He threw his head back and bellowed, slapping the wretch’s defenceless bottom as he came inside her. He gritted his teeth as the tremors rocked him. As soon as they subsided, he slipped his softening prick from her, unceremoniously stuffed it back into his britches and remounted his horse. The wretch gingerly slipped off the metal toy and stood on shaking legs.
Currently there was a two-tier system for his girls: those on the periphery, sworn to secrecy and schooled in the rituals though not allowed to partake in them, except as victims if they broke any rules or conditions; and the bacchantes, his fully-fledged initiates, who lived and worshipped exactly by his code, who purified their skin and swore to do anything in his name, the more immoral and degenerate the better. The entire British Isles yielded few more than a dozen girls who had such dark hearts, such wanton souls that they would seek him out and embrace his vision of perverted nihilism. He needed more. He needed genuine victims to reward their loyalty.
He spurred on his horse and trotted out of the wood with his escort in tow. The orgy would continue in his absence, for the hunters were now crazed with desire after this show. Their reverence for him would be raging inside and they would want to demonstrate their homage through depravity. They would jostle for the chance to indulge themselves further with the initiate, and then they would fall upon each other, as if possessed.
The bushes would be alive with their gasps and cries, the sound of sex and slapping flesh. It would have been surreal and horrifying for anyone who chanced upon the scene, but this was impossible since all the lands around were privately owned, and no one would ever dare trespass. It was his secret dominion. Here he was God, and anyone who was either lured there or strayed onto these lands would feel the full force of his divinely demonic lusts. Indeed, they might never get to see the real world again, even after he was finished with them.
Mimi decided early that it was a perfect day for a picnic. She knew the perfect spot too, found just a few weeks ago when she had been out walking alone. She had been drawn off the beaten track after sighting a fox. She had tracked it through to a small clearing where she had stayed crouched behind the greying trunk of a fallen oak, watching it as it played around and pounced upon leaves and insects. It had been a magical few moments. She had felt a sudden surge of elation at this window on nature. She had seemed at one with the world, experiencing a mixture of freedom and security, cosseted as she was by the dense foliage surrounding her.
She had also felt a rather uncharacteristic urge to frolic. She had flashing images of herself stripping off right there, although such daring public naughtiness was hardly her forte. She might even have gone through with it if it hadn’t been rather too chilly that morning for whipping your bits out, especially when brush-tailed wild animals might be watching. If she had been there with someone else, though, and that someone had taken it upon themselves to ravish her, maybe forcing her over that same fallen trunk and ripping her knickers away to leave her at his mercy, why, then there would have been little she could do about it. No one would have been around to come to her aid, there would be nothing she could do to resist being plundered, maybe even spanked …
So a picnic it was, and lazy Dominic would have to play the loving boyfriend and drag his arse out of bed to accompany her, even though he had sounded so uninterested in the whole idea on the phone. He didn’t even seem to care that he would be off back to college in a few days and this would be one of their last chances to be alone for a while. Fortunately that morning the Spinster had gone off to garner the latest village tittle-tattle, giving Mimi free rein of the kitchen to prepare a picnic for two without prying eyes and uncomfortable questions. Dominic was her secret and tongues would be ceaselessly wagging if anyone knew they were an item.
Getting out of her room and having the run of that gorgeous wisteria-covered cottage was a treat in itself, however brief such moments were. She loved the place. One day she hoped to have enough money to buy just such a property within the village, but for now renting a room was a more than acceptable alternative, despite having to share with the spinster landlady. It meant a time-consuming drive to reach work in Oxford, but the quiet leafy lanes could make your heart soar with optimism when the early sun lit the green, flint-strewn fields and the beech woods behind, and brought the hedgerows alive. It had been a different story in her first winter, when any snowfall or thick ice rendered the roads impassable and forced her to exist for days off pub food or remnants in the freezer. She didn’t care though. Anything was worth it to live here. She had coveted a place in the village for as long as she could remember.
She had grown up in the nearby town where Dominic now lived. Her parents would bring the family out here for summer picnics in the glades or autumn walks amongst the copper-leaved trees. They provided many of her fondest childhood memories: colour-splashed meadows, swallows dipping and zipping over lush-cropped fields, dew-covered cobwebs amid frosty thickets, or pristine snow blankets and freezing breath. Sun or rain, it was always special. She tried to imbue her lethargic boyfriend with the same enthusiasm as they sauntered through those woods on the way to her Secret Location, but he had his standard couldn’t-give-a-fuck face on. He seemed so one-dimensional sometimes that it wearied her. How their short relationship had continued was a mystery.
He was tall and nicely muscular, and good-looking in a posh-student way. Plus he had the most delectable of pricks: slim but very long and silky-smooth when erect, which was often. It seemed to have a mind of its own. It certainly had more go than the rest of him. A few times when she was making advances he had seemed to be crying off, only to be outvoted by his own member. And once unleashed it could certainly hammer home with the best of them, even if its owner was more than a little unimaginative when it came to dirty business.
The staying power and speedy recovery rate of his young erection ensured she was never left disappointed. That was not something she had always been able to claim in the past, so it was worth clinging on to, even if the man himself could barely raise the passion to hold her hand, better still delight in the promise of the secret place she was taking him to. He could gather even less zeal for the smells and the promise of the day that were firing her, or for the snatched views across the landscape of her childhood haunts.
The timelessly pretty villages and hamlets here were dotted around the countryside, some more easily reached across the fields than by the narrow roads. To her they all seemed like miniature empires in sleeping valleys, all unique despite their close proximity, all holding their own wonderful secrets that were jealously guarded from outsiders. In more recent times these outsiders had come to populate the villages. The steep rise in house prices forced the locals elsewhere as wealthy Oxford and London commuters took over. Affluence was pervasive, but nowhere lost its ancient, deep-set notion of serfdom, of the poor locals giving service to their richer landowners. The old customs and folklore were maintained and even the new wealth could not diminish it. The newcomers simply had to absorb the traditions or suffer isolation.
Before Mimi had even moved into her room, some nine months ago, her gossip-happy landlady had shuffled her fat posterior from house to church to village hall telling anyone who wanted to know that a young journalist from the Echo was to be her new tenant. Fortunately, the Spinster also told everyone that she was a local girl, so Mimi found herself more immediately accepted than some of the London incomers would be, although she still noticed some reticence when being spoken to. She guessed she would have to live there a good many years before this wore off.
She also noticed that she became a hub for gossip. If certain blabbermouths wanted a scandal spread around they often ‘accidentally’ divulged their secret within her earshot, as if she had the power to splash it across the front pages. This didn’t bother her. Hopefully one day the local scandal might well prove to be the roots of the very story she was desperate to break, the one that did indeed make headlines and get her noticed.
She would be the first to admit that in nearly five years at the Echo she hadn’t made the impact she had intended. She was well-liked and appreciated but she suspected this was more for her prick-pleasing attributes