But this was to be a sacrificial, orificial night. I knew as much even as I advanced, an accomplished crepuscular navigator all of the sudden, miraculously aware of prehistoric ditches and jutting flint, my back arching instinctively against the icy pillars of the outer circle, my eyes as untroubled by the darkness as a cat’s. I knew it even as I peered around the colossal sandstone doorway into the inner horseshoe (made of spotted dolerite, by the way), and saw giant, even violent shadows, and heard at last a sound that was not the booming tune of the wind upon the edifice, was not a music either which I could say I recognized, although I knew, without a single doubt, from whom it came. To my left the two great trilithons loomed black and indefinite, tremendous and yet oddly inconsequent like all wasted ruins, wanly menacing. A graveyard of smaller rocks stretched out before me, and beyond that the Altar Stone, a massive splinter of micaceous sandstone, measuring 16ft long by 3ft 4ins wide, but trapped like the victim of some blunder on a building site beneath the fallen stone of the central trilithon at one end, and its spilled lintel at the other. And there, splayed out amongst this confusion of masonry, careless of discomfort, druidical decorum, or our marriage vows, my own monumental Camilla heaved and twisted and bellowed, as she’d never heaved and twisted and bellowed on a bed of rock for me, her legs thrown wider apart than I’d ever seen them thrown, in order to accommodate the boy de Sade – the steam from whose nostrils ascended into the night like incense, the glint from whose solitary ear-ring flashed amongst the melancholy bluestone pillars like a falling star; while at her other end, in a squatting position above her uncovered and once more superabundant breasts, the black acrobat and actor Pierre swayed to a monstrous rhythm, his gracefully predacious shadow falling now on this silicified module of sandstone, now on that, according to the extravagance of his movements (or of mine!), his virile member – I didn’t have to imagine it, I had already seen it enough times this evening, getting in and out of Marat’s bath – his virile member, I say, (if I could look, you can), plunged deep into Camilla’s throat.

[5]

It must have been a full hour – I am not exaggerating the time this time – before all activity on or around the Altar Stone ceased completely. At last the sound of breathing, quick and small, was all that issued from the innermost chamber of the ancient temple. Outside, only the distant purr of my boiling engine and the sad, scared scrapings of nocturnal creatures disturbed the silence.

Then Camilla stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved.

‘I am ready,’ she said quietly.

Chapter IX

CHAPTER IX

[1]