close, roughly-cut cap that hugged the graceful contours of her scalp. In the very centre of the circular, velvet-covered divan, she was crouched like a bitch before her master, her sex offered to a slim, dark-haired youth.

  ‘Arabelle?’ André whispered, his doubts growing stronger. He sent his mind circling the divan, and looked down into the young woman’s face.

  Yes, the features were the same, but seemed more defiant and a little less fine. The woman who was about to be taken looked much as his beloved might have done a few years after he had last physically seen her, when she had grown and tasted love’s invigorating pleasures. This woman had experienced the richness and ecstasy of the flesh that Belle had never savoured, the consummation that Isidora had denied her.

  ‘Witch! Foul devil! She-demon!’ he hissed, his anger spurring him as sex had done. That black-haired monster had taken away two lives and condemned two souls to two separate kinds of torment. ‘Get back to hell. I will not think of you,’ he said coldly to his nemesis, and resumed his observation of the lovers. ‘Who are you?’ he said, as the young woman thrust out her hindquarters and the man behind her took advantage. The slim youth was rough as he thrust into his paramour’s lush haven, but even so, André still sensed a mood of great tenderness. This was a joyous consensual act, just as it would have been if it were really Arabelle on the bed, and he himself were the lusty naked lover. The affection between the distant pair seemed to goad him like a new spark of dynamism. Strength returned fully to his hands and his fingers just as stiffness returned to his penis.

  Clasping himself, he cried out, ‘Yes!’ And as if hearing him, the lovers convulsed, their meshed bodies lunging in the so-familiar throes.

  ‘Oh dear God … Dear God,’ André moaned, joining them in their pleasure, his own spasm so intense it felt like pain. After years spent in the half-life, his sudden release was much too much for him, and with a stifled sigh, he sank back to oblivion. His last awareness was cool fluid on his fingers.

  Belinda woke to soft golden light. She smiled at a pleasant warmth on her naked body, and began to stretch and curl her toes and generally wake up slowly and luxuriantly, when suddenly awareness poured into her. With a gasp, she sat up and looked around her, panicked. Where the devil was she, and why was she naked?

  Calm down, calm down, she told herself, drawing in deep breaths and trying to work out what had happened. Jonathan’s presence beside her and the reassuring familiarity of his body quickly settled her, and as she touched his bare back, he grunted sleepily and stirred a little.

  ‘Trust you,’ she whispered, leaning over to kiss the nape of his neck. ‘Here we are, stranded in the back of beyond, probably camping out illegally on somebody’s property, and are you worried?’ She watched him as he mumbled, licked his lips and then buried his face in the grey velour of the couch they had bedded down on. ‘No. You just sleep like a baby. As usual …’

  Yet somehow she couldn’t find it in her to be cross with him. For one thing they must have trudged miles through the rain-soaked countryside last night, and that was enough to exhaust anyone. And on top of that, when they had found this, their haven, he had made love to her with all the power of a stallion, and given her a pleasure she hadn’t felt for some time. Quite some time …

  ‘It’s OK, Mr Sleepy,’ she whispered, ruffling his dark hair and knowing that nothing short of slapping or kicking him would wake him yet. Then, rising carefully from his side, she stood up and looked around again, hardly recognising the white folly in the morning sun. She couldn’t remember whether it was she or Jonathan who had opened the shutters, but whoever had done it had changed the place entirely.

  The small circular building was filled with light, and its design, with windows all the way around and going right up to the ceiling, seemed to capture and amplify the sun’s radiance. It was like being trapped inside the golden, idyllic essence of summer, and it was easy to imagine the picnics and parties that might have been centred around this charming little structure.

  But why have what was so patently a pleasure pavilion in the grounds of a priory? An ecclesiastical establishment? It seemed incongruous.

  ‘Weird,’ muttered Belinda, running her fingers through her hair in lieu of a comb and beginning to wonder what had happened to her clothes. Jonathan’s shorts, trainers, T-shirt and briefs were strewn across the floor, clearly exactly where each item had been removed, but of her own clothing there was no sign at all.

