The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal Read online

  That was madness, I thought, but it was as if my body and mind were separate things. I was frightened, confused and desperate to run for my life, or soul, but my prick was being called, and it seemed to intend to come.

  I felt, rather than heard, breathless grunts and groans. My mind threw up the faces and bodies of lovers I had never seen. My skin flared with the touch of fingers that weren’t there. I cried out, through fear or arousal, I could not tell which, and Simon Feximal shouted something aloud.

  Now, with my hard-won experience, I know that he had begun the Third Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual, on which he and his fellow ghost-hunter Carnacki had done such perilous research. Then, I only knew that the guttural sounds of those strange words in his deep voice boomed like a pagan gong, and the barrage of sensation was snuffed out as instantly as the candles had been.

  I gasped for breath and slumped back against his bare chest, held by that hard, unwavering grip. My legs were shaking, but my prick was still rigid as a tent pole.

  I became aware of a hard length pressing against my arse, and I realised Feximal was in the same state.

  “I think I know what it wants,” I whispered.

  “So do I.” His voice was strained. “The power of this thing… I cannot master it and protect you at once. I can hold it off a little longer. You must run to the window. Break it. Climb out. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?”

  His breath rasped hotly against my ear. “Damn it, man, you can feel what it wants. I can feel it. It is old, and powerful, and it has a way in. It is very easy for a spirit to direct the actions of the living as it desires, if…” He tailed off.

  “If the living share the same desires?” I asked.

  He stood, absolutely still and silent, holding me pinioned against him. Then he murmured, very softly, very deep, “It’s coming upon us. You really should run away.”

  I was bewildered, terrified. I was aching for his touch, for more than touch. I could hear the moaning starting again, beginning to build. And, I was not leaving a fellow human alone in this house of madness.

  “Is it evil? What it wants?” I panted.

  “No. It’s…angry, betrayed. Lonely. Frustrated. It wants satisfaction.”

  “So do I.” I leaned back against him so that my head was on his powerful shoulder, my prick, restrained by close-fitting trousers, trying to push upwards and out.

  “Robert… You can still run,” he rasped.

  “No.”

  “This will not be controllable.” His voice held clear warning, and clearer desire.

  “Please, Simon. Please.”

  Feximal—Simon—took a shuddering breath. Then his hand on my waist moved down, stroking over my arousal, pulling me hard against his hips, his own stiff prick. His other arm was wrapped over my shoulders, forearm against my throat, and he increased that pressure too.

  I was held there, trapped, in a haunted house, with a strong arm gripping my neck and a strong hand opening the buttons at my waist.

  My cock sprang free. I groaned aloud. Simon gave a little exhalation of satisfaction and took it in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the tip, spreading the dampness that already beaded there. I rubbed back against his hips in wanton invitation, and he pushed at my drawers and trousers, shoving them down, tucking my shirttails out of the way.

  “Kneel,” he ordered me, and I fell to my knees, or tried to. His arm was hard against my windpipe, and I grabbed at it, for balance or freedom, as for a second I was held off the floor by that pressure.

  He was strong as an ox, and he was going to fuck me.

  I whimpered, and he let me down to the floor so that I knelt obediently before him. I did not look round, or into the mirror, for fear that I might see what was written on that thickly muscled body now.

  Simon reached a long arm for his bag, without releasing my neck. He fumbled within, pulled out a small bottle, flicked open the stopper one-handed. I smelled an unfamiliar perfume, one that made me think of the Arabian Nights.

  He was slicking his cock, readying himself.

  I tried to bend forward, to get on hands and knees. He didn’t let me. His finger slid down the crease of my arse, his knee nudged my legs apart into a wider stance, he moved his free hand forward once more to control my hips, and his cock shoved forward into my entrance.

  I gasped aloud. I was no virgin, had had a fair few men ride my arse, but never with so little preparation. I bit my lip as he pushed again, not too far or too fast for what it was, yet it stung painfully. I shut my eyes.

