The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The sky was thunderous dark; a sky you see in paintings but cannot believe could be real, but it was. To the west the palest blue sky as of a summer’s day but overhead and coming from the east black, black clouds and with them a wind.

“It looks sort of like rain.” The incipient stupidity of Roberta’s comment drove Asala almost to a fury. Of course, it fucking looked like rain. It was going to come down in torrents and there they were out for a walk, a walk that had been Asala’s idea and not Roberta’s at all. Roberta had been content to stay in and watch ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ or some other inane programme or, instead, go on Facebook or Twitter or just text her vapid friends. It was Asala who had wanted to do something real, something involving moving flesh, working bone and hot blood for that matter: not just sitting and mindlessly watching or tapping a screen. She wanted to be up and doing, experiencing life to the full.

“Life is real! Life is earnest!” she had said to Roberta, but the pretty girl had just looked at her in puzzlement.

“All right, I suppose so. It’s what you like doing.”

A walk had seemed the very minimum of real activity, albeit up on the moors in a place ten times more real than the studied security of Roberta’s mother’s new boyfriend—or was it partner’s—flat. Asala had not really wanted to come with Roberta to the modern flat at the seaside in the first place but Roberta had made a fuss, said she did not like to be all alone and bored, and so Asala had been kind. After all they had been at school together and, most of the time, she loved being with Roberta.

Roberta, she well knew, would not let Asala forget whose idea it was to go for the walk and get soaked—not though the soaking had happened as yet—but it would. The sky was dark and Asala could not see it as anything but ominous, her mind always made a bit of a drama out of... no, that was unfair, she saw the potential in situations and liked to see the dramatic possibilities. Imagined or not, the weather was still not good. It was a dark, threatening sky, the sort of sky, Asala mused, had seen the Transylvanian count in Bram Stoker’s book—no, not the Lair of the White Worm nor the Jewel of the Seven Stars—Asala had been assiduous in her reading—but the other, better known one, milked for all it was worth, she had noted, in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast where they were staying.

To Asala, it seemed the dark cloud brought him but to Roberta he was just an old man caught in the rain—just as they were—and sheltering in an old stone barn. Roberta seemed to have little curiosity about how he happened to be there. She was far more worried by the poor reception on her mobile than about the unlikelihood of an old man being up on the hills in a dark suit and black shiny shoes. Asala did not like him, nor the way he sat in the darker parts of the barn as the rain and wind came—and did rain and wind come, dark and howling.

Asala did not like the man from the first but was that because he seemed to almost ignore her, his attention focused almost exclusively upon Roberta? Was that jealousy?

At first, he had said little but then seemed inclined to some conversation at least. The inclemency of the weather, who they were, where were they saying. His own answers seemed a little too general, a little too unspecific to Asala but she did not think Roberta noticed, was probably not even really listening to what he was saying.

“You might find this diverting.” The volume was old, leather bound no less, and probably badly foxed. Asala could not see Roberta so much as touching it when he withdrew it from an inner pocket of his coat and offered it to her. Roberta liked everything new and modern; not for her second-hand things and that went not just for books but authors as well. “Who wants to read what dead people have written?” would be just what she would say. Asala took a very different view: unimpressed by the endless pages of simple prose and poor conversations, half the time without any sort of real plot that, in her opinion, formed the modern novel. Asala buried herself in the more testing and intelligent writing—old or modern—though with a penchant for excitement of a real kind.

The man seemed oddly eager for Roberta to take the book.

“Oh, not my sort of thing.” Roberta spoke, hardly even glancing up at the man. Almost flippant—uncaring was how Asala saw it—but then Roberta seemed to realise she could not say that without actually looking at the book. Even she could not do that. She picked it up and idly flicked the pages sending a small cloud of dust into the air.

Asala could not think why the man had even thought Roberta could be interested in such a book. Clearly it was in a process of decay, its pages disintegrating before their eyes, turning to dust. Asala stood and stared out of the doorway into the rain towards the sea and waited for Roberta’s curt dismissal of the loan.

Apart from a cough or two, Asala heard nothing and, having watched the moving clouds and rain for a time, she turned to find Roberta actually reading. The man was watching her friend with what seemed a hunger as if he wanted to eat her. It was an unsettling image but one that remained with Asala. She could not imagine what had possessed Roberta. It was not in character. Asala turned back to the landscape and watched the rain slanting down like stair-rods. She smiled wryly, who of her generation would know what stair-rods were—certainly not Roberta. It required a penchant for old books to know such things.

“You may borrow it... of course.” Behind her the man spoke. Asala did not like his voice.

The man had not actually said where he lived or was staying, much less how to return the book but Roberta seemed almost to have forgotten about that when, eventually, the weather was sufficiently settled for them to attempt a homeward journey; merely dropping the old book into her knapsack. The man had been strangely quiet whilst Roberta was reading and Asala had most definitely not engaged him in conversation or indeed gone near him. In a way it was surprising her interest had not been sparked. The whole situation almost a reversal of the usual. It should have been Asala interested in the old volume and a curious old man, whilst Roberta fidgeted and stared out at the rain wishing it to stop and let her get back off the moor, not Roberta.

