Diana frequently strolled along the veranda, although it was a very strange place. The air was always soft, the breeze always pleasant. People ostensibly went there for an outing and to watch the gulls, or to peer out toward the sea that rolled and crashed beyond the wide sandy beach. But Diana knew the real reason that everyone visited the veranda: to be consumed.
In the daytime she would go and smile at the ladies in their long dresses and wide summer hats. The gentlemen would nod and tip their own hats, and Diana would nod back. And since she had peculiar insight into such matters, Diana always knew which of these people she would meet later on the veranda, when the moon was full and the high stone columns awash in ghostly light.
One midnight she rendezvoused with the tall man who sported a Mephistophelean goatee, wore a silk top hat and carried a cane. While she braced herself against a column, he lifted her dress from behind and stroked the backs of her thighs.
Pressing fully clothed against her arse from behind, he slipped the cane over her head and pulled back against her throat.
Gagging, Diana grabbed both his gnarled hands and tugged to relieve the pressure. He continued humping her as they grappled against the column. When Diana pried one of his hands from the cane, he clutched at her throat, discovering the fine mesh chain she wore, the small golden cross from her girlhood.
The man ceased to hump and choke her. They both stood panting. Diana was angry and afraid but wanted completion. She saw her cross in the moonlight, so small and delicate in the palm of the man's ghostly – some would say ghastly – hand. She felt his cold stare over her shoulder at her talisman.
"It's a childhood gift," she said. "To remind me that I am responsible for my actions but not in control. Not in control at all."
Groaning as if in anguish, the man knelt and penetrated her rectum repeatedly with his tongue, pausing occasionally to nip at the flesh of her buttocks with sharp teeth, all the while slowly working the tip of his polished cane into her wet vagina. When the cane had invaded her as far as she could take it, the man arose and pumped her madly, almost brutally with the mahogany phallus, while she fingered herself in a gasping frenzy.
When Diana began to moan as she neared orgasm, the man quit pumping, whimpering strangely as he withdrew the cane and walked abruptly away. Diana's building orgasm evaporated and vanished without claiming her.
The next day the man saluted her with the selfsame cane he had used to penetrate her, but a fearful hatred smoldered in his eyes, and he never looked at her again.
On another evening Diana met a married couple who had smiled and wetted their lips at her that afternoon. They arranged Diana on one of the red chairs of the veranda, the skirt of her dress around her hips, the bodice dropped around her waist.
The wife knelt and kissed and licked Diana's private parts while the husband stood behind the chair and played with Diana's breasts. This continued briefly until the husband walked to Diana's side, his penis thrusting erect from his trousers.
He made Diana suck him until he was almost ready to burst, then he rushed behind his wife, lifted her dress and plunged into her with a shout of release, his wife sobbing all the while against Diana's nether lips.
Without a word the husband motioned for Diana to slide out from the chair and join him behind his wife. He withdrew his long penis from his wife's sex and stepping to one side spread her swollen lips wide with two fingers. He held his other hand out, palm up, as if holding a door for a lady.
Graciously, Diana knelt behind the wife and licked between the husband's fingers. The wife sighed and rested her breasts against the seat of the chair where Diana had been sitting. Diana licked the husband's ejaculate from his wife's dilated hole, tasting the salty vinegary mix of man and woman. Then, at the husband's insistence, she sucked his member clean too.
After they had all stood up and straightened their clothes, the husband and wife both kissed Diana tenderly on the cheek. Despite all the pleasure they had shared, Diana had still not attained her own release.
"I do hope we can meet here again tomorrow," she called as their silent forms glided away arm in arm.
But late the next morning, as they passed Diana on the veranda, the couple nodded as if to a stranger. Their smiles were polite but firmly distant. When Diana returned to the veranda that night at the same time as their previous meeting, there was no waiting to meet her.
Another time, in broad daylight, Diana joined a man with a spyglass on a tall stepladder. They shared the glass, watching a woman in a white dress fellate a man in a brown suit and bowler hat.
Soon three more women arrived, one wearing peach, one wearing charcoal, one in brown. They all took turns fellating the man. Diana, who was at the top of the ladder, felt dizzy and flushed. The man below her reached up beneath her dress and thrust his finger into her vagina, his thumb into her anus.
While Diana observed the fellatrices below, the man on the ladder stroked her membranes with a slow, mesmerizing insistence until the man in the bowler hat emptied his semen into the mouth of the woman in white. But once again, even though she was incredibly excited, Diana failed to achieve her own release.
By nightfall the man with the ladder was gone from the veranda; the man in the bowler hat and the four fellatrices avoided each other carefully, none of them acknowledging Diana's presence, except for an occasional furtive glance.
