Monsieur Venus, Somnambulist
by Noël Burch
First adventure of Bret Blade  aka Louise Lame , dominatrix in black leather, martial artist and hypnotist.>


Une sainte en son auréole

Une châtelaine en sa tour

Paul Verlaine

Bret Blade glanced at her watch and sighed: she was running late.

" Hurry up, please, I'm expecting someone," she called to the middle-aged man
in the flowered apron and scruffy beard, bent over a sink full of dishes.
Attempting to speed up his awkward manipulations, he let a glass explode on
the tiles in the kitchen-corner of a sparcely furnished, resolutely modern
sitting-room.

"Again! That's the third one this month! You're doing it on purpose! All
right.. Hold out your hand, Leopold!" There was something artificial about the
hard edge to her voice and a touch of lassitude could be heard.

With a mixture of fear and anticipation, "Leopold" held out his hand. The
edge of Bret Blade's stiffened palm chopped down with sharp precision on the
delicate veins and cartilages of the proferred wrist. There was a scream of
mingled extasy and pain: the man pressed the throbbing forearm to his hollow
chest while the other hand crept towards his swelling crotch.

Bret Blade's annoyance was no longer an act. "You can jerk off at home! And
stop that whining! Pick up the pieces, finish the washing-up, and make
yourself scarce. But if there's any more breakage, I'll have that arm in a
cast!" The sadistic manner rang true now.

Leopold was beaming through his pain : "Yes, madame, right away..."

The dominatrix had already turned her back on him. As she vanished through the
bedroom door, she called back over her shoulder: "And tomorrow you'll go to
the Rue de Paradis and buy six of those crystal claret glasses I like."

The very real punishment meted out to her poor cleaner - at his age the wrist
would ache for days - had been more than perfunctory payment for services
rendered. Bret was airing rage and frustration which had little to do with
that sweet maso and his broken glass.

In principle, Bret had decided to do without those submissives who clean your
apartment for the sheer pleasure of domestic slavery: "They're more trouble
than they're worth" she would tell friends and colleagues. "For the least
little chore, they drag you into such complicated games that it would be
easier to do it yourself."

Yet she still put up with this kindly widower, a retired professor who always
brought flowers and other little gifts. His personal hygiene left to be
desired, but he was less demanding than most submissives, content with quick
and cunning chastisements such as he had just received in exchange for several
hours of a housework. The mere threat of a Kung Fu demonstration on his
precious person could keep him happy for a week. And from time to time, she
actually could enjoy spending time with him, going to an exhibition or a
movie, for he had sounder tastes than most of her circle.

With lithe movements of the hips, she removed the jabot blouse, the riding
pants and sneakers she liked to wear at home, and examined herself in the
full-length mirror.

At forty-eight, thanks to jogging, gym work-outs, but most of all to years of
practice in a variety of martial arts, Bret Blade's figure was still nubile,
ideally slender, with delicately rounded breasts of alabaster perfection.

However, face-lifting was repugnant to her and as the years went by tiny
wrinkles were beginning to appear, the chin-line was beginning to lose its
perfection. But of course many masos found these signs of ageing attractive,
admitting thereby that it was Mother they were seeking in
"She-who-administers-pain". And Bret Blade was highly skilled in acting out
the double role of Good Mother who cajoles and comforts and Bad Mother who
brings humiliation and pain.

Yet for the umpteenth time she wondered how long this finely honed tool which
earned her keep would retain its current value on the Paris marketplace.

Suddenly she felt tired. Get into another line of business, perhaps?
Journalism? Fiction-writing? She was considered to have talent (not least by
her "old professor", but how could she trust his blind adulation?) Yet her
writing had thus far earned her only pocket money. She also worked as a DJ but
her weekly late-night jazz program was little more than a hobby.

Marry a rich submissive would solve her financial problems, put an end perhaps
to a certain loneliness. There was still that Swiss banker, and we wasn't the
only one... But she shivered involuntarily at the idea of forced monogamy with
a pot bellied bourgeois - like old Friedrich Engels, she believed that the
emancipation of women involved the abolition, for both sexes, of monogamy
itself. And could she really bear the thought of joining the clan of
"Omphales" she met at every party, dominatrixes kept by their husband, who
looked down on professionals like Bret.

For it would never have occurred to her to walk out on her world, the
S&M/fetish circles of Paris and Europe, which provided access to other milieus
as well, often enriching in both senses of the word.

She sighed and slid open her wardrobe: for the moment, it was business as
usual.

She turned her thoughts to the submissive she was expecting: it would be his
first time, he had claimed on the phone. That could augur well or badly, it
was hard to say in advance... A man who had never actually "practised" might
turn out to be dangerously hung-up: not infrequently Bret had been obliged to
send an aggressive beginner to sleep with a hand-heel cuff to diaphragm,
carried out to such perfection that the victim never knew why he had suddenly
fainted.

But often, with proper coaching - and after twenty years experience, Bret's
expertise was considerable - the initiation of a novice could be wonderful fun
for both parties.

From the client she was expecting, Bret had been able to wheedle two bits of
information only: his name was Thierry and it was black leather that excited
him the most.

Bret was as wary of a tongue-tied john as of a chatter-box and tended more and
more to reject both when her instinct told her she was dealing with a problem
case.

This one, however, had a gentle voice which touched her.

So, black leather it was. She slid back the other door and took out an
elegant, made-to-order leather cat-suit which "her professor" had bought for
her just a few weeks before. She sat on the bed and began pulling on the legs.

The front door opened quietly, but Bret's sharp ears told her that her
submissive was trying leave without disturbing her.

She acted on a magnanimous impulse : "Leopold, come in here and make yourself
useful."

"Oh, Madame, I was just about to..." stammered the poor fellow, to whom his
mistress' bedroom was normally out of bounds.

"Are you questioning an order?"

The bearded man appeared in the doorway, coat over his arm. He froze as he saw
Bret sitting on the edge of the bed in "his" cat-suit, crafted of high-grade,
soft, matte-black leather - and which had taken quite a bit out of his modest
pension.

As if by accident, she had let him come upon her just as she slowly slid the
single, invisible zipper from crotch to throat. "Leopold" had a brief glimpse
of the fine-grained skin, thrusting nipples, and firm, forbidden flesh. With
the zipper closed, the fetichisation was complete, the leather statue shone
forth in all its perfection. Bret let him admire her a few seconds more, then
handed "her Leopold" a pair of calf-length boots with short Louis XVth heels
(even when dressed for work, Bret Blade spurned the agony of stilettos). And
though still handicapped by the crack on the wrist, the professor was already
on his knees, carefully lacing the boots to mid-calf: the sweetest chore of
all!

Again oblivious of the submissive, even when he smoothed the supple calf-skin
to her legs with unduly caressing hand, Bret peered into a hand-mirror,
retouching her lipstick, separating a few eyelashes before deciding that her
mask was ready for work.

The boots were laced, and well-laced at that, but Bret refrained from
complimenting the lacer, frowning down at him on the contrary as a matter of
principle, before dismissing him with a disdainful wave.

As he left the apartment, he was walking on air.

Back in the sitting room of her minuscule apartment, Bret Blade proceeded up
the narrow corkscrew staircase which led to what had once been a maid's room
on the floor above. Thanks to her connections at the mairie du sixième
arrondissement she had recently been able to acquire the lease, cut through
her ceiling and outfit it as a "dungeon". It had improved her income slightly
but less than she had hoped and she had still not recovered the cost of the
transformation.

In contrast with her colleagues, whose tastes she deemed crude and who most
often preferred a "Disneyland" setting, with beams and stones of molded
plastic, Bret had chosen a black velvet wall-covering which absorbed every ray
of light, and a discreet system of concealed spots that picked the disquieting
instruments that stood or hung here and there - a wheel, a rack, a Saint
Andrew's, elegantly fashioned in polished wood and burnished steel, shone
forth in the otherwise impenetrable darkness.

Bret picked up a length of rope lying on the black latex floor covering and
inwardly cursed "Leopold"'s short-sightedness. As she prepared to go below,
the door-bell rang faintly.

She descended the spiral steps at a leisurely pace, taking pleasure in the
gentle sway of the staircase beneath the light tread of her supple boots, in
the rustle of leather at the intimate folds of her crotch and armpits.

Bret Blade knew that for a submissive ringing for the very first time at her
door, the delay before the door opened could prove deliciously exciting.

The bell rang a second time.

Back in the bedroom now, she lingered before the mirror - the cat-suit really
fit like a glove - and it was not until the third ring that she relented.

At the door, she resisted the temptation to spy on her new john through the
peep-hole: she almost always did resist, on account of the distortion. She
wanted her first contact to be de visu.

With deliberation, she slid back the deadfall bolt the bolt and opened the
door halfway, with a standard, throaty-toned, opening gambit : "Don't be so
impatient, young..."

Today, however, there was a hitch in the routine : "Merciful me! What a hunk
of man!" she marvelled to herself.

He was tall but not too tall, he was slender but with perfectly tone muscles.
Above all he was an Eurasian. Bret Blade had a weakness for racial mixes in
men, which had sometimes backfired. He was young but again not too young,
twenty-three or twenty-four, she thought: a beautiful piece of modelling clay,
just waiting for her expert hands.

Or so she had reason to hope.

Her manner softened at once: "Thierry?"

He nodded and she saw his gaze fasten on her supple torso wrapped in leather.
It was clear he had never seen anything like it before in the flesh, so to
speak, and that it took his breath away.

She stepped aside to let him enter the narrow hallway, shut the door behind
him.