The man had stayed in the corner of the barn, seeming to shrink further into it as the sky lightened. The weather continued to brighten and soon the rain stopped completely. The sun came out and the walk back proved dry and actually good. Roberta seemed in much better spirits—perhaps it was the prospect of getting back for tea.

What surprised Asala more than anything, later on, was finding Roberta sitting up in bed reading the book. Her knees drawn up, the shape of her body deliciously hinted at within the cotton. It was so unlike her to bother to read. Asala dropped her bath towel by the bed.

“What is so fascinating in that old book?”

It was the emphasis on the ‘old’ which clearly sparked Roberta’s retort. It was not like Asala to criticise something merely for being old. “Oh, not your thing at all, just some old story. You wouldn’t be interested. Too trivial, just a romance. Set ages ago. Even the type is kinda old. Cool actually.”

Asala got in beside Roberta and picked up her own book, a paperback, “North and South,” by Mrs Gaskell. “Are you going to read for long?” She asked.

Roberta looked so desirable in her pyjamas. Asala had bought them for her on a whim. Men’s cotton pyjamas, all stripes and a drawstring waist. The buttons all wrong. It was lovely to slip her hand into the cotton fly and feel not the rigid male pole but the soft down of Roberta’s sex, to trace her finger down the little valley and into the warm wetness beyond. To stir and play before a little tug on the drawstring opened all of Roberta’s delights to her. And delights they were, from Roberta’s fine rounded breasts to her little suckable nubbin. A lovely body.

“Robbie,” her lips brushed her friend’s ear, “shall we?”

“Another couple of pages, be patient.”

Asala pouted. Fresh from her shower and without pyjamas or a nightdress she was still a little damp despite the vigorous towelling. She looked at her friend, admiring the long, dark curls and her little button nose. She had such—was luscious a good word for them—full lips. Despite the covering sheet and Roberta’s pyjamas, her eyes flicked downwards to where her hips and the start of her legs were moulded by the draped material, the indentation showing Roberta’s pleasingly full hips and the slight mounding of her pubis. Slight only, she was not a boy—urgh! Asala smiled, thinking how much nicer Roberta was than a boy, that lovely, soft, uninterrupted triangle of dark, springy curls and then below, as she knew so well, very full lips just like her face!

Watching Roberta was such a pleasure. Asala’s own tongue slid over her lips and she raised herself upwards, the sheet slipping back along her back and her small breasts coming into view. She bent downwards and kissed Roberta on her lips, momentarily obscuring her reading.

“A few pages more, Asala, please and then I’ll…”

Asala pouted once again and settled down. Her nose itched. It would be that dusty old book. She stopped herself criticising its age in her mind. It was she who liked old things not Roberta. She waited, and still Roberta read. Finally, her hand made its way between them. Fingers made their way up Roberta’s side and onto her cotton clad stomach. Warm, soft, so young and alive soft flesh under the thin covering of her pyjamas. Her fingers found their way twixt buttons and touched naked skin and found the indentation of Roberta’s tummy button. Asala knew, which nobody else did, how much that turned her friend on, how it would make her run between her lovely thighs.

It worked. Finally, Roberta moved, setting the book down beside her bed. The yawn was not so good. “I’m tired, Asala,” she said as she settled down under the shee,t but her face was towards Asala and Asala moved and their lips touched. Soft, feminine lips together though it was Asala’s tongue that poked through and into her friend.

Asala’s finger moved from Roberta’s tummy button, out of her pyjama top and then pulled it upwards exposing, under the sheet, the smooth skin above her pyjama bottoms. Her fingers slipped down the skin and over the bow of the drawstring to the pyjama bottoms and slipped into the fly, her fingers finding the springy curls upon her mons veneris, she wriggled them into the dark curls, feeling them curling around her fingers as she sought and found Roberta’s slit. A moan from Roberta right into Asala’s mouth. Asala felt Roberta’s hand on her own skin. This was so what Asala loved, being sexual with her friend. She loved the outdoors, being out in the fresh air of open moors or pastures, loved the woods, was captivated by romantic ruins but equally loved the soft, cosy intimacy of two girls in a bed.

A sweet gasp from Roberta as Asala’s fingers slipped further. Their lips separated, and they lay on the pillow staring at each other as, beneath the sheets, the girls’ fingers moved.