  ‘Uh oh,’ she said to herself, as more memories of last night began to surface. Despite their solitude and Jonathan’s complete insensibility, she felt the blood rise into her face in a vivid blush.

  Last night, right in the middle of the storm, she had stripped naked in a woodland clearing, then peed herself and masturbated. She could still almost hear her shriek of pleasure.

  Good Lord, what got into me? she thought, her fingertips brushing her throat nervously as if trying to twitch up a non-existent collar and hide the pinkness that was rising across her chest and up her neck into her face. She remembered feeling wild and exhibitionistic, and being filled with a strange sensation of being watched. And then, when she had returned to the folly and to Jonathan, she had offered him her body and they had rutted like a pair of animals.

  But animals that care about each other, she thought, looking down at him fondly as he turned over in his sleep and began to scratch and fondle at the very member that had so pleasured her last night.

  ‘That’s right, get it ready for me,’ she whispered to him, feeling naughty, then tip-toed away from him towards the door of the folly.

  Outside, the beauty of the day took her breath away. Everything that had been harsh and turbulent last night was pacific and gently sun-kissed now. The grass was vigorously, almost preternaturally, green, and hung with drops of moisture like tiny diamonds. The sky was a delicate eggshell blue tinged with pink, and thin streamers of gauze-like mist were slowly dissipating. Even the grey priory across the park looked quite benign, and not a bit like the derelict hulk of the previous night. Belinda decided to make her way there as soon as she found her clothes.

  Retracing her former steps into the woods, looking this way and that and on alert for possible company despite the apparent desertedness of the priory’s spacious park, Belinda soon found the little clearing she had encountered last night. Her clothes were there, just where she had abandoned them, the pattern of their falling not dissimilar to that of Jonathan’s. She could feel her blood stir again at the thought of how she had shed them and at her own crude and strangely pagan behaviour. And when she had to squat again, she was almost too embarrassed to perform.

  Having been taken off in the shade, and sopping wet, her clothes were still in that condition. She shuddered at the touch of the clammy, ice-cold fabric against her skin, but consoled herself that they were at least clean again. She had never liked putting on once-worn clothes for a second time, especially after she had indulged in hectic sex. The vision of a steaming bath full of scented water suddenly presented itself, and Belinda wondered if there was a stream or something nearby so she could have a quick wash before she set off on her exploration.

  Better not get lost though, she told herself, turning in a circle on the spot and squelching in her trainers. On all sides the trees were numerous and the woods deep and thick; it was only in the direction of
the folly that she caught sight of bright light and open ground.

  Back in their circular white refuge, Jonathan was still fast asleep, and much as she would have liked to discuss their situation, Belinda didn’t have the heart to wake him. During her absence, he had turned again on the couch, and now lay in a foetal position with his two hands folded so sweetly beneath his sleeping face that he looked a perfect innocent. She decided to walk to the priory and back and give him time to come to wakefulness naturally.

  As she set off across the grass, sheer pleasure to be alive made her less aware of her wet clothes and the fact that she and Jonathan were lost. The sun was surprisingly high now, and a light breeze made the bejewelled grass ripple. There were birds singing cheerfully in the woods and she caught sight of a rabbit, or a hare perhaps, sprinting ecstatically along the edge of the treeline. And now, closer up, the priory looked even less like its midnight incarnation.

  The building appeared both larger and somehow smaller than it had done last night, spreading out far further than had previously been apparent, with numerous wings, buttresses and even a crenellated turret. But it no longer seemed to claw the sky and loom.

  It was still not an ‘easy’-looking residence however, and its tall leaded windows with their rounded Gothic arches and tiny lozenge-like panes had a curious and watchful air of latency, as if a presence beyond them lay waiting.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Belinda told herself, still studying the priory and frowning. It took her just a few seconds more to realise what it was about the house that had really changed, or seemed different. Last night the priory had seemed deserted, desolate, a blasted ruin; but now, in the brilliant day, although it still wasn’t a well-kept building by any means, it certainly looked sound enough to live in.