  Simon pushed again, and this time my arse took the invasion with more readiness. I grunted, breathing in and out, feeling the burn recede with each breath. He rocked into me, further each time, until I made a small sound of pleasure that somehow rang out clear against the ghostly moans.

  Simon shifted his arm from my hips to my chest, encircling my own arms, hand closing over one wrist to hold my arms tight by my sides. He pushed again then, and this time he slid all the way in, thick cock stretching me wide, until I felt his hips pressed right against my entrance. I was trapped by his arms round my neck and chest, by every inch of his erect member inside me, pinioned and stuffed like a Christmas goose.

  I groaned aloud. As if in answer, Simon pulled out, slowly and carefully, till only the head of his thick member was inside me, leaving me feeling empty.

  Then he began to fuck me in earnest.

  I am no Goliath, but neither am I weak. I had never felt the urge to submit to another man’s will, let alone to force. I had always approached physical satisfaction as I did everything in those days of youth: as a pleasant game.

  This was no game. Simon held me captive. My legs were splayed, my arms trapped, and I could do nothing but groan and grunt and take the fucking he administered. I was hopelessly mastered, utterly subject to his will, and I had never been so hard in my life. I thrashed against him with a dark, unspeakable joy at the commanding usage, and as I cried my pleasure aloud, I felt something else.

  A tongue in my mouth. A pinch to my erect nipple. A hand gripping my cock.

  Not Simon’s. Not anyone else’s; we were miles from the next human being. Nobody’s, in fact, because as I opened my eyes and stared, I saw nothing but the dark and empty room.

  I shut my eyes again and felt something rub against my erection. It was, without question, a stiff prick. A hand closed around me, pushing them both together.

  “The ghost,” I gasped. “It’s touching me.”

  Simon didn’t respond. He simply lifted me slightly to change the angle, and as he drove into me now, he hit that spot that sends ecstasy leaping through a man’s flesh. I cried out for more, and he gave me more, more than I thought I could take, again and again, forcing his solid cock deep as the ghostly member thrust and twitched and jerked against mine.

  Simon came, buried in my arse, with a savage grunt as his seed spilled. I came a second later, crying out with my release. And I will swear that I felt something else, cool and silvery, splash against my belly, and as it did so, the spectral moans died away.

  I lay back against Simon as he loosened his grip—only slightly; if he had released me I would have fallen. I was shaking. He inclined his head so it rested on me, chest heaving with desperate breaths.

  When I opened my eyes, the fire burned brightly in the grate, the candles shed their merry glow and, in the mirror, the painting of Randolph, Lord Caldwell was no more than a simple picture.

  I will not detail the rest of that night. Simon tended to me with an absurd attentiveness that charmed me beyond words, until I was ready to walk the house with him to check for any evidence of further haunting, an exploration that ended inevitably in one of the more habitable bedrooms. I am pleased to report that the subsequent moans and screams that disturbed the silence of Caldwell Place were mine.

  The ghost never returned, its story concluded that frantic evening. Simon called it a case of two centuries’ coitus interruptus. One can only sympathise.

 
Butterflies

  A Note to the Editor

  Dear Henry,

  I had not intended to write more of what I find myself calling The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal. (Such is the jobbing author’s habit, to create a book out of nothing!) I told you how we met, tied up the tale, and it was done. Yet there are so many more stories, so much of my history with Simon that I should not like to disappear.

  I met him in 1894. For two decades we have been lovers, the best of friends, the bitterest of enemies. We were partners in work and in crime, of more than one sort. We have shared secrets so dark that the stories I have published in The Casebook of Simon Feximal, which you begged me to amend for the sake of readers’ weak hearts, came to seem to me almost light entertainment. For two decades, we have been everything to one another, yet to the world I am no more than the famed ghost-hunter’s friend and chronicler, witness to his deeds. In writing Simon’s stories, I have written myself out of my own life. I wonder, Henry, if you can imagine what that is like.