"Did you find it easily?" Banalities for a novice, put him at ease...

He grunted and stepped into the sitting-room.

Anguish...

What if he really were tongue-tied? What if this silence was the sign of an
iron-clad hang-up? It just wouldn't be fair!

She bade him sit on the divan. First, the vital statistics...

"What do you?"

The beautiful young man finally got his voice back. "I'm in my third year of
law school."

"Oh, well, that could have come in handy with my insurance lawsuit!"

With no apparent reason, he grew visibly alarmed.

"Don't worry, they settled up."

A look of relief appeared on his face and a long pause followed. This was
getting nowhere...

"Well, young man, do you live with your parents?"

He was nonplussed until he realised she was joking. They laughed together and
the ice was broken.

Bret moved closer in a friendly way, but he shrank from her instinctively. She
refrained from remarking on it, with this kind of john one had to proceed
either very, very gradually... or else throw him in at the deep end, as it
were. She hadn't quite made up her mind which it was to be.

He suddenly dug into the inside pocket of his well-cut suede jacket and took
out an envelope. "This is what you asked me for." She took it with her
sweetest smile, glanced inside, dropped it carelessly on the coffee table (all
gestures which were carefully calculated : "neither grasping nor credulous").
Then she turned to face him on the divan, drawing her calves up under her
thighs, a comfortable position which also set off to advantage her perfect
figure.

It had been years since she had received a visit from such a attractive man
and was determined to avoid any faux pas. Usually, she could trust her
instinct...

For Bret Blade was a true professional, thoughtful and conscientious. With
regard to the men who came to her - so many men over so many years, in search
of what "honest women", their wives, their sweethearts, would not or could not
give them - she felt that once she had been paid, it was her obligation to
espouse their fantasies as best she could, or to coax them out of those who
did not yet really know what they wanted. With some she had to start by
allaying their fear of their own desires.

Thierry, she sensed, might well be one of these.

She made him tea, and made small talk for a while. Thierry played along but
seemed increasingly ill at ease.

"Well, how would you like it to be?" she asked gently, having decided that
warm-up time was over.

But the young man froze at the abruptness of her question. His embarrassment
could be cut with a knife as he stammered : "Forgive me, Madame, I shouldn't
have come here..."

Her smile teased him : "I'll keep the money anyway..."

He fell all over himself with generosity : "No problem, it's all my fault,
just a bee in my bonnet..."

He stood up. "I'll leave now."

"Why not come and see what's at the top of my stairs?"

Bret knew that this boy did not really want to leave... would not leave, in
fact. But perhaps he needed to be stopped from leaving. It wouldn't have been
the first time. To act on this supposition involved a certain risk, of course,
but as usual Bret relied on her intuition.

She rose in turn and stood facing him, a smile playing about her lips, gazing
into his eyes as she offered her hand in farewell. He averted his eyes, but
accepted the handshake.

And discovered that the offering was a trap. Bret wrapped her wiry fingers
around just two of his, bent them down and back with brusque precision as she
gripped his elbow with her free hand; the captive arm was locked by the
leverage, throbbing and numb from the pressure she seemed almost accidentally
to be exerting on his "funny-bone". The grip was not excruciatingly painful,
but deprived him completely of his freedom of movement.

"What are you doing?" he demanded to know, in a strange voice wherein the
anxiety did not quite ring true... Bret smiled inwardly: he was beginning to
hold his own in this comedy of capture .

"I'm liberating you from your scruples. Just relax... Isn't it exciting to be
at the mercy of a woman swathed in black leather?" All masos adored that
rhetoric, how could this one be an exception?

He dared not reply.

Manoeuvring Thierry's body with his arm the way she'd flown planes with a
joystick in her barnstorming days, Bret backed him to the bottom of the spiral
stairs. Braced himself against the central column, he tried awkwardly to fend
her off with his free arm.

"Madame, I really think..." he started to say, but suddenly found himself
obliged to rise on tiptoes. "Owww! You're hurting me, stop it!"

The grip on his fingers became imperative while her thumb dug deep into his
elbow-joint : "You are about to satisfy your deepest desire, the one you
wouldn't tell me about over the phone... but which I already know ... You're
coming upstairs with me, whether you think you want to or not... This grip is
a sample of the Chinese art of qin na " (he was taken aback by the melodic
authenticity of her accent). In English, what we call the petit juif is named
"funny bone", but for the Chinese it is shaohai and there is nothing funny
about it. It is located on the meridian of the heart, and if I wanted to be
very mean I could give you a mild heart attack right now! So you see it is in
your interest to obey me," she concluded, with a smile that was more
reassuring than her words had been.

Now her voice grew softer: "Come along, you know you want to see what's up
there... And I always make it a point of honour to carry out my side of the
contract... I've seen this coquettishness before... You'll soon get over it."

And, she concluded to herself, she was damned if she was going to let the
prettiest john of the year walk out on her like that!

He still held back but Bret could see right though him: teasingly, she pressed
the vulnerable hollow in his elbow and already his squeal contained a nuance
of ecstasy. He started backwards up the stairs. "You're so strong!"

Yes, yes, he was getting there...

"Especially my fingers... I exercise them every day by crumpling up sheets of
paper, it's very effective. And I know every vital spot on the human body and
how to attack them... It's very useful in my occupation. We sometimes
encounter clients who are violent and have to be taught a lesson... or others
who are just timid, like yourself..."

During the slow, clumsy climb, Bret had a compassionate thought for her poor
professor: he would have given all the years he had left to have witnessed
this scene: his goddess, clad from tip to toe in leather, and using her qin na
skills to subdue a strapping youngster a head taller than herself!

Every maso like Leopold considered himself a "practitioner" but in fact they
were voyeurs first and foremost... A diagnosis which for Bret Blade was in no
wise pejorative: she was a woman for whom Freud's polymorphous perversity, in
all its guises, was the natural way of life. Well, all its guises save "the
classic Sadiean couple", whose "games" offered too faithful a replica of
everyday phallocentric power relations. Nor did she have any use for
paedophiles...

While her mind strayed thus into "professorial" territory, her eyes could
feast upon her captive, more or less consenting by now, if not yet actually
amorous.

She tried to sort out his ethnicity: Eurasian, for sure but with touch of the
Negroid or the Amerindian, perhaps? The grain of the matt skin was exquisitely
fine, the honey-coloured hair was prettily curled. Bret mentaly licked her
chops.

Obliged to walk backwards into her dark "dungeon", Thierry saw little of it
until he found himself lying face up on the rack. Bret released his arm and
had the satisfaction of seeing him make no effort to rise ; he merely lay
there nursing his aching arm, pressing the sore fingers pressed under his
armpit, rubbing the numbness from his wrist and forearm. His eyes were shut,
and that was a good sign, too.

But there was still a certain stiffness in his body.

She had no difficulty fastening the padded manacles around his wrists, the
heavy rubber cords around his thighs and legs, the leather strap across his
throat; often enough this kind of novice - timid, passive - could only be
induced to let go if events got beyond his control. She unbuttoned her
"patient's" shirt and took from a rack nearby a "Chinese pinwheel". This
elegant, scalpel-sized allowed for a whole range of tortures, from an exciting
but harmless prickle - the needles mounted on the revolving drum barely
breaking the skin - to the electric agony of deep and bloody perforations. She
let the handsome object sparkle before her handsome client's eyes.

But it was then that she lost control of the situation, and the young man
began shaking violently, noisily : his teeth were chattered, his chest shook,
his arms and legs were convulsed.

This was not the first time Bret Blade had encountered such a phenomenon, the
spasms of an enraged super-ego, so to speak, and she was not without resources
to deal with it. Yet never had she encountered such a violent attack, it might
almost have been an epileptic fit, had she not known (again from experience)
that it was no such thing.

Instinctively she leaned over the boy, pressing her warm leather bosom to his
chest, massaging his temples with her finger-tips, murmuring, intimate,
reassuring words...

"Easy now, relax, everything is all right, don't be frightened..." over and
over again. "I'll help you relax... Feel my hands on your arms, there do you
feel them? Now you're going to relax these muscles here... And now here...
Feel the tension going out of your muscles... Now the forearms... that's
right... now the wrists... the fingers, one at a a time..."

And she continued thus, softly, tenderly, sure of her ability to transmit a
tranquillising "fluid" to hyper-sensistive the boy.

And indeed, gradually the trembling ceased, the breathing became more regular.

She was thinking to herself that she would have to give up her efforts for
today when she made a mind-blowing discovery : thinking she was merely helping
her client to relax, she found she had quite involuntarily put him into a
hypnotic trance, light enough for the moment but unmistakable...

Bret Blade had mastered hypnosis a few years before, simply because she had
wanted a new experience, in the same spirit as she had learned to fly a
jet-fighter and devoted many hours to Chinese martial arts. It was a talent
she had kept to herself, had tested it out only once in real life... to induce
sleep in a harmless but tiresome neighbour on a transatlantic flight.

For the blasé senses of our dominatrix, here was an opportunity to exercise an
entirely new form of power and she felt rising excitement.

This ideally beautiful young man could be made into her slave for real... and
even, if she wished, without his knowledge . She could finally act out a
fantasy of her own, all her own, about which no one else would have anything
to say!

Never had she known any but willing slaves and only within certain limits at
that, slaves who, in the last analysis, by the very fact that she was in their
employ, had the power to terminate, at any moment, the contract they had
passed with their "sexual servant". Bret was perfectly clear-sighted about
that: however "dominant" in the presence of those men, at the end of the day
she was their domestic, a sort of governess, well enough paid but without the
job security.