It was the most wonderful thing. To be with her friend each with fingers up inside each other. Each smiled at the other, visible to each other despite the bedside light being off, because the curtains were thin and even at this late hour it was not that dark. Asala felt so content. To have her so special friend in bed and intimate with her. She withdrew her three fingers from Roberta and brought them to her own mouth and sucked them tasting her friend as Roberta did the same with Asala’s wetness and her own fingers. Again, they dipped, but as was their habit, this time each pushed their fingers into the other’s mouth so they tasted themselves. Asala raised herself,

“Robbie…” and her lips found her friend’s and they kissed again with tongues playing. And then Roberta did that perfect thing: pulling her tongue from Asala’s mouth she dragged it down her chin, down her neck and across her sternum into the valley of her breasts. Asala reached and held the sheet upwards so her friend disappeared beneath it. She closed her eyes as she felt Roberta’s wet, rasping tongue move up the mound of her left breast. Roberta sucked and Asala shivered in pleasure. So good to have her nipples sucked.

As Roberta’s mouth moved from one of Asala’s breasts to the other, she undid the buttons of Roberta’s pyjama top leaving the lovely rounded breasts hanging there over her. She did not touch them but just the thought of them hanging there, Roberta’s nipples over her own, ready perhaps to be lowered and for the girls to touch—nipple to nipple—was pleasure enough.

Roberta’s tongue recommenced its downwards journey, circling and then entering Asala’s own tummy button. Asala’s thighs parted, wider and wider, opening herself ready for her friend. The touch of Roberta’s tongue at the top of her own slit, within her own dark curls. She opened her light brown thighs even wider, as if making herself ready for a man to penetrate. But that was something which would never, never happen—nor to Roberta, she hoped—rather she was opening herself for Roberta’s tongue not a penis.

The touch—the touch of Roberta’s long tongue. The dear girl, the naughty girl. She had pushed straight into her. No preliminary swirl around her wetness but had plunged straight in, her lips had pushed into her soft flesh, her tongue inside and swirling. Asala abandoned herself to pleasure.

It was minutes before Roberta surfaced as if coming up for air. She had stroked Asala’s swollen little button with her tongue, had nibbled it with her lips and lapped away at the pouring wetness she had found. Roberta surged up the bed, her lips finding Asala’s. A wet joining. “Fuck me,” she breathed into her mouth.

“Don’t use that word,” Asala replied, but knew what Roberta wanted. Her hand reached and found Roberta’s thighs damp with the wetness leaking from her sex—lovely, soft, feminine thighs. Bunching her fingers, she pushed easily between their softness and found her friend’s sex. She did not pause and tickle and stroke, rather she plunged straight into the girl—hard and deep. In and out, the motion of sexual intercourse between man and woman. Asala hated the analogy yet knew it was what Roberta was imagining, knew her friend was not as committed to women as she was, remembered Roberta saying once how she wished Asala had a cock or that they could have a man in bed with them as well. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, Asala?’ She had said. ‘Three of us together.’ Nice? Hardly.

“Oh, I love you so, Asala, fuck me harder.” Her tongue pushed into Asala’s mouth in time with her thrustings, her long mobile tongue moving in Asala’s mouth and then her fingers finding and thrumming Asala’s clitoris.

Entwined, steamy and wet under the single sheet Roberta and Asala orgasmed, hot, damps so feminine bodies, whilst through the window the Moon looked on.

The next day was sunny and the two girls spent the morning up at the abbey, set high above the town. Roberta had complained a little at the number of steps to climb but had been mollified by the view and the feel of the sun. Towards lunchtime the sky had darkened and they had returned home, reaching it just before the first drops of rain fell. After lunch Asala had settled to read but her friend had not wanted to do that, perhaps, thought Asala, having grown tired of that old book she had been reading the night before, and, after aimlessly wandering around the flat and disturbing Asala’s reading, had gone out. Asala had not thought Roberta would be gone long, expecting her to return even more morose and disparaging about the smallness of the town, not seeing the interest in the old and historic seaport. Roberta, however, was gone for the whole afternoon and when she returned looked bright eyed and happy saying how well her shopping had gone. Asala was puzzled. Whitby was not the biggest of places and Roberta had only bought a single thing, a cotton dress. It seemed to Asala a long time to have spent away from her just to buy a single dress.

Asala’s idea about Roberta having lost interest in the old book proved misconceived. She knew how quickly Roberta could tire of things, her concentration span if not that of a gnat was certainly not very long, but Asala had never seen Roberta quite so engrossed even sitting in an armchair reading long after their usual bedtime.

Bedtime with Roberta meant sex to Asala and she became impatient once more, “Shall we shower together tonight, Robbie?”

The answer had been non-committal and made without even looking up.

Finally, the exasperating girl set the book aside and looked up. She looked to Asala a little dazed and confused, perhaps in need of sleep. And then she sneezed. Much as Asala liked poking around in second hand bookshops and actually liked the smell of old books she thought Roberta’s rather more dusty than she liked.

“Shower?”