  I have decided. I shall write the Secret Casebook, record the truth of our lives—not Simon Feximal’s life alone, but Robert and Simon, together. It is for you to decide what to do with the tale when it is told.

  Your friend,

  Robert Caldwell

  October 1914

  It was a fortnight after my first and, so far, only meeting with Simon Feximal. He had rid my inherited house of a lustful ghost, opened my eyes to a concealed world of strange forces and arcane knowledge, and buggered me twice. The next day he had departed, with a nod of thanks and a final-sounding farewell. There was no hint of regret in his stern dark eyes. I had wondered whether to propose another meeting, but looking at that remote face, I lost my nerve.

  It was hardly unusual behaviour. Those of us who prefer the company of men know that many of those men want to leave one’s company as quickly as possible after the fact. The only dignified response is a smile and a shrug, even if one should wish for more. And Simon Feximal, with his strange air of a pagan priest, and the occult writing scrawling itself over his skin, was not a man to bother with importunities.

  I was disappointed, but not surprised. My own features—medium stature, green eyes and unimpressively brown hair—were pleasant but undistinguished. My profession as a journalist would doubtless be repulsive to a man with secrets to keep.

  I could understand his indifference to my person and forgive his dislike of my profession. What I found a great deal harder to swallow was the bill for his services.

  He did not send it. A fee for the visit had been agreed, but he was to give me a final amount depending on the work required. In the natural excitement of the moment, and the next day’s awkwardness, I had certainly not thought to request it. And it was not sent.

  I wrote to him, a businesslike note, asking for the amount due. He ignored the letter. I wrote again, and received a letter by return.

  I will admit, I had butterflies in my stomach as I opened it. I wondered if there might be a personal response. Perhaps even a suggestion that we might meet again.

  There was no such suggestion. Merely a few lines in a clear, vigorous hand, stating that there would be no charge.

  I read the note with incredulity, then dawning fury, as it came upon me with stunning force that Feximal apparently considered my services as bed-partner would suffice in lieu of payment. Whether he believed that I had been paying him by offering my body, or far worse, that he was paying me for my services by waiving his fee for his, I did not know. I did not care. I damned his eyes, the patronising swine, and sent a twenty-guinea payment that I could ill afford along with a note nicely judged to convey my sense of offence, and I resolved to be relieved that I would never see him again.

  In fact, it took ten days.

  “Get down to Winchester,” Mr. Lownie told me. He was the editor of the Chronicle then, a tense, compact man with a habit of chewing his pipe stem to splinters. “Extraordinary reports. Two deaths, against all nature. There’s a train at quarter past.”

  He pushed a paper into my hand and thrust me out of the office. I was used to this unceremonious method of briefing, and I did not so much as glance at my orders, concentrating only on the seemingly impossible feat of catching the allotted train. I ran to the Underground, fretted until I reached the station, secured my ticket, and leapt aboard the second-class carriage almost as the train drew away with the angry cries of a guard ringing in my ears.

  The carriage was empty, and I sat back in my seat, took a much-needed breath, and looked for the first time at my brief, which included two reports from the local Winchester newspaper and a transcribed statement from the local doctor. I read them with curiosity mingled with growing horror.

  It appeared that some five days ago, a young lady and her governess, taking a walk in the woods, had stumbled upon a strange discovery. From a distance it looked to be a great pile of brightly coloured paper, a vast heap of trimmings and cuttings piled into a mound some six feet long and perhaps two feet high. As they approached the peculiar sight, they realised with astonishment that it was constituted, not of paper, but of butterflies. Butterflies in their thousands, of the most extraordinary variety of hues, of species not native to England or ever seen here. The insects were all dead or dying, with barely a flutter to their wings, and the two ladies approached to look closer. Then a drift of the lovely dead things slipped to the ground, and what had seemed merely extraordinary became terrible.