And while companionate submissives like the professor had less power than the
johns, they were still theoretically free to escape her thrall whenever they
wished.

Hitherto she had never so much as entertained the idea of hypnotising a man
without his knowledge for erotic purposes - she'd had only fantasies of
revenge, of ridiculing some enemy through post-hypnotic suggestion. But deep
down inside, she was jubilant. Here, within her grasp, was a relationship such
as she had never known. Nestled to her breast was a marvellous sex object,
bearing deep within him a submissive's vocation and whom Bret could attach
irresistibly to her person while allowing him to believe himself totally
free... Or he could be made to know that he had become her slave but could do
nothing about it! The choice was entirely hers.

The temptation was too great to resist.

Adjourning sine die the moral issues involved - these were hardly Bret Blade's
forte in any case - she concentrated all her powers of persuasion, and still
cradling the boy in her arms, prepared to deepen his trance.

Her voice took on a monotonous, imperative tone : "Open your eyes, Thierry and
look at me, look into my eyes, they are very beautiful aren't they, like pools
of water, deep and cool... Keep looking at them... Keep on looking... You are
feeling drowsy, aren't you, your eyelids are feeling heavy, so very heavy, you
feel your body weight supported everywhere by something firm and soft... Feel
it under you... You hear only the sound of my voice, my beautiful voice that
lulls you to sleep, you are a baby at your mother's breast, you cannot resist
the sound of my voice... henceforth you will obey only my voice..."

And all the while she was gently massaging his temples and the back of his
neck.

"At the count of ten, you will fall into a deep sleep..."

And she began to count in a hoarse, soporific tone...

"... nine...ten..." and with the tips of her fingers she touched the
hypnogenic points in the hollow of the young man's palms. Immediately his
breathing became deep and steady.

An ideal subject!

She backed away and realised that her own hands were trembling.

She left the boy sleeping on the rack and went back down to her sitting room.
and lit a long thin cigarette. The telephone began ring... She turned down the
volume on the answering machine, put Ornette on the hi-fi and lay on the
divan.

The situation required some thought. There was plenty of time: she was
expecting no one and Thierry would awake only if she wished it. There was
something at once intoxicating and distressing about this absolute power that
she now wielded over this man, unbeknownst to the entire world... including to
the man in question.

She recalled her first attempt to learn hypnotism. She had enrolled in an
extension course at the University of Nanterre, but candidates were required
to submit to hypnosis themselves and Bret had been found devoid of moral
instincts: it would have been dangerous to teach her hypnotism. She had taken
some pride in this diagnosis: indeed she couldn't care less for "their"
morality! And some months later she had had her revenge: a less scrupulous
psychologist friend had agreed to train her in the art of Mesmer.

Should she have scruples now? Apart from the excitement she promised herself -
excitement was Bret Blade's chief goal in life - she was convinced that
hypnosis could serve to liberate this hung-up boy's deepest drives... If he
had yielded so easily to such a minimal display of her powers of suggestion,
did not his surrender express some deep, hidden desire?

A remote part of her mind knew this reasoning was unsound, but in Bret Blade's
philosophy was that the libido always had the last word.

Upstairs in the dark "dungeon" she removed the useless bonds and addressed the
man in a trance : "Thierry, can you hear me?"

"Yes, Madame."

"You know that my will is stronger than yours, don't you?"

"Yes, Madame."

"You know you must always obey my voice, wherever and whenever you hear it?"

"Yes, Madame."

"Now listen carefully to what I am going to say : from now on, wherever you
are and whatever you are doing when you hear me say these words "Thierry,
Thierry, quite contrary" you must come to my apartment... Do you understand?"
And she repeated several times this variant on a familiar nursery rhyme.

"Yes, Madame."

She was tempted then and there to test the virility of this new kind of slave,
but she banished the thought. This was certainly not the right time for him...
And Bret Blade herself felt suddenly endowed with immense patience; she often
mocked her dear professor's penchant for delayed gratification... and yet here
she was indulging in the selfsame vice!

"Thierry, can you hear me? Give me your telephone number."

And the dull voice complied immediately.

"Now you are to forget everything that has happened here since I shook your
hand... You do remember when I shook your hand, don't you?"

"Yes, Madame."

"You will forget everything that happened after that, won't you?"

"Yes, Madame..."

"Now stand up and follow me."

Obediently, he fell in behind her.

They were soon back in the sitting-room, standing by the divan. Bret picked up
the envelope containing the money, took the hand of the man who still slept on
his feet and snapped her fingers in front of his face.

Thierry immediately awoke.

"Then I won't keep you... Take your money..."

Slightly dazed, Thierry tried to protest, but Bret was already at his side,
grasping his arm just above the elbow, a cunning grip which a short sharp
squeeze informed him could become powerfully uncomfortable if she so wished,
and led him firmly to the door. He made no effort to resist, he was
flabbergasted and not at all sure he understood what was happening to him.

"And don't ever come back here again, I won't see you under any
circumstances." She hammered out the words harshly, barely able to choke back
her laughter. This was going to plunge her beautiful young man into a cruel
dilemma.

The door swung shut behind him and Bret leaned against it.

She was pleased with herself. There were exciting times ahead.

2

Je sais pourquoi là-bas le volcan s'est ouvert

C'est qu'hier tu l'avais touché d'un pied agile

Gérard de Nerval

Indeed, Thierry did live with his parents.

More precisely with his mother, in her comfortable appartment just east of the
Jardin des plantes.

For ten days her son had been studying for mid-term exams, and she was
worried, for he practically never left his room. This was a mother with an
advanced degree in history, a member of the Centre national de recherche
scientifique and she did not believe in cramming for exams.

But behind the locked door of his bedroom, Thierry was having a hard time
concentrating on the fat volumes of business law and his class-notes swam in
front of his eyes. He kept going over and over in his mind the lost
opportunity with Bret Blade, whose voice, eyes and lithe leather figure
haunted his restless nights.

There came a knock and the door-knob rattled. "Telephone for you, a woman's
voice... I hope you'll go out and have a little fun, you're over-doing it, you
know... Past a certain point, Cramming is counter-productive..."

"I know your theories, mom, I've got my own... Who is it?"

"I don't know... A deep, sexy voice... but a little old for you, I'd say."

The door was flung open and Thierry brushed past his pretty Eurasian mother
with an apologetic grunt and dove for the phone.

At the other end, a voice he was sure he recognised spoke his name twice
followed by a few words in English - followed by a click and a dial tone.

What did it mean? He could have sworn it was Bret Blade. But why assume he
knew English, practically his worst subject at school? Why ring off before he
could speak? And having ordered him never to darken her doorway - he still
blushed at the thought - why ring him at all? He couldn't even remember giving
her his phone number...

"So who was it?" asked his mother, joining him now in the parlour.

"Nothing... wrong number."

"What are you talking about? She asked for you by name!"

"Probably some other Thierry... It's not the most original name in the world,
you know..."

His mother took the slur without reacting.

"O.K., mom, I'm going out for some air!"

"I'm glad to hear it!" She smiled to show she wasn't fooled by his white lies.
"It will do you good, you'll see... Coming home for dinner?"

His mind was elsewhere as he took his coat out the closet. "Yes, yes, I guess
so... Well, actually I don't know... Don't wait for me..."

And he was gone.

His mother pursed her lips and went back to her computer.

His back to a café counter, staring out at the boulevard Saint-Germain,
Thierry was on the horns of a dilemma. What was he doing in this part of
Paris, less than and 100 meters from Bret Blade's apartment building? Why did
he feel this urgent need to see a woman who had banished him from her sight in
no uncertain terms? And then what was to prove it had been her on the phone?

The dull, nagging urge for the past ten days to pay another visit to the
"tart" - he clung to the degrading term as though it could erase the memory of
his ignominious retreat - had abruptly become, since that telephone call, an
imperious, irresistible desire, almost as if imposed on him from without - he
felt like a character in a Hollywood "possession" movie: if he wasn't at that
woman’s place in the next three minutes, his skull must burst!

He downed a second glass of rum, dropped a note on the zinc counter and rushed
out onto the sidewalk.

After careful thought, Bret Blade had decided to wear something quite
shocking. Despite the sway she gad gained over his mind, which she could
activate at any time and for any purpose through post-hypnotic suggestion, she
thought it would be a good idea to give this boy with the genteel upbringing a
little jolt while he was still mostly in his right mind: a leotard cut out at
the sex, soft, clinging, thigh-length boots and elbow-length gloves without
fingers, all in gleaming black latex, should certainly do the trick.

Bret's favourite material was latex; the elastic coolness of that second skin
afforded sensations like no other. At first, she meant to complete the
crackling, shiny, outfit with a skull-fitting mask, but then decided against
it; young Thierry had to accept the fact that he was dealing with a person and
not a mere abstraction of his desire. Instead, she pulled a trunk out from
under the bed and equipped herself with a long, beautifully braided, flexible
bull-whip, which she proceeded to wrap round her waist like a sash.

The doorbell rang...

For once, she used the peep-hole, and having seen that her handsome slave was
at her door, she let him ring five times. She was thrilled by the thought that
this one couldn't go away, and that if she, Bret, so desired, he would stay 
there with his finger on the button all night long.

The door opened at last and Thierry, in the throes of an incomprehensible
anxiety, hesitated: before him lay only impenetrable shadow.

"Come in little Thierry," said the throaty, unforgettable voice of Bret Blade.
"There's nothing to be afraid of..."

He stepped across the threshold almost without meaning to, heard the door
swing shut behind him. A heady mixture in his nostrils of perfume and...
rubber?... told him the woman stood close by.