Asala led Roberta by the hand and even undressed her, enjoying the gradually revealing of her body. Turning on the shower, Asala encouraged her friend into the water with a few pats to her soft bottom before undressing herself and entering the falling water. Lovely to wash each other. Their rule if in the shower or bath together was they did not touch their own bodies but washed the other. That rule went back a long way.

Lovely to soap each other’s breasts and make the nipples harden, lovely to pull Roberta to herself and feel their pubic hair touch as they soaped the cheeks of each other’s bottom, nice to finger each other’s bottom hole, stroking the wrinkled, rubbery flesh with soapy fingers. Giggling fun to place a cupping hand between each other’s thighs and feel the sudden warmth as each emptied their bladder, lovely to find the source and place a finger on the hole seeking to stem the hot flow and making it squirt here, there and everywhere but particularly, if done right, directing the hot, rushing stream, horizontally onto the nearby clit. Once, when they had been in the bath, Roberta had made Asala come like that when she had directed her own flow right onto Asala’s little hard pea. A forceful and hot jet—it had been quite something.

The shower seemed to have awoken Roberta—and her lust. She was erotic with the towel, drying her friend. The towel rubbed purposefully across Asala’s nipples and an exaggerated pressing of cotton towelling against her sex. “You are very wet here, Asala, dear, I can’t seem to dry you!”

Asala had tumbled onto the bed, naked from the shower and had opened her legs towards Roberta. Roberta had turned, her lovely rounded bottom towards Asala and had fumbled in her drawer.

“I have something to play with.”

Asala liked the use of a dildo or vibrator, enjoyed pushing the thing into her friend or having Roberta use one on her. They had even done strangely intimate things with a real cucumber once upon a time, well, actually, at least thrice, with one each end, but what Asala did not like was to have the dildo at all realistically moulded. A plastic cucumber or banana would have been fine to her, as realistic as possible as a green cucumber or yellow banana, but she did not like penis modelled dildos one bit. Yet Roberta had deliberately brought one, it was there in her hand—to tease or possibly annoy. Asala was horrified, her legs had snapped, wetly, together.

“I don’t want that thing inside me.”

“But I do,” her friend had replied. She had held it against her, rising upwards from her so lovely curls as if she was some sort of hermaphrodite. “Come on, Asala, let me fuck you with it and then you fuck me.”

Roberta advanced and Asala retreated up the bed, but Roberta was the quicker and Asala found herself with Roberta sitting astride her hips, she reached and held her round breasts holding her away from her. Their pubic hair was mingled.

“Come on, Asala, let’s suck it and fuck with it.”

Asala watched horrified as Roberta—her Robbie—brought the thing, its hateful, bulbous man end, to her lips and licked and then closing her eyes, had opened her mouth wide, rounding her lips over her teeth and sucked.

It had been one of Asala’s fears, she knew how sexual Roberta was, to find her with some boy, his trousers perhaps around his ankles and his thing in Roberta’s mouth. That she might not keep to women as Asala wanted—particularly herself—was a fear.

The plastic penis came from Roberta’s mouth all wet, and was turned, business end towards her.

“No, Robbie.” The end came closer to her lips. “Please.”

Roberta grinned in the moonlight. “You are such a wimp when it comes to penises. So strong, so self-reliant but… fuck me with it then.”

And Asala had to comply, it avoided her own penetration and it was, after all, lovely having Roberta straddle her chest, put her head down between Asala’s own thighs and lick leaving her so pretty, so perfect sex open for Asala to do her worst with the plastic penis. Poor Asala had to use the thing as if it was a real man’s erection. She held it, with distaste—even at the blunt end it was realistically moulded, except for the screw on cap where the batteries went. She stroked her friend with it wishing it was simply a rounded plastic wand or a carrot or a cucumber or anything but what it so clearly was. She toyed with Roberta’s clit but knew she would have to do the deed.

She lined it up and pushed it slowly inwards letting it be absorbed by her friend, the rounded end of the hateful thing opening her friend and filling her. Asala pushed and then pulled and then pushed again. The sucking noises not unattractive—wet and sexual. Asala closed her eyes. It was better that way. Meanwhile, down below, her dear Robbie’s tongue was doing just what she so liked though it was going in and out of her in time to what she was doing with the plastic ‘thing.’

A press to the button and Roberta seemed to go wild as the buzzing vibrations hit her, her hips and bottom moving from side to side and her mouth and tongue all over the place between Asala’s thighs. If anything, Asala preferred the plastic penis ‘on’ rather than ‘off.’ It made it clear it was not real. Men’s penises did not buzz—or at least that was her understanding. She had, of course, no experience.

Roberta came, shuddering, moaning and even crying out. Asala could even see a sudden extra running of moisture all around the plunging dildo. The fingers of her spare hand had leapt upwards and stroked Roberta’s little shining pea at the first signs of the impending orgasm. Could a man have made her come so well—hardly!