  It was not simply a heap of butterflies, as if there was anything simple about such a thing in a chilly English October. The bright wings hid a corpse.

  He was Thomas Janney, Old Tom, a vagrant of the Winchester woods. Known to the police as an itinerant and a drinker, prone to foul language in his cups, but with little real harm said of him at any time these past two decades. And he was dead, face suffused with blood, skin shrivelled and dry, and inside his mouth, down his throat, in his lungs, were butterflies.

  An appalling discovery, but the passing of a tramp makes little impact on the world, however mysterious the circumstances. It was the second death that had set the news wires alight.

  This time it was a local schoolmaster, Hubert Lord. No weakling he, as unlike the broken-down wanderer as could be imagined. A young, healthy man in his twenties, he had set off into the woods for a cross-country run, as was his peculiar habit, and he had not returned. Alarmed for his safety, his young wife contacted the police, and it was not long after that his body was found, his face distorted with fear and horror, his throat crammed with butterflies.

  Where were the creatures coming from? How could two such swarms arise? Why should they kill?

  The local journalist, though his account was verbose and greatly too conscious of its own styling for the taste of a brisk London professional like myself, had included a few valuable pointers in his story. Chief amongst these was the interview with Dr. Merridew, an amateur lepidopterist apparently held in high regard by those who shared his interest. He had been asked to give his views by the police, as Winchester’s only “butterfly man”, and had volunteered the information that some of the species had never been seen outside South America, that none of them were equipped for the rigours of an English climate, and that it was as impossible for butterflies to be directed to kill as it was for such a peculiar mix of species to be bred in captivity, or for them to swarm together.

  And yet they were bred, and they did swarm, and two men had died.

  I took a room in the Wykeham Arms, a pleasant inn set in winding red-brick streets. Compared to London, everywhere was convenient in this little cathedral city, but I was pleased to note that it was just a short walk from Dr. Merridew’s address on Culver Street. My first step was to send him a note requesting an appointment at his earliest convenience. My second was to go down to the crowded dining-room, ready to plead with the staff to find me a seat for luncheon.

  I walked in and saw Simon Feximal.

  He sat alone at a table for two, directly in front of me,
intent on a newspaper as he ate, and I stopped dead, gaping with the shock of recognition, and with that unwelcome, unstoppable quiver of sensation in my gut as I took him in. I had told myself that my memory and the dramatic circumstances of our first meeting had exaggerated his attractions, but he was every bit as commanding a presence as I remembered. That hair like spun steel, that beaky nose, those powerful shoulders that I had clutched as he drove into my body…

  The landlady made a politely impatient noise, urging me forward, and as she did so, Feximal looked up.

  “Robert?” he said blankly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, you gentlemen know each other!” cried the landlady, and swept me forward to the spare seat at his table with relief. “Then I dare say you won’t mind sharing. We’ve steak and ale pie, sir, sit you down and you shall have a plate.”

  I would have turned away. My injured pride and his less-than-warm welcome both stung, and in truth, more than my pride had been hurt. To have shown the tenderness that Feximal had demonstrated that night, the second time, the murmurs of endearment, the gentle touches, and then to walk away from me—that had felt like a lie. Like a promise made and not kept. Like a cruelty.

  Two things stopped me from rejecting the offered seat and taking my meal elsewhere. The first was that he was surely here for the same reason I was, the inexplicable butterflies, and I was determined to have that story. If Simon Feximal, ghost-hunter, discovered anything to do with this mystery, I intended to make it worth three columns of the Chronicle’s paper, with a byline.

  The second was that, though his greeting had hardly been a welcome, he had called me Robert.

  I sat. Feximal looked at me, deep-set eyes unreadable, waiting. I arranged my napkin. He put the side of his fork through a hard piece of pie crust, shattering the pastry into shards and crumbs.

  Someone would have to speak first, unless we were to sit here in silence for the next hour. It was inevitable that the someone should be me.

  “You’re here about the butterflies?”