"Well, go on inside!"

He could only obey, without looking back. But when, in the light of the
sitting room, he turned and saw the woman's outfit, saw the gaping sex, saw
the inviting smile, there rose up in his soul a wind of panic that proved
stronger than his desire. And he moved to leave again...

Still smiling, Bret took a step to one side and stopped him in his tracks with
an offhanded little jab to the solar plexus that doubled him up, momentarily
disabled. His will too was paralysed by a new contradiction: wanting
desperately to run away but knowing full well that this was physically
impossible and thirdly, somewhere at the back of his mind, enjoying the
knowledge of that impossibility.

Even after he had caught his breath, he stood with bowed head: somehow he knew
that he must not look at this woman. He shivered as she drew close, thrilled
to the cool touch of her finger-tips at his temples. A gentle but imperious
tug made him look up, he wanted to close his eyes but could not... before Bret
Blade's gaze stabbed into the depths of his mind.

"Fear not, Thierry, for I am pleasure, you know that... And you must do
whatever I say, mustn't you? You know you can deny me nothing..."

He tried to rebel. He knew not why but he had a deadly fear of this woman in
her obscene costume, of the hold she seemed to have over him... Yet there was
no resisting the soothing voice, the penetrating gaze...

"Yes," he finally whispered.

"Then get down on your knees... On your knees, I said... We're going to train
you... But it will be the sweetest of trainings, believe me... That's what you
want, isn't? Repeat after me : 'I want Bret to teach me all that I do not
know..."

What was the matter with him, he wondered? He felt strange, cottony, as if he
were coming down with the flu. Could he have caught a chill walking all the
way to Saint Germain-des-Près...

She was staring down at him insistently... With an effort, he lowered his
eyes.

"I want to go now," he ventured," I don't feel very well."

He felt the cool touch of her gloved hand under his chin and again he was
looking up. Her gaze drilled into his : "In here, I am the only one who says
'I want'. No, don't turn away, keep looking into my eyes, keep looking, you
cannot detach yourself from my eyes... Henceforward, only my willpower counts,
I promise you I will answer for everything!"

And suddenly everything seemed quite simple to Thierry: he understood at last
that he was not responsible for his acts nor for anything that happened to
him, that his will had fused with that of this petite, infinitely attractive
woman standing before him.

Bret saw the tension go out of his face and knew she had won a bout of psychic
arm-wrestling.

"Now down on your knees." He did as he was told, his eyes still held by the
woman's gaze. From inside his ball of cotton wool, he watch with profound in
difference as the woman unwrapped the strange sash she wore around her waist.

She bent his head back gently so that he was looking straight into her parted
lips.

"Look how pretty it is, a woman's sex... Don't you want to touch it?" So
lightly that he hardly felt it, something seemed to wrap itself around his
neck...

"You may touch it, but only with your tongue... very gently... No, not there,
higher up."

She wrapped the two lengths of whip around her gloved hand in such a way that
a half-twist would suffice cut off the air to his lungs and the blood to his
brain... She played him cunningly like a bulldog on a short leash, guiding the
awkward caresses of her brand new love-slave, jerking him back when he nuzzled
too greedily, guiding him back on target when he lost contact with erogenic
point.

Bret Blade's clitoris had soon swollen enormously.

"I've got a hard-on" she gloated ecstatically.

And yet seconds only before she peaked, Bret jerked the man's head away : she
adored coitus interruptus.

"On your feet, slave! For you are my slave, you know, you can only obey me,
you know that, don't you?"

"Yes, Madame..."

"Then follow me." She turned towards the spiral staircase, assuming the man
could only obey.

But this was to neglect one remote corner of his brain, one tiny scrap of
memory which Bret Blade still failed to control.

He began to cry pitifully and sank to his knees pleading: "No, no, no!"

She turned back, pressed his face to her resilient abdomen and stroked his
hair. "There, there, there... Are you listening Thierry? It's time to sleep,
you're going to sleep now..." She squatted and looked deep into his eyes : "I
will count to three... and you will sleep because I wish it and you must
always obey my wishes... One, two, three... sleep now."

The man's body immediately went limp and Bret laid him gently on the parquet
floor. She felt the pulse in his throat: he was in deep trance, totally cut
off from himself. A fully conscious "march to the gallows" would have to wait
for another day.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Thierry was instantly awake, feeling fit as a fiddle and wondering why those
half-gloved fingers were snapping before his eyes.

Then a beautiful face leaned down and kissed him tenderly on the lips. His
head ached a little but he was no longer in cotton-wool and, oddly enough, he
was no longer afraid - he couldn't even remember why he had been frightened
sometime in the not so distant past...

And now that he became aware of his body, he was frankly amazed at not being
afraid, for he lay on his back, entirely naked, strapped to some sort of
hospital table. "Gynecology" was the word that popped into his mind, for his
hips were raised and his legs were held in splayed suspension.

But this was only a game, he knew that: so he finally had gone back to see
that woman. He couldn't think how or under what circumstances but he felt
profoundly relieved, as though he had overcome at last some horrid taint.

He was surprised to hear himself actually crack a joke: "Getting my leg over,
am I?"

Bret Blade was pleased: her patient's "I" was back in place."

This was important to her because she had decided it was time to use her
"oyster-openers" as she called the set of dildoes in their rack on the wall.

In dealing with submissives and masochists, Bret attached great importance to
their propension and capacity for enduring impalement. She believed it was
important for men to explore their fantasy to its logical conclusion, which
for her, if not always for them, meant accepting the feminisation of their
bodies, the penetrating pelvic thrusts of an "augmented woman", a female body
outrageously masculinized with a "strap-on".

Like most of her milieu, Bret was fascinated by all forms of androgyny,
gender-bending in all its variants - to the great displeasure, incidentally,
of her "dear professor", broad-minded in many respects but still clung to
fixed gender identities, a trait for which Bret repeatedly derided him.

However, sodomising her clients and partners mattered above all to Bret
because of the complex sensations associated with this act, the pleasurable
pain of penetration, distension, and the tickling of the prostate, all
associated with the disgusting pleasures of defecation. For the feminist in
her, there was something suspicious about the sheer stoic endurance of pain:
flagellation, for example, which the male subject could experience as a
glorious virile ordeal, ultimately to be rewarded by an orgasm or, for those
with an "Omphale" at their disposal, by intercourse. But stoic male pride
rarely stood up to the sodomizing female.

In the present instance, the need for it was so self-evident that she refused
to ponder the matter further: a further shock treatment seemed clearly in
order. In the event of failure, she could always "wipe the slate clean", try a
different tack - another wonderful thing about hypnotism!

Out of the prone man's range of vision, Bret Blade clipped the corner of a
plastic sachet and spread Elbow Grease on the bare finger-tips of her right
hand. She took down one of the smaller dildoes, inserted one of the two
branches into her moist vagina and deftly fastened the straps around her hips
and thighs. She moved in between the young man's splayed legs and grasped his
sex, already quite stiff: the lubricated fingers formed a fist around the
member, moved up and down, squeezing the foreskin with a subtle rotation.
Thierry began to moan uninhibitedly and Bret was glad. Her experienced hand
slid lower, gently kneading the testicles for a while, slowly twisting the
scrotum to the very threshold of pain... The moans grew louder. Then, with the
tip of one greased index finger, she touched the rim of the anus, a circling
caress that went round the edge two, three, four times until the finger
slipped into the tiny mouth... Thierry groaned...

Gripping his throbbing sex with the other hand to distract from the
threatening potential of what lay ahead, she brought the tip of the dildo in
contact with what she surmised was a virgin ass-hole...

Purchased in Nevada, where they were made to order for a high-class brothel,
Bret Blade's dildos were quite special, designed to procure as much pleasure
to the user as to the subject to the outrageous penetration. Thanks to a
piston inside a semi-rigid air-chamber, any compression of the outer branch
caused a delightful dilation of the portion lodged in the vagina.

The tip of the rubber penis, carefully lubricated, gently began to spread the
young man's sphincter...

And then everything was spoiled: "Oh no! Not that! I'm not a faggot! Stop it,
you're hurting me, stop!"

Bret had no intention of stopping; especially as she herself was now very
excited. And this was going to be a wonderful opportunity to measure the
extent of her power over this handsome boy...

She touched a switch beneath the table and the beam of a tiny spotlight,
carefully regulated beforehand, fell precisely on her eyes as she leaned
towards the helpless torso.

All the while thrusting gently forward into the tight tunnel of flesh, she
laid her cool latex palm on the feverish brow and set about reactivating her
hypnotic control : "No, no, easy does it... Open your eyes and look at me, I
command you... I command you, Thierry, that's right... Trust me, you must
trust me... The pain is only an illusion, the pleasure is in the pain, the
pleasure is there... Feel it mounting inside you... Doesn't your cock feel
good in my hand? It's like mine inside your ass, can't you feel how the
pleasure is the same, our two pleasures embrace, I have you in me and you have
me in you, I have your pleasure in me, you have mine in you... Give in to the
pleasure, that is what my eyes are telling you, what my voice is telling you,
give in to the power of my eyes , the sound of my voice..."

Thierry had stopped protesting and was moaning once again. Bret was pleased
with herself... Now the dildo was in to the hilt; she shifted her hips and
applied a cunning leverage that compressed the prostate in such a way as to
increase the young man's pleasure ten-fold. He howled his consent while she
savoured the "typically male" satisfaction she derived from deflowering a man:
Bret Blade had always had a rapist's instinct.