“Robbie, what are you doing?” Asala was near to coming. She did not want her friend to stop. The dark-haired girl had pulled herself from the dildo and had turned around on the bed, had opened her mouth and sucked in the plastic, was holding it with her lips and was pulling it from Asala’s hand. Roberta reached with her hand and turned it completely around so that rising up from her mouth was a penis, a big and still vibrating penis. Clearly, she was holding the weight not just with her lips but her teeth and she made it rise up by, no doubt, pushing down on the blunt end with her tongue and using her bottom teeth as a fulcrum. It was strangely erotic, even to Asala. In the moonlight it looked like the girl really did have a penis rather than a mouth.

Roberta touched Asala’s lips with the swollen, bulbous end of the dildo but, excited as Asala was, even finding the sight of her Robbie with a big erect penis for a mouth enticing, she was not having that thing in her mouth. And then Roberta moved downwards. It was so sudden, one moment just brushing Asala’s lips with the dildo’s end, wet from Roberta’s sex: the next she was back between Asala’s thighs and…

“Nooooooooo!”

But it was done, the big plastic, vibrating penis, held in Roberta’s mouth had ‘taken’ Asala. It was inside her, vibrating and being moved in a ‘fucking’ motion. In and out, in and out with those self-same sucking noises that she had made with Roberta.

“Stop. No!” But Asala came—came hard—Roberta had left the thing deep and vibrating inside her and placed her lips over Asala’s clitoris, sucking it into her mouth and playing with Asala’s little pea with her tongue. It was a fantastic orgasm, perhaps the best she ever had. Not the most romantic or the most sweet, or at all how she had wanted it, but… Asala in the next few days remembered it again and again: indeed it was not something she ever forgot.

A day sightseeing away from Whitby followed, a day of sunshine and happiness. Roberta was in a jolly mood and there was plentiful laughter and ice cream. Asala felt relaxed, the nagging worry about Roberta’s long shopping trip to the town put to the back of her mind. Returning to Whitby they found the sunshine of the day had become hazy and then the sky became overcast and it almost seemed, as they dropped down into the town, as if the town was in shadow.

“It looks like rain—again,” remarked Roberta.

“I don’t really think so.”

The loss of sunshine seemed to affect Roberta’s mood and she sat in a corner reading her dusty old book. Asala’s joy at the pleasure of the day retreated. She did not like Roberta’s fascination with that book, yet she was loath to pick it up and touch it and find out what it was about. Something about it repelled her. She liked it the less when Roberta suddenly announced she was going for a walk.

“I’ll come.”

“No, I need to clear my head,” she coughed, “just leave me be for a little while.”

Roberta returned an hour and a half later.

“Where have you been?”

“Oh, here and there. I did not much notice.”

It was not in character, Roberta just wandering around. She was, though, so loving that night. Their love making was very different from the almost violence of the night before. It was she who instigated the act, she who turned to Asala and kissed her. She who rolled atop Asala and lay there kissing her with their breasts together, she who wriggled with obvious meaning so that Asala opened her thighs and felt Roberta’s pubis pushing at her own and their curls mingling.

“Asala, please!” And it was Asala who had slipped down under the sheet this time and buried her face in Roberta’s fragrant wetness and nuzzled and licked.

The next morning, though, Roberta had slipped away on some pretext and then again in the early evening. The joy in her face of the previous morning had gone. Roberta seemed preoccupied, almost sullen when Asals spoke. There had been no love making that night. They had slept in the same bed but that was about as far as it had gone. Roberta had dropped easily into sleep whereas Asala had eventually got up and sat at the window upset and wide awake, worried that she might have said something to upset her friend or worse. Asala had no knowledge of where Roberta was going. She suspected a tryste, her mind in the dark of the night fearing the worst, a time when all the bad ideas crowd into one’s head, but she could not imagine whom Roberta was meeting. Roberta had not been paying attention to any other girl—or, dare she imagine it, boy. Roberta’s answers were evasive and Asala did not like to press for fear of upsetting their friendship—their relationship. It was not as if Roberta was long away but where did she go?

It was seeing Asala with the man, the old man in the barn in the rain, the next day that brought matters to a head. Suddenly and so unexpectedly all was explained—awfully explained. Asala was shocked at seeing Roberta so animated, so clearly happy in his company as they walked along the quay on the dark, showery afternoon, an umbrella pulled closely down over them. Roberta did not see Asala, did not see her sit down on a bench, staring out from underneath her rain hood with her shoulders slumped forward, did not see the rain hood slowly turning as they walked away, following their footsteps until they turned a corner.

Asala sat on the bench for over an hour, a policewoman even asked if she was ‘OK’ perhaps concerned because of the way she sat unmoving, a look of complete dejection about the wet, crumpled figure.

An uneasy meeting that evening but Roberta seemed to completely miss Asala’s unhappiness, her cutting words and accusations. Roberta was all sweetness and light; moreover, as open as could be about her ‘dear Dr. Mecuniam.’ She was not evasive, there was no need for Asala to drag the truth from her. It was a bitter draught to Asala. Roberta told Asala everything. How she had met the man again by accident and had fallen into talking about his book, how they had taken tea in the little, small windowed tea room down by the water, how she had agreed to meet him again and then again. And then at his house.

