Paradise - Part Two (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) by O.L. Casper

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    I took my trench coat out of the closet and tried it on over the camisk . It worked.
     
    Sophia Durant’s Diary
    August 13, Eleuthera Island, Bahamas
     
    Evening—the door to his room is open a crack. The corridor is beset with gray light. The dull gray sky and silent rain reflects the mood that has come over me. I don’t know quite how to shake it, but decide to go in anyway, good mood or no. The heavens are hung with black…the master poet wrote. As these words come into my head on entering the room, so does an image emerge from the depths of my soul: deep underwater, in a dark grave of broken metal and smashed glass, the body of Isabella Gardner rolls in my direction—eyes falling upon me. Suddenly the eyes dissolve, leaving in their place two eye sockets teeming with squirming maggots. Uncontrollably I gasp, cupping my hands to my mouth. Realizing where I am, I try to regain composure. I am in the woman’s room, having visions of her ghost, playing to the demented fantasies of a sick man reeling from her death. I see my soul splintered into a kaleidoscopic image like seeing several reflections of myself in a shattered mirror. I am doing this for him, and for her. I am submitting my soul, just tonight. I will pick up the pieces tomorrow.
    I round the corner in his room to find Stafford sitting in a wicker chair, pointing at the floor. He is naked except for a leather loin cloth with a golden belt. The posture would be laughable if I wasn’t in such a sullen mood. He is reminiscent of the god Apollo with his toned body and dominant expression. He smiles that indescribable smile, perhaps recognizing the strange humor of the scene. I remove the trench coat, exposing the camisk , and toss it aside. Perhaps due to the cold air of the overly air-conditioned house my skin is in goosebumps and my nipples stand out like bullets. Humoring him, I kneel before him, extending my arms to touch his feet. I wait for a moment, half-thinking I will feel the sting of a whip on my back, but there is no such sting. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails plays in my head to the tempo of my heartbeat. I am filled with fear and lust, a strange state to be in. Half-disgusted with myself and feeling semi-divine, I raise my head up to see him. His head is tilted back, eyes closed, as though he is channeling some supernatural power. The fear I feel is not of him, but of the woman I try hard to block out of my head. Though the harder I try, the more she is there. I see her stern image in every reflection about the room, her lips barely cracked in a devilishly mocking half-smile, like she is some demon returned from the nethermost hell. The visions become too real and I have to bring myself back to reality, striving to see what actually appears before my eyes and not in the hollowed vision of an overactive imagination.
    He looks down at me and points to a small stand covered in a purple cloth next to him. On it is a small, silver chalice next to a silver pitcher on a silver plate with dark grapes. He pours a crimson drink from the pitcher into the chalice and hands it to me. Kneeling before him, I take the cup. It’s filled with wine.
    “You are drinking the blood, the grapes are the body. Eat them too and transcend.”
    “Whose body and blood?”
    “The goddess Isis.”
    He said Isis , but the pronunciation was closer to Aset , which is apparently the way the Egyptians pronounced it. I only know it to be Isis that he said because I’m somewhat familiar with the ancient gods and goddesses of Egyptian lore, to include the pronunciation of their names. Partaking of the blood and body of a deity in the form of wine and a bit of food goes back at least as far as recorded history, and was adopted into Christianity from the pagan religions as was the fictitious birth date of December twenty-fifth. It was for the Egyptians, as it is for the Christians, one of the best means of communion. I believe this communion to be more real than symbolic, a