She removed her soothing hand from his forehead and started stroking her
clitoris while the dildo nestling in her vagina swelled and shrank gently in
response to her movements. The stiff cock in her greased rubber fist was on
the verge of ejaculation, but by pressing a certain spot at the base of the
shaft, she could delay the spasms along as she wished without affecting the
erection... Now Bret herself began to moan gently, still gazing deep into her
captive's eyes... The hypnotic dimension of this fuck was brand new for her
and she wanted it to be completely successful.

And indeed, even as a wave of ecstasy swept over her, Bret Blade brought the
boy to orgasms in perfect synchronism with her own.

She lay for a while, her latex bosom pressed against the delightfully hairless
chest.

After a few minutes however, she heard a faint sobbing.

Emerging from the somnolence that had begun to overtake her, she sat up,
passed her hand before the tear-filled eyes and ordered her lover to sleep and
forget...

She detached the straps that held the slumbering man and went downstairs for
her shower.

3

"Get away, get away young man...

if you can"

Marlene Dietrich

In the weeks that followed that memorable afternoon, great was the perplexity
of Thierry's mother, Wendy. Her son was radiant, his cramming less frantic and
his examination results were honourable. She deduced that there was a
relationship of cause and effect between her new-found domestic harmony and
the regular calls her son received from an older woman.

This was all she knew.

But she was not in the habit of prying into her Thierry's affairs of the
heart, nor did she endorse bourgeois prejudices regarding sex between the
generations.

On the one hand, then, there was Wendy, happy in her blissful ignorance, and
on the other Bret Blade, happier still in her sinful omniscience.

And between them, there was Thierry...

What exactly did he know? What did he think he knew? Was he happy?

Most of all, Thierry was confused... Oh, happy enough, but very confused. He
was like someone who regularly dreamed lurid erotic dreams but who, upon
waking, had only the foggiest recollections. And yet he suffered not at all
from this partial amnesia: through increasingly refined techniques of
suggestion, Bret had been able to ensure that never again would her lover have
to cross the threshold of anxiety.

Thierry knew he visited "that woman" rather often, but what happened while he
was with her remained swathed in strange clouds of forgetfulness.

As for Bret Blade, never had she felt so satisfied sexually.

She had known for many years that she preferred relationships with men to whom
she had nothing to say : the cultural gap that lay between her and the
beautiful males she picked up at random during her long holidays in the
tropics was a source of the subtlest pleasures. The fact was that she enjoyed
the mother-son rapport implicit in her cultural superiority. And yet her
globe-trotting had made Bret deeply anti-racist; she knew the illusory nature
of Western arrogance and her own brusque mothering was free of contempt. But
the economic power wielded by any tourist in the Third World was precious to
her perverse libido, for it cast her in the exciting role of "john" to the
impoverished local males.

Her "professor" liked to point out that this preference for unsophisticated
lovers was also part of the "macho side" of his "mistress". And of course it
was Bret Blade's cold-blooded profligacy which most excited him; and which
reconciled him, as well, with the often intimate proximity of that body he
would never possess. if the professor cast aspersions on her Don Juanism, it
was to exorcise the jealousy he couldn't help feeling in the presence of her
handsome lovers. Bret knew all this and sometimes took pleasure in imposing
her lovers as a subtle moral torture on the old man - when they were on
holiday together, for example. But she also knew he was right: beneath her
glamorous exterior, she was a true tomboy.

The jealous reflexes of the men and women who had received from Bret favours
of any sort, weighed heavily on her. If she still could enjoy the company of
"her professor", it was because he had his jealousy pretty much under control,
so long as the Other was kept "off-screen", as he had once put it. For at the
end of the day, he knew that his relationship with Bret Blade was of a
different nature, that he belonged to the small circle of people she could
talk to.

Moreover, the suffering caused by a brief encounter on the stairs, for
example, or a gathering of Bret's friends, was more than compensated for by
the professional services she would occasionally grant him... sessions which
were are all the more divine as he always paid her normal fee and became, for
an afternoon, one of her johns, with all the wonderfully cruel detachment this
implied on the part of the dominatrix. "Leopold" had come to believe that the
financial transaction between mistress and slave was as important as that
between analyst and patient; if an Omphale "under contract" could provide
these same services for her husband or lover without charge, a professional
like Bret was an independant worker, and the gift of a session would be tinged
with resentment and guilt.

Bret drew material benefit from this sophisticated reasoning, but also
actually enjoyed her sessions with her "Leopold". A tomboy indeed since
earliest childhood, she had always loved to fight. Thus, the martial games
that "Leopold" alone among her clients requested, those sublime moments of
which he cherished for weeks the bone-bruises, strained tendons and other
painful sequels, amused her sincerely: this was a much better way of working
out her aggressions than complicated sessions with pernickety masochists
oblivious to her own desires.

But of course, such exercises with a greybeard, however agile he still
remained, were not to be compared with the pleasures of sex, and since Thierry
had come into her life, Bret had always found a pretext to put the old man
off. "Leopold" could only champ at the bit and derive whatever comfort he
might from his roles of cultural companion and cleaning boy.

Her hypnotic skills had enabled Bret Blade to turn Thierry into the ideal
lover. Besides his height and beauty, sine qua non requisites in a partner for
our heroine; naturally tender and considerate, he had now been relieved of his
complexes and his memories... and had thus become the reincarnation of Alfred
Jarry's Supermale, always ready to start again, or pause, to go along with
Bret's wildest whims or go home without a whimper. He was loving or
indifferent, absent or present at her bidding, he was a fantasy of flesh and
blood . For Bret Blade had long ago settled to her own satisfaction the great
debate among feminists: yes, women fantasised, too... unless this too was her
macho side!

She couldn't believe how happy she was. Nor could she really feel any guilt
about what she had done: she was certain that this involuntary catharsis, for
a man who was naturally timid and repressed, was deeply therapeutic (she had
learned from his lips that his studies had greatly improved).

Bret had always been aware that her relations with her customers often had a
therapeutic value. Precisely because of the role that money played in her
encounters, she had concluded, long before she met the professor, that her
work was comparable to an analyst's, and had herself read Freud and his
disciples assiduously.

With her successive lovers, on the contrary, those consequently who did not
pay, she had to admit that even at the height of passion, there were too many
misunderstandings, too many frustrations: male pride and possessiveness, so
prominent among the men she was drawn to, often enter into conflicted with her
professional commitments; and their frequent narcissism, their recessive
machismo, tallied even less with Bret's perverse desire to dominate and
feminise her partners.

None of these problems arose with Thierry, whom the magic wand of hypnotism
had freed of both ego and superego.

Bret had often made love, by preference or by necessity, with a man in
bondage. The situation could be exciting, but the man's performance always
left much to be desired: she had come to the conclusion that there was nothing
like a man in full possession of his physical capacities. Which was
delightfully true of Thierry... but who at the same time was in total bondage,
confined to the spatio-temporal limits chosen by her, bound more tightly than
by any manacles, ropes, or other restraining devices. A situation which
increased ten-fold for Bret the sensations she had taught her pupil to
dispense.

With Thierry, she had been able to undertake in-depth education as never
before with a partner. By now he knew all the secrets of her body, surfaces
and recesses alike, his fingers, lips and tongue had acquired a thorough
command of the subtlest sources of pleasure. By contrast with all those men
she had had to accept more or less as they were, she'd been able to implant in
Thierry a wonderful patience, a woman's patience. She liked to refer to her
lover as "Monsieur Venus" in tribute to his creator, Rachilde, the most
perverse woman novelist of her time and the only woman, it is said, to have
possessed the inhibited Alfred Jarry, a "supermale" in her bed perhaps, but
never elsewhere, it would seem. Perhaps she too had used hypnosis, Bret
wondered.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that Bret was wholly unambivalent about
the perfect love-making of her male robot. But never would she allow such
thoughts to undercut her hedonism. Lazing on her silk sheets of an afternoon,
it was sheer bliss to abandon herself to the dainty thrills afforded by the
young man's tongue on certain erogenic points on the soles of her feet, which
Bret had learned to locate in the Orient and had taught to her "android."
Touching these spots with his tongue, the entranced young man who could hardly
remember at such moments that his name was Thierry, could infallibly bring his
mistress to climax, delaying or precipitating the spasms in accordance with
the subtle indications that her sharp nails traced on his tender scalp...
"Spaced out" though he always was in his goddess' presence, he felt pride at
being able to serve her so well...

"Android" indeed... At such moments, Bret fantasized herself in a sci-fi
movie, and was keenly aware of the extent to which the pleasure making her
gently moan, was due to the dehumanisation of her servant. Sometimes,
fleetingly, the notion brought a wind of panic blowing through her mind. But
the mere thought of the absolute power she exerted over her handsome Thierry
so moved her that her ecstasy would overflow, swilling down the scuppers of
her conscience.

Bret had undertaken to enlarge her lover's anus - she could only love a man
who was truly "open" - by making him wear, day and night, in class, in the
library, at his mother's dinner table or in his own bed, hard rubber plugs
that grew bigger as the weeks wore on. The results were already so appreciable
that he had graduated to her fattest dildo. She had ordered the larger sizes
from Las Vegas and had thought of organising a "fist-fucking" party with a
few close friends. Considering Thierry's violent homophobia in his waking
state, she said to herself that this would be the acid test of her thrall.

This euphoria lasted for several months. Bret had even ventured to take her
slave - a denomination that seemed increasingly inappropriate - to some of the
S&M parties with their democratic mix of jet-set swingers and single men or
couples "of the people", for whom the price of admission represented as a much
as a week's wages.