Asala could not think the meeting had been by accident—on the man’s part.

Roberta described his house and Asala found it the next day without any real difficulty. On the older side of the town, the East side under the shadow of the great Abbey. An abbey begun in 657 AD but now ruinous high above the town. Below it lay the maze of alleys and yards dating back as far as the 1600s and in one of these, off Church Street, was the house Roberta had described. To Asala it seemed to crouch rather than stand, its front in shadow and its windows dark; the alleyway damp with rain making the cobbles a little slippery. Asala felt relief at leaving its darkness and climbing the steps next to the steep cobbled Donkey Path, all 199 steps to the Abbey, up into the light and she sat quietly by herself looking over the town puzzled and shocked by the turn of events.

Her friend, her so dear friend involved with someone else, not another girl but… a man… and that man! She could not understand it. If only they had never come to Whitby—its many charms all gone for her.

Roberta was not discreet, was unthinking. Asala almost did not see her. Worse, she did not even come back to sleep. Asala lay in her lonely bed with the most awful thoughts in her head about what ‘they’ might be doing. What might be going on in that house—that shadowy, damp house she had seen.

Roberta, though, had clearly formed a very different perception of the house, was more than keen to show Asala around when Asala had made some disparaging remark the next day. Her friend assured her the good doctor would not mind, indeed had a key and was delighted to show Asala the building.

Asala for her part was not keen to return even to outside the house but nonetheless could not resist seeing inside it despite knowing how it would hurt her. A dreadful attraction, perhaps, to what we know will harm. She was sure no good would come of Roberta’s association with this Dr. Mecuniam but Roberta seemed to see none of the impending hurt: perhaps her imagination was not up to it or, else, the dreadful attraction too strong.

It seemed almost as if the man preferred the unlit and dark. The house was undoubtedly on the shadowed side of the street, a north facing dwelling, most likely a fisherman’s cottage originally. The key was turned and Asala found herself in a parlour straight off the street, the steep stairs parallel to the front and behind that the kitchen and scullery. Upstairs the front main bedroom had a certain quaint attraction though the rear bedroom looking out over the dank garden was not somewhere Asala would have wished to lay her head. An outside privy was a surprise and there was no bathroom. It was not a modern dwelling but clean, very clean, not damp inside at all, and the sheets on the old brass bedstead in the front room were crisp linen.

Roberta showed Asala around with almost proprietorial pride. How much was she ‘in’ with the man? He looked old enough to be her grandfather, at least when they had first seen him that was what Asala had thought but, now, when she saw him he seemed younger, quite a bit younger. In contrast, now that she looked closely at her friend, Roberta seemed a little tired, a little worn, but as lively as ever, if not more lively, but somehow it seemed to Asala, a little transparent as if her usual solid presence was being sucked away. A peculiar fancy but that was how it appeared to her.

It was that evening the question was asked. Asala had put it off for days, had dreaded the answer, had been so unwilling to ask the question. In the end it had been a simple question.

“Has he?” Asala could hardly bear the thought of her friend touched, let alone invaded. It was obvious to both of what she was speaking.

“Oh, Asala, you cannot imagine what it is like when he, when the good doctor, goes down there. It’s like you—and I have always really, really, loved that but... oh, there is something else, it as if he is literally draining me of pleasure, I can feel it almost shooting right down me, streaming right through my body, right to my clit. The feeling, the pleasure, it’s like nothing I’ve felt before. Not that it is not good with you. I mean it’s as if my clit is sparking pleasure. Really! As if he was sucking pleasure out of it. I can feel it coursing through me into my clit and out. Is it what a man feels when he comes, when he shoots his stuff? Oh, Asala, you would not know!”

Asala was wide eyed. What was this man doing to her friend? What else was he doing?

“Men are meant so much to be after one thing. You always said. But the good doctor is so caring, so attentive to my body, my needs, it is almost as if he would rather I came than he did. Oh yes, dear Asala, oh yes he has done that thing, and it was so very, very good...”

The words were like daggers to Asala.

“Asala, you always said...”

“I know, I know.” The tears had come. There was no way they could not. Asala had known she could not keep Roberta to herself. Roberta’s inclination did not really lie that way. She lay with Asala all right but never any other girl. Asala knew that. Hateful as it was, she knew her Robbie’s inclination was towards men. It was only that they went back so far, had done so much together that it was to Roberta merely a habit. Little different from masturbation really. They had always been two girls in a bed and things had just developed. Asala could remember the first time

And they had parted, Asala to sit alone and cry, Roberta to go out into the night to meet her ‘good doctor.’

