He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.
“Wait, love!” Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.
“I’m losing my mind,” he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.
“You’re not crazy, you’re just seeing things clearly for the first time.”
“Well I don’t want to see them.”
“Why not? Isn’t it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there’s life after death? Pleasure after death.”
“Pleasure. You call that — ” He glanced back at the Pool House, where he’d seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.
“We had no shame then. We have even less now.”
As if to prove Katya’s point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted her lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.
The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.
Aware of Katya’s gaze, Todd glanced over at her.
“Would you like to fuck her?” she said.
The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.
“She’s yours if you want her. Ava!”
The girl looked up.
“This is Todd,” Katya said.
“Hello, Todd.”
“Go on,” Katya said. Don’t worry: I’m not going to get jealous. I’d like to see how you give pleasure to a woman.”
Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava’s feet hadn’t suddenly began to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.
“Another time,” he said to Ava, moving away.
She called after him, but he didn’t look back.
“There’s plenty more where she came from,” Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. “You should go to one of them,” she said.
“Why?”
“Just to see what it’s like … ”
“Fucking a ghost?”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“I don’t know. It’s weird. I’m not sure — ”
Her hand went back to his hard-on. “Yes you are. You love the idea.”
Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd’s hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.
“Katya?”
A girl’s voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried towards Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.