Thierry's avid docility at the end of a leash, his beautiful body strapped
into a harness, his fine features encased in a black leather hood - however
reckless her nature, Bret knew this incognito was a wise precaution.

But alas...

All good things must come to an end.

One evening before a club party, some friends gathered at her place and a few
joints were passed around. Whence, no doubt, Bret Blade's fatal mistake.

It was indeed because of her immoderate taste for Canabis that she threw
caution to the winds. For the first time, she allowed herself to exhibit her
hold over her lover in public, thinking to disguise it as demonstration of
strength.

"I want to show you what my Thierry can do!" she announced giddily.

On tiptoes next to her lover, always slightly dazed in her presence (a
condition which her friends presumably set down to liquor or dope), Bret
whispered into his ear what appeared to be a few "sweet nothings", but which
immediately plunged him into a deep trance.

Did the guests see his eyelids droop, did they see him fall asleep on his feet
? Bret didn't think so... they were already much too high.

But she had forgotten "her professor", who had finished the washing-up and a
other little chores and who now sat discreetly in one corner of the room.

"Leopold" never went to the clubs. Bret had never thought to invite him and he
was not apparently desirous of it. Those soirées were open only to people
wearing leather, latex, vinyl or other "fetish" materials. And Leopold, though
he love observing or touching women who dressed thus (he had derived immense
pleasure from talcing the inside of the black and white striped rubber sheath
dress that his mistress wore that evening), the idea of wearing such clothes
himself was deeply repugnant to him. In any case, his dancing days were over
and he much preferred the dying art of jazz to the loud, monotonous sounds
that appealed to the in-crowd.

However, until such time as the little party of blasé homosexuals, middle-aged
submissives and beautiful young professionals set out for some club, there he
still sat, conscientiously puffing on the joint when it came round to him.
"Leopold" was a great hasch-lover - he claimed it helped him write his obscure
papers on Indo-European languages - and Bret, generous to the point of
proselytism when it came to almost anything illegal, had become his regular
"connection", sparing the timid man face-to-face meetings with the dealers.

If, as she was preparing Thierry for his performance, Bret Blade had been able
to observe the expression on her "old Leopold"'s face, she would perhaps have
known that he alone understood what she was doing, had uncovered the secret of
that strangely preoccupied, remote lover, had guessed that her hold over the
handsome Eurasian was not a matter of propinquity alone.

She would perhaps have known too how horrified he was, or pretended to be,
though in fact moral indignation at what he saw merely offered itself as an
alibi he could at long last use to justify, for once, the jealousy he choked
back whenever Bret took a new lover.

Unfortunately for her, and ultimately for her professor, Bret saw nothing of
all this.

She was busy with a demonstration familiar to music hall hypnotists:
whispering to her subject to stretch out his arms and stiffen his muscles, she
chinned herself on his arm, hung there for long seconds and then invited her
guests to follow suit... There was astonishment all round.

"See how strong he is, my Thierry?... For a submissive..."

She laughed and stroked his erection through the tight latex trousers she had
bought for him, all the while kissing him inside the mouth with her tongue.
Now she whispered in his ear again and Thierry sat down at once, gazing into
space... Bret stroked his forehead and spoke quietly to him... Her guests were
gathering their effects to leave and none of this seemed unusual between
lovers.

As always, "Leopold" took his leave as discreetly as he could: Bret made it a
point of brushing her lips affectionately against his cheek - she was actually
very fond of her professor. And yet this evening, even allowing for the dope,
he didn't seem quite himself.

A few days later, Bret mislaid her address book.

It was the professor who found it tucked behind a cushion on the divan.

That very evening, the telephone rang in the apartment where Thierry lived
with his mother.

It was Wendy who picked up the phone.

The voice at the end of the line was that of a cultivated, mature man. The
caller apologised for not giving his name, and then went on to tell her things
that made her jaw drop:

"Madame, I must warn you that your son is in great danger. He has fallen under
the influence of a highly perverse and extremely dangerous woman possessed of
certain hypnotic powers who has subjugated Thierry's mind and made him her
sexual plaything. When he is with her, Thierry is unaware of what he is doing
and she forces him to participate in... intimate activities which I can only
leave to your imagination but which should make you fear for your son's mental
well-being. I advise you to take him away from Paris immediately and put him
in the hands of specialists..."

"But who are you, sir?"

"I, for my sins, am her friend."

And he rang off, the Good Samaritan.

Wild as this laconic tale was, it upset Wendy all the more as she believed
every word of it. During these months when her son had seemed so happy, had
worked so hard, displayed such tender filial feelings, though unable to put
her finger on anything, she had been occasionally assailed by doubts. Today it
was almost a relief to dredge up those fleeting uncertainties and convince
herself she had always known he wasn't in his right mind.

But she was also ashamed to realise that if she had repressed her fears so
successfully, it was mostly because she was someone who did not want to be
bothered. She had her work, her friends, her lovers. So long as her son seemed
all right on the surface, self-servicing as it were, she wanted only to
rejoice. It had been in her interest to ascribe those occasional fits of
dazedness to "puppy love"...

This fragile fiction had just come down with a crash.

She picked up the phone and dialled the number of an old friend, the head of a
psychiatric ward at Sainte-Anne hospital.

Bret Blade had been in London for a few days, for an illustrated article on
the Hallowe'en party at the Hammersmith Palace, where she was of course a
high-profile celebrant, as well.

She sniffed eight or ten lines of coke, danced til dawn, exposed three rolls
of high-speed film and took some notes. She stayed in the Mayfair apartment of
a transsexual friend who plied the same trade as she, participated in a
session with a submissive who turned out to be an MP incognito. Her share of
the fee would just about pay her expenses, since the S&M magazine that had
commissioned the article was notoriously poor.

Back in Paris, she picked up the phone to summon her lover.

As often happened, it was the mother who answered.

"Good morning, Madame, may I speak to Thierry, please?"

But this time, the woman wasn't gracious at all.

"No, Madame, not today or any other day... I do not know who you are and for
the moment I do not care to find, but do I know what you have done to my
son... Your friend told me the whole story... At this very moment, Thierry is
out of the country and in the care of specialists who do not despair of one
day curing him of your ascendancy... I am not the sort of person who enjoys
dealing with the police, nor do I relish scandal, but if you ever dare ring
here again, you will be in deep trouble... Adieu, Madame!"

For several hours, Bret Blade remained utterly stunned. How could this have
happened?

"Your friend told me the whole story."

And she remembered the incident of the "mislaid" address book.

For a week, Bret stayed shut up in her apartment, seeing neither friends nor
johns, taking for sole nourishment cups of smoked tea and an occasional
spoonful of cold brown rice... She wandered about the small apartment,
fingering various mementoes, chain-smoking joints until her supply ran out.
She didn't answer the phone and listened unheeding to the messages that came
in, unsurprised that her "dear professor" 's voice was not among them.

Never had she suffered so greatly from a loss.

Never had she felt such hatred.

On the evening of the eighth day, her decision was taken.

The following morning, she rose early, took a pair of scissors and gave
herself a brutal crew-cut. She had lost weight and her face was gaunt: she
felt a grim satisfaction at the death's head she saw in her mirror.

In a light-headed dreamlike-state, she went down to the underground car-park
where she kept her old Mercedes.

Soon she was headed for the Porte de Clignancourt.

Half an hour later, she had turned off the autoroute du Nord and was driving
along a deserted country road at a leisurely pace. The weather was dark and
foul. It suited her mood.

It took her four hours to find the place she had remembered from a holiday
weekend in the region years before: in the centre of a fallow field, stood an
old stone well.

Back in Paris, she called on her dealer, bought ten grams of coke. In a
speciality shop in the twelfth arrondissement, she made a stranger
acquisition: 60 metres of strong, light cord which the clerk assured her would
support up to 100 kilos "dead weight."

The expression elicited from his customer an enigmatic smile.

She immediately drove back to the field she had found and did not get home
till late. For once, she parked her car on the street: she would be up before
the meter-maids.

She lay awake all night, sniffed a few lines of coke and did some limbering-up
exercises.

At six AM, she put on her leather cat-suit - the very outfit in which she had
met the man whom she now mourned and whose name she no longer allowed to cross
her mind. But this time she wore soft black flat-soled boots not unlike those
worn by wrestlers. Finally, she selected a long black wool hooded cloak,
fashionably slit to the waste, pulled on driving gloves with cut-off fingers,
and went down to her car.

Bret wore no makeup this morning. In the mirror on the back of the sunshade,
the tight mouth was like a knife, the dark hollow eyes like twin
revolver-barrels.

4

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

In the tiny attic apartment he occupied not far from les Halles and which
still attested to the exquisite taste of his late wife, the retired professor
whom Bret had christened Leopold in honour of his noble predecessor, was sound
asleep when the doorbell rang.

He switched on his reading lamp, found his glasses between an uncapped tube of
Vaseline and a rumpled issue of Le Monde diplomatique, and peered in amazement
at the alarm clock: who could be calling at ten minutes to seven?

He pulled on a bathrobe, couldn't find the second slipper and trudged barefoot
over the freezing red tiles to the front door. Instinctively spurning the "law
and order" paranoia of the day, he refrained from challenging his caller
through the thickness of the door. But before opening, he did swing the
safety-catch in place.

In the brief glimpse he had before the time-switch plunged the landing in
darkness, he failed to recognise the slender, hooded silhouette that stood
there.

But the voice from the shadows was Bret Blade's: "Good morning, Leopold...
Hurry up and get dressed, I'm taking you to the country, we're going to have
fun and games... I want to play with you today, you're really going to get
your rocks off... And there's no charge!"