Another waking without Roberta, another lonely breakfast, eaten because she should rather than taking any pleasure in it. Dressed against the cold that seemed now to have settled in on the coast, Asala went out into the rain.

Asala stood once more outside that old house. It was as if it drew her as a magnet to increase her sorrow. An old woman came out of the house, frowned when she saw Asala and turned to lock the door.

“I… I thought an old man lived there, a friend of a friend.”

“I certainly don’t, I just does.”

It transpired the old woman looked after the house, had been engaged by Dr. Mecuniam. She told Asala the doctor paid well but she would not spend the night there—certainly not with him! Her cackle was a little unnerving, but she seemed a good enough sort and one inclined to talk. Certainly, she kept the house spotless. Asala had seen that with her own eyes. As clean a house as you could wish for. It was not the old woman’s fault it was so old, so un-modern, so not Roberta.

Asala’s eyes rose to the upstairs window remembering seeing the brass bed within, and the so crisp and clean sheets. Knowing what happened there was like a stab to Asala’s heart. Yet when she had been in that room, Roberta had chatted away as gaily as anything, seemingly oblivious of her friend’s mounting dismay.

It was most certainly not by design that she met the two. The awfulness of having to say something and the doctor raising his wide brimmed hat to her. Asala could not believe the change that had come over the old man. Years seemed to have dropped off him, he seemed more vital, more alive, more luminous. It was in such contrast to her friend who had paled and now seemed almost fragile. Fragile but so animated, so full of life. Awful how clear her attachment to the man, dreadful how she clung to the doctor—but was it from affection or for support? Asala had asked whether she was well but Dr. Mecuniam had said she was of a delicate disposition as, indeed, was he. Perhaps he had been delicate and ill before and was now getting better. Yet that seemed strangely at the expense of Roberta who, to Asala, looked almost consumptive but that was surely not possible in Whitby in these modern days, but Roberta refused to see a doctor—or rather another doctor.

Asala could not understand what was happening. She tried to talk with Roberta as her friend changed in their bedroom. She could not help it but her desire rose as she watched her friend reach to pull her tee shirt up and over her head, revealing her brassiere and the swell of her delightfully full breasts. But it was not Roberta’s breasts which made her then pause and the thought of Robberta lying with her in bed rush from her mind. It was the new addition to her jewellery, an oval of Whitby Jet in her tummy button. Roberta saw Asala’s eyes upon her navel. She turned to and fro with pride, showing it off, as she unclasped her brassiere letting her breasts hang free..

“You like?” The intense waxy lustre of the gem was of the deepest opaque black. So smooth and so dark.

“It’s fossilised wood, you know. Freaky eh? The Doctor gave it to me. I like it”

Asala knew, knew all about Jet. Millions of years old compressed, fossilised wood from a species of Monkey Puzzle tree. Prized in Victorian times particularly by Queen Victoria who, following the death of Prince Albert, took to wearing Jet jewellery in remembrance of him. And it was that use as an accessory to elegant mourning that really upset her, more than it being a present from the loathsome Doctor. Asala watched her friend continuing to undress unwilling to say anything about the decoration.

“He likes to remove it so he can place his forefinger in my tummy button. You know how much I like that and what it does to me.”

The stupid girl prattled on, sending ice shards into Asala’s heart. Uncaring, unthinking, Roberta was revealing how that dreadful man—so awfully, a man not a woman—knew of what had been their special thing. He, not Asala’s, finger being placed in Roberta’s navel. Asala looked across the room at the now naked girl, her body as desirable as ever, but seeming paler, much paler,with her blue veins so much more visible under her flawless white skin. Roberta seemed thinner, almost unwell. Consumptive? That thought again. That was what would have been the conclusion in the sort of old book Asala read. The romanticised disease all the way from Shakespeare to late Victorian times, the Great White Plague, Phthisis or, now, Tuberculosis written about by so many: Keats, Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Mann and Bram Stoker. Asala was well aware of the special poetic and aesthetic qualities the dreadful disease had been imbued with in the past, but so unlikely in late Twentieth Century England.

“Have you seen the doctor?”

“Yes, only an hour ago.”

“No, not him—the doctors—you look so pale, so wan, so delicate.”

Roberta looked puzzled. My doctor says I am fine, just a little tired sometime.”

“Is he a medical doctor?”

“What other sort is there?”

Asala loved Roberta dearly but she could be so stupid sometimes. She watched the girl reach for her dressing gown and put it on.

“I don’t think he is doing you any good…”

Roberta whirled and stormed from the room, banging the door behind her. Asala sat, listening to the shower starting in the adjacent bathroom. She had tried to separate them. She was sure Dr. Mecuniam was not doing Roberta any good. Not one bit of good.