He didn't know what to reply.

Yet as always, when Bret Blade gave an order, a Leopold could only obey
unthinkingly. He shut the door, released the catch and admitted into his home
the woman whom he both worshipped and feared more than any other being. He
hadn't dared get in touch since his... "justified treachery" which he had come
to regret almost at once and which he knew was irreparable.

Bret's behaviour was impenetrable. She went to the kitchen and turned on the
coffee-maker, set to start an hour later.

"Come on, hurry up, I'm making your coffee..."

He dressed in haste, not knowing what to think of this unprecedented - and
unutterably exciting - visit. Had she found out what he had done? There was
nothing in her attitude to suggest that she had... But why this extraordinary
transformation? He scarcely recognised her.

"You've cut your hair," he ventured when they were settled on the comfortable
leather seats of her Mercedes.

"I wanted a change" was the laconic answer. Bret turned the key and with a
discreet cough, the powerful engine began to purr. As she put her foot on the
accelerator, Bret saw that her companion was staring at the leather-clad leg
revealed by the slit in her cloak.

"You see, I'm dressed just the way you like... even the cut-off gloves... This
is your day, Leopold, you won't be disappointed... Out in the country, we'll
have plenty of room to play..."

Abruptly reaching over and feeling his crotch, she verified the effect
produced on the old man by her fetishised body and a few suggestive words ...
as always.

"Today, I promise you that hard-on will never go down..." in an all- but
inaudible voice.

The ageing professor's mental disarray could be read on his features, but he
was far too aroused to ask any questions: the suspense, even though he'd begun
to suspect it might prove fatal, only added to his excitement.

Bret drove as she always did, in silence and with a rally-racer's economy of
gesture: at this time of day, outward-bound traffic was thin. After less than
half an hour on the autoroute, she took the Chantilly exit, for the third time
in 24 hours.

Another thirty minutes and they were in farm country.

It was now broad daylight, but a thick winter fog lay over the fields. And
already for many kilometers, there had been no sign of life.

The Mercedes turned into gravelly road that seemed to lead nowhere, finally
coming to rest at the edge of a fallow field, not far from an old stone well.

"Pretty here, don't you think? Especially in the fog... Get out Leopold, let's
go play, I can't wait to play with you...

Despite the professionally sexy promise in her voice, the old man hung back.
All this was too bizarre...

Bret stripped off her cloak and stood there by the car, her serpentine body
encased from throat to toes in the black leather suit. She looked at him
intently through the raised glass; her faint, knowing smile told of her
confidence in power she wielded over him wearing leather gear. Her body thus
bedecked was bait he could not resist.

"Come on, Leopold... It's fun to improvise, don't you think? I needed a
change. Don't disappoint me..."

All resistance vanquished, he got out of the car.

" Take off your coat, it's not as cold as all that, and the exercise will keep
us warm!"

He did as he was told, just as he was in the habit of doing ever since he had
so gratefully accepted Bret Blade's thrall. Carefully folding the coat, which
had just come back from the cleaners, he lay it on the back seat of the
Mercedes. When he stood up and turned back, Bret was already several meters
away, in a field of alfalfa, performing the slow Tai Chi exercises which had
always fascinated him on their country holidays, but which he had never seen
her do in fetish clothes: the effect on his glands was devastating and he
stood transfixed, oblivious to the cold, oblivious to all but the weaving
leather figure whose graceful moves prefigured, he knew, the deadly combat
techniques which held no secret for Bret Blade.

The black serpent smiled at him from afar and he walked towards it, fascinated
as the proverbial rabbit.

Yet deep down inside he knew these would be no ordinary games.

He now saw that she was wearing a thin belt with a discreet black pouch that
he had never seen before.

She observed the direction of his gaze.

"What's in there, you're wondering... A surprise! Presents for my Leopold...
You'll see in a bit... Let's warm with a little tuy shoo " Once again he
thrilled at her singing pronunciation.

"You push first..."

He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed as she had taught him to do.
Supple as a stripling, she bent back at the waist, used his momentum to sweep
his arms aside and somehow grip his wrists with those disconcertingly powerful
fingers, and in such a way that he found his arms suddenly crossed and locked
at the elbows, an incapacitating hold which he knew by heart but never tired
of enduring... precisely because he could never prevent her from applying it
or escape from it once she had completed her magical move.

But as she often did, just to tease him, she spared him the deft footwork that
would throw him to the ground and instead released him.

"Come on, once more!" Again the ritual push, and this time she pushed back and
made as if to hook the back of his ankle with the edge of her foot. Though it
had only been a feint, he dropped to the ground in anticipation, hoping to
soften his on the frozen sod.

But she had him by the lapel: "On your feet, Leopold! We only fall down when
Bret want us to fall!"

But as soon as he had regained his balance, Bret Blade stepped quickly
forward, entwined her shapely calf around his leg and this time he did fall,
quick and hard, back stiff and arms flailing, right square on his tail-bone,
as always. That was quite deliberate, she had once explained, a matter of
careful leverage. It hurt him a lot but he was so excited that he managed to
stifle a cry of pain. Enacted for the umpteenth time, it was a ritual that
never failed to enflame his senses and overwhelm his mind.

"On your feet, hurry up... Come at me from the side, now..." He did as he was
told and she slid through his grasp as she invariably would do and this time,
when his arms were crossed and forcefully locked, she hooked his ankle
sharply. He fell and she fell with him. He landed heavily on his back with the
woman straddling his heaving chest. Lightly gripping his twisted wrists, she
held him utterly powerless, crossed elbows locked, forearms jammed under knees
that seemed to stare at him like twin warheads of black leather.

"I could break your arms like matchsticks, would you like me to do that?"

He dared not answer but merely smiled up at her with infinite gratitude. She
leaned forward dangerously, pressing down on the helpless arms, eliciting a
shriek of fear and pain from her willing victim. Then she released him, leapt
agilely to her feet and waited for him to follow suit : "Now for some muy thai
... I just love to kick."

She spun a dizzying 360° and the ball of her rigid foot landed with moderate
force on his unprotected kidney. He cried out melodramatically and "put up his
dukes" in a gesture of self-parody. She was beginning to work up steam, and
"Leopold" was pleased to see her excitement grow, as it always did when they
played together... with perhaps, this morning, an extra shade of
agressiveness.

She swept aside his outstretched arms, feinted an elbow-strike to the jaw and
then, spinning like a ballerina again, flattened with a kick behind the knee.

He lay there, a smile of beatitude on his face: "Ah, Bret Blade and her
devastating skills! I am putty in your hands! You are so good to me, dear
mistress! "

"Yes, aren't I?" said she, and her tone was ambivalent. She stood towering
over him with folded arms. "Much too good, no doubt... Come on Leopold, up you
come, we've only just begun..."

He scrambled to his feet. Her arms were dangling loosely at her sides now, and
she was staring at him oddly. He stood waiting for her next exciting move, but
she took longer than usual to resume their play.

Then without warning she struck again...

And this time he knew it wasn't a game.

The blow was not in itself spectacular, she cuffed him with the heel of her
open hand high on the chest, just under collar-bone and instantly he realised
the blow was no a random strike at random, for its consequences were
spectacular indeed: his whole body was racked with a violent fit of coughing
which seemed as though it would never end. So debilitating was the suffocation
induced by what had not been a specially a violent blow, that he sank to one
knee, choking and retching... What had the woman done to him?

Bret Blade watched him suffer for several long minutes, a look of cold
satisfaction on her face. When the coughing began to subside, she spoke again,
calmly, almost gently but her flatly technical explanation contained a note of
sadistic hatred he had never heard :

"That was a qin na strike, Leopold, and it was right on the button, wasn't it?
The quihu cavity is on the stomach meridian, but as you are experiencing, it
is the respiratory system which is affected... If I had hit you with all my
strength you would have choked to death by now. But that would be premature.
Leopold, I have a score to settle with you, and you know it..."

As she spoke these words, she had moved behind the crouching man, who was
coughing less violently now and was trying to get back on his feet. She put
her left arm around his shoulders, an almost comforting gesture, as if to help
him up. He could smell the pungent dour of black leather and the old
excitement returned. But then her gloved hand slid forward and clamped onto
his collar bone like the talon of some fierce bird of prey.

"Leopold" shrieked with terror as much as pain, for this bizarre grip had
inexplicably paralysed his whole upper body.

"Effective, isn't it? Do you what qin na means in Chinese? 'The art of seizing
and controlling'. You didn't know about these little tricks of mine, did you?"
She reveled in his powerlessness, pulled him effortlessly to his feet and
dropping into to a strong "horse" position, butted her knee against the
insides of his thighs back of his legs and pulled him backwards, off his
balance, with his legs spread apart.

Then, quite unexpectedly and for the second time that morning, she touched the
bump in his trousers.

"I see you're still enjoying this... Good for you, I want you to enjoy this
Leopold, I really do... And it will make it easier for me to operate... Look,
Leopold, this is called an "Eagle beak".

And she held up her free hand with the palm towards his face and then with
slow deliberation closed it so that the four finger-tips emerging from the
cutoff glove formed with the thumb a kind of cone. She exhibited for several
seconds what the professor and immediately recognised as some unusual
body-weapon. It vanished from his sight but soon he felt her hand between his
legs, this time delicately probing the tender muscles between distended
scrotum and sweating anus. The terrified man's brain fought with his body to
ward off the blow he knew was coming, and which he sensed be no ordinary
blow... but fought to no avail. The vice-like grip on his collar-bone kept
both arms hanging numb and weak at his sides. Off his balance and with his
feet wedged apart by some mysterious footwork, he could not even press his
thighs together.

Bret Blade cocked her arm back several times, checking her target as she
inhaled deeply once, twice, three times, concentrating all her energy, all her
chi , in the tips of her bunched fingers. Then a burst of breath "han!" as she
struck at the vital point she had located so precisely in the man's groin a
short, vicious, dagger-like stab.

A wail of horror an anguish rose from the depths of the old man's throat. The
woman released her pincer-hold on his shoulder, stepped back and gently
lowered the suddenly shivering body to the ground. Then she stepped back and
stood where he could see her, hands on hips and smile of incommensurable
cruelty on her lips. Having recovered the use of his arms, the professor was
nursing his outraged groin and moaning pitifully.

"I expect that put paid to your hard-on... In fact you I expect don't feel
very well at all now, do you?... Well, let me explain what I have just done to
you... You love technical explanations, I know you do, they turn you on,
you're a voyeur of the martial arts whereas I am an accomplished
practitioner... It's my "macho side" as you would say... That tender part of
your anatomy which I just hit is called the huayuin cavity, it is a very
important centre for the interaction of the yin and the yang. The effect of
such a blow is to perturb the ebb and flow of chi..." She kneeled beside him
and stroked in forehead; he felt soothing touch of leather. "Oh, Leopold, I
know you don't believe all that about the yin and the yang and the chi...
Nonetheless, you have exactly 24 hours to change your mind on that and many
other matters, for that is the time it will take you to die from the blow I
have just dealt you... Nothing can save you now, there is no cure, no surgery,
nothing and you know me Leopold, I never lie... My qin na master finally
consented to teach me that blow after 48 hours of sex as only Bret Blade can
provide it...

She leaned closed and fairly hissed: "I could have killed you instantly...
like this for example..." and she seized his wrist, raised his left arm and
thrust two stiff fingers deep into the arm-pit : "Fatal heart attack
guaranteed..." Or like this" and she slapped him sharply on the top of the
head with the palm of her gloved hand. "A certain hard slap here upsets the
chi as well, but it's the wrong time of day. "

With these words, there appeared a glimmer of incredulity and perhaps even of
hope in the eyes of Bret's "dear professor."

"Sceptical? Think maybe I'm having you on? I just want to frighten you? Well,
what if I tell you that a blow to the huayin cavity is fatal for only three to
four hours after the subject wakes up. Which was why I dragged you out of bed,
I absolutely wanted to kill you with that technique, I wanted you to have a
slow, sure death, and have time to think about me and the wrong you have done
me. And I know it works : I used it on a burglar in Bangkok one night, just to
see..."

Only then did the professor's predicament come home to him, only then did he
realise the fantasy was real this time, and he shouted for help, weakly at
first, then louder and louder.

Bret stood up, an evil smile on her face.

"What's the matter Leopold, doesn't my expertise turn you on any more?" She
bent over and seized one of his ankle bones between thumb and finger in a way
that hurt terribly, whipped it into the air and twisted his foot in such a way
that he could only roll helplessly over on his belly. "There's no one anywhere
near to hear you, but I don't want to run the risk of letting you have a soft
death in hospital... And I have no intention of going to jail..."

She crossed his legs, folded his feet into the small of his back and sat on
his shins: again he was helpless and her hands were free. So were his, but in
this position, they were useless against her.

All he could do was scream for help.

Bret unzipped the pouch at her waist and took out a thin tube of glass,
uncorked it and drew forth a hair-thin acupuncture needle. One light
finger-nail explored the nape of the hated man's neck: "You didn't believe
much in acupuncture, either, did you? Well, this point here - feel it - is
called yamen , the "Gate of silence"..."

With delicate accuracy, she drove the needle a few millimetres into the flesh:
instantly the man's shouts were cut off.

"So you see, acupuncture does work: speechless at last, you old chatterbox. ."
He reached back desperately with his right hand, searching for a needle he
could scarcely feel... Brett chuckled and an open-handed chop on first one
then the other biceps left his arms quite limp.

From her little bag of tricks, she now drew a metal gadget that looked like
miniature stocks with ratchet locks. She held it out for him to see: "Look up,
Leopold, and see what I have for you: the cute little thumb-cuffs you brought
me back from New York when we first knew one another. I'm giving them back to
you now, Leopold, giving them back forever..."

Then came sharp twists of his wrists, as she clamped his thumbs into the cold
steel rings, with ratcheting clicks that brought still more pain.

She stood up then and he regained the use of his legs and rolled over to look
at her. The leather cat-suit was suddenly ominous for real, and the old man
felt his loins stirring. "Get up Leopold, you're not staying here... You can
still walk, you'll be surprised... Someone who's been hit like that and
doesn't know what's happened to him, may well walk home and die in bed, it's
one of the advantages of that little trick... No dead bodies lying about!"

A particularly vicious twist of the earlobe forced him to his feet... and Bret
had the satisfaction of observing that his screaming produced no sound at all.

"Do you see that old well over there, that pretty stone well? You're fond of
old stones, aren't you, Leopold? Well, that's where we're going, so get a move
on..." And she kneed his buttocks, another calculated strike on the edge of
his pelvis which sent an electric shock up his spine and doubled him up.
Instantly, steel fingers wound themselves into his thinning hair with a
practice grip that prevented him from standing upright; she yanked him
forward, and to keep his balance he could only waddle along at her side like a
bad boy punished by a wicked governess.

"You've always told me you were tired of living, Leopold, that since the death
of your wife you feel as if you're just waiting for the Grim Reaper... And
here she is... I am your executioner! Doesn't it excite you just a little when
you think back on what I've done to you in the last few minutes? Come on, a
little effort of the imagination! Admit I've been extraordinarily good to you,
I've made your supreme fantasy come true... you're about to die at the hands
of a beautiful martial artist in black leather." And she chortled
sympathetically...

They had reached the brim of the well. She manoeuvred her captive around,
allowed him to straighten up, then deftly used this momentum to bend him back
over the waist-high stone lip. It was then that she saw the tears in his
eyes... She had a moment's hesitation, quickly dismissed with the recollection
that he was already as good as dead, that nothing could reverse the effects of
the blow she absolutely did not regret having administered.

The wooden drum and its handle were old but the cord wound around it was brand
new and the iron ratchet-brake had recently been greased.

She slipped one end of the cord under her victim's arms and around his chest,
and set about tying a slip-knot. The professor made one last desperate effort
to resist: his feeble kick was the first attempt he had ever made to hurt Bret
Blade... or any woman.

Bret parried the kick with scientific grace and a taunting laugh, trapped both
ankles with steel fingers, probed delicate tendons with her thumbs, found the
vital spot... and drilled. The professors legs fell limp.

"Xuehai," said the singing voice, "on the meridian of the spleen... Your
lesson in qin na will have been very thorough, Leopold..."

She felt suddenly almost light-hearted, with perhaps a touch of hysteria. She
drew the slip-knot tight acros his chest and stepped back to let the helpless
man have one last glimpse of the leather-cased body which had always filled
him with joy.

At this precise moment, a more generous temptation passed through Bret Blade's
mind: after all, she could take a few more minutes to hypnotise this man. With
no risk to herself, his death could be made quite painless. But this very
evocation of her hypnotic powers reminded her of her lost lover... and her
hatred returned with a vengeance.

She was anxious to get the thing over with now... She stooped and grasped his
trouser cuffs, toppling him over the edge of the well : he hung in the air.
She could read the terror in his eyes and it actually gave her pleasure. This
was not the first time she had killed a man but today she realised that if she
let herself go, she was capable of enjoying the experience immensely: it was
perfectly true that she had no moral sense, sadism was vital to her pleasure.

She seized the crank and began ratcheting her human burden down into darkness.
She did not want him to fall, be knocked unconscious or possibly killed, she
wanted to be sure he took full advantage of the reprieve afforded by the
trauma to his rein mie , that "vessel of conception" on which she had
"operated", grim surgeon of death - and the irony of the Chinese name made her
smile in spite of her macabre task.

The cord had almost run out when it went slack: the condemned man had reached
the bottom. Her calculation the day before with stones and a stop-watch had
proven accurate.

She pulled out the wedge held the end of the cord to the drum and it vanished
silently into the depths.

But now an irresistible curiosity - and the vague recollection of a tale by
Poe - impelled her lean over the brim and peer down... Only shadows met her
eyes.

She looked around: a discarded newspaper lay under a hedge. With unhurried
stride, she went to fetch it, twisted it into a torch on her way back at the
well. There she took a lighter from her pouch, set fire to the paper and
dropped it towards the shadows. In the light of the dancing flames, she made
out the silhouette of the man she had long believed to be her faithful friend.

"Leopold" lay on his back, and his gaze seem to meet her own... Was it her
imagination? He seemed resigned to his fate. He opened his mouth... as if to
bid her a sad, silent farewell.

She refused to let herself be moved: "There you are, Leopold... this is what
it costs to interfere in the love-life of Bret Blade... You have 24 hours to
think that over... which is to say all eternity..."

Her words still echoed down the well after the torch had burnt itself out...

Bret Blade lit a cigarette from the packet in her pouch and headed for the
Mercedes, without once looking back at the picturesque old well in a field of
alfalfa which would soon be a tomb.

As she turned the ignition key and the motor began its powerful purr, she
thought to herself she would have to find some place safe against prying eyes
to burn the overcoat that lay carefully folded on the back seat of her car.

At least that is how "Leopold" had always imagined the scene.

End of the Bret Blade's first adventure.