The end of Roberta and Asala’s sojourn in Whitby was approaching. A relief to Asala as her friend was quite clearly unwell. She had stayed in bed for the last two days—at least during the day but had gone out at night. The first time slyly and secretly so Asala had only noticed her absence when she went to see her in their bedroom. The second night it had been more open. A defiant Roberta getting up and Asala arguing with her all the way to the door. She would have stopped her and could have so easily, given how weak she seemed, yet when Roberta had pulled the door open onto the street and before Asala could restrain her there, black as night but with his white face now betraying almost colour—rude health—was Dr. Mecuniam sweeping a protective arm around her friend.

The next day was awful. The rain pelted down and the wind was strong. Asala left her friend looking pale, wan and so tired in bed. Never had she seen her eyes so deep and dark. “Sleep,” she had said and had left her for half an hour to sit in a café with a coffee and Danish pastry. She had forbidden her to go out but that had seemed unnecessary. She did not seem strong enough to go anywhere.

Asala had shunned the many cafés in Church Street, pretty as it was with all its Whitby Jet shops and many cafés and restaurants it was just too close to that awful cottage where Roberta and Dr. Mecuniam had…

It was an old report in a newspaper, a facsimile in a guide book that Asala was reading as she sipped her coffee, ‘Vampyrism in Whitby—a true account.’ Idly she read it. She had read Bram Stoker’s works but was somewhat contemptuous of the modern obsession, in films and elsewhere—‘Buffy’ and all that, of vampires. What caught her eye was the mention of a Dr. Mikaeliam having been hounded from the town in 1712. The name seemed an awful co-incidence and again a Dr. Makuniam was suspected of having something to do with the disappearance of young women before he left—by train—in 1912—seemingly to disappear into thin air. Certainly, there was no account of him having been detained elsewhere in the country. The name was a coincidence. A grandfather perhaps, surely Dr. Mecuniam’s father could not be that old? What utter rubbish what…

Asala sped from the café back to Roberta. She had forbidden Roberta to go out or to see that man but her bed was empty, her pyjamas strewn over the sheets, she was not in the house and her boots and coat were missing. She was not at the dark cottage off Church Street either. Where could she be? Where were they?

Boots? Why had Roberta taken boots? Asala was suddenly sure that madly, absurdly given her condition, she had gone back up onto the moors where she had first seen him. Had known Asala would seek her out in Church Street.

Asala’s hunch was completely sound. Roberta had been forbidden, Asala had forbidden her to see him yet there she undoubtedly was, up on the moor at the very place they had first met the dreadful doctor and once more having relations with him. Asala had told her he was doing her no good, had insisted there was a break. Had been about to take her from Whitby. She had been ignored. In the distance Asala could see her friend on the moor.

Asala raced towards her friend, Roberta’s fragile form seen through the scudding clouds low on the moor almost like skeins of mist. She was closing and knew Roberta could not keep up the pace, was too weak to outrun her.

The wind howled and all at once Asala saw Roberta stumble ahead of her and it was as if her solid form, the very real body Asala had known so well, so intimately and for so many years before at school, was jarred, banged just a little too hard and simply came apart. Yes, it was as if the glue that had held her being together suddenly lost its efficacy and all the myriad particles just disintegrated to dust and, caught by the wind, were blown away, expanding into a larger and larger but distorted and less distinct version of Roberta until a sudden squall whipped the image into a vortex and sent it across the land as a cloud, like smoke almost, out into the North Sea to be lost to sight.

As Asala stared after the vanishing cloud with eyes wide and open mouth she saw Dr. Mecuniam, not far from her. He was in silhouette, not looking at her but at the now vanished cloud across the sea.

Dr. Mecuniam slowly turned towards Asala, he had evidently followed her, his dark eyes staring and sorrowful; and as his eye fell upon her she felt an awful attraction, a strange magnetism drawing her to him. Asala wrenched herself around and ran, just ran across the moor not caring where she was going—oh yes, that was terror all right, with all the flesh, bone and blood she had so sought. It would be a long time before the terrified, whimpering wreck the police found high on the moors wanted anything outside the warm comfort of a very ordinary modern flat with, bright electric light, solid smooth gypsum plaster walls and central heating. It was a long, long time before Asala would talk to them about what had happened, what she knew, what she suspected. They seemed very, very interested.

All those little realities; all those little worlds carried around in people’s heads; all those particular ways of looking at the world—and how many are real and how many an illusion? We perceive reality as we have formed it in our own little skulls. How similar is it to the next man’s? How similar is his version of reality to our own? And if it is simply and uniquely our own, does it continue on after we are not?

Dr. Mecuniam watched Asala as the girl ran across the moor, then turned back towards the distant grey sea where Roberta had been blown, smiling a little sadly, his sharp teeth showing through his thin lips. It was not as if Roberta had quite ceased; her reality had become his own, her vitality his, trapped within his own ancient form along with so many, many others. Sometimes he could almost hear them clamouring, seeking escape and their own substance.

It was a pity—for her, for sweet dear Roberta—but that was how it was. Survival of the fittest perhaps—certainly survival of his ancient race.