The Hermaphrodite's Curse

PART THREE - PARIS

- 5 -

The sun beating down on his back, the sound of cool water tumbling and falling, the soft green grass beneath his bare feet, by now Gabe could recognise his recurring dream world. He knew that he was dreaming and he did not want to wake from it. In the dream world he felt good, he felt right. His body was no longer a mass of awkward aches and pains, but a soft, supple comfortable thing.

Instinctively, he felt himself drawn to the sound of water. He had been in this place before, he knew the attraction the water had to him. As he walked barefoot in the grass, he felt the presence of another body just behind him, although he seemed unable to turn to see it. Somehow he could tell that the other presence was none other than the goddess Venus. He could feel the force of her power flowing all over his naked body, making his skin tingle and all the hairs on his body stand on end.

Seeing the silver ripple of falling water in the fountain, Gabe walked toward it in a trance like state, still feeling the presence of the goddess over his shoulder. He stood beside the stone wall around the fountain's pool and looked into the clear water, watching the waves and ripples as the fountain's rain fell down into it. The presence behind him drew closer. He felt a soft hand on his naked back, the very touch of which caused him to become light headed and swoon.

"Come, my son, and look into my mirror," came the melodic voice ringing in Gabe's ears, "Come and see what the mirror has to tell you."

Gabe peered into the fountain, watched the ripples of the falling water, stared into it, becoming lost and detached from all around him until all he could see was waves on the water, and all he could here was falling splashes. As he drifted in this strange state, the waves began to form themselves into words and pictures, symbols and phrases.

At first, Gabe could make no sense of the swirling shapes. Patterns of lines and crosses formed and disappeared before his eyes before he could hope to decipher them. There was, however, a certain familiarity in these rows of shapes and symbols, he had seen them somewhere before. Gradually, those symbols started turning to letters, some recognisable ones and others from all kinds of different alphabets, and Gabe began to see individual words that he recognised.

One group of words stood out to him. It said "the fortunate ones", grew large in his vision and then burst into tiny lines, disappearing and reforming into other new letters. The phrase seemed familiar to him, but he could not remember from where and he had no time to think about it as he was faced with a new set of words and letters to try and understand.

The letters were all Greek, but they gradually transformed before Gabe's eyes into their English equivalent to reveal a phrase that read, quite cryptically, "I would rather see the sparkle in your face than watch the world in glittering copper or see foot soldiers armoured in hard iron." As Gabe stared, lost in the moment, baffled by the words he was seeing before him, the words grew to fill his field of vision until he could see nothing else.

As the words grew up before him, it became clear that the "o" of "copper" was, in actual fact, a circle with a cross beneath it, the symbol of Venus, her mirror. Soon, all that Gabe could focus on was just that individual word, the substance of the whole sentence seemed lost from his mind. The round surface of the mirror symbol shimmered as if it really were a metallic mirror itself. Eventually, that was the one and only thing that Gabe could see, filling the pool of the fountain, turning it into a flat, golden sheen with a completely reflective surface.

Gabe could now see his reflection in the polished metallic surface as he leaned over it. The shape of his body was becoming more and more defined in the mirror as all of the words, letters and symbols began to swirl around it. As he watched his reflection in the mirror began to change. It seemed to attract all the swirling shapes and symbols until they stuck against the mirror him, plastering the image with words and pictures like tattoos. One, in particular, caught his eye, a red heart that fluttered around like wings before attaching itself against the reflection of his chest.

Then, at that moment, he realised what he had been seeing. These abstract images and phrases were all drawn from the tattoos that he had seen on Saphy's body. Just as he thought that, the reflection began to change. His hair in the mirror pool became bright red, his body began to change shape, began to grow in the chest area until it showed breasts. He glanced down at his own body, but it was unchanged in any way. However, the image in the mirror was looking more and more like Saphy and less and less like Gabe. Yet it was still his reflection, when he moved his hand or turned his head, so did the image in the reflective surface.

"Remember," the melodic voice that made a tremble of excitement run down his spine uttered right into his head, "Remember that I like girls."

For a moment, Gabe felt the presence of the goddess stronger than ever, felt her hands running across his chest and thighs, leaving his body feeling more active and alive than it had been in a long while. He watched in the reflection as the image of Saphy, topless with a pair of pert, firm breasts, reached up and cupped her chest in her hands. Gabe realised that the reflection was, in fact, following his own hands, only he did not have a pair of breasts for himself.

His chest may have been completely flat to look down at, but his hands felt almost as if they were touching something real and fleshy. As he ran his hands over the imaginary mounds, he felt the sensation of nerves that were not really there running right up his spine. He watched as his reflection in Saphy's body began to fondle her breasts and began to feel the sensation of firm nipples between his fingers, getting perky and excited.

The same intense feeling of new sensations, of a body transformed, ran right down into his groin where he could feel his penis become erect again. There was something rubbing up against him that was making him become harder and harder, more and more aroused as he ran his fingers around his invisible chest and watched as Saphy in the mirror did the same. She opened her lips in an expression of pleasure that Gabe realised was his own and her eyes rolled back in her head.

He closed his eyes for a moment, savouring the intensity of the sensations he was feeling, and woke up. He was not in a field, naked beside a fountain, he was lying in bed in a cheap Parisian hotel beside an aggressive lesbian feminist. Despite the space in the double bed, he had moved around so much in his sleep that his body was pressed against hers, his groin against her thigh, rubbing up against her, giving him the arousal that was now highly embarrassing to him.

Beside him, Saphy began to stir and awaken, becoming aware, like Gabe a few minutes earlier, of her surroundings, becoming aware of the distressing arousal that her sleeping companion was displaying right up against her. She felt Gabe's body against hers and shivered away from him, sitting up and throwing back the blanket that covered both of them to look down at him shame-facedly trying to conceal the bulge in his pants.

"What the hell?" Saphy said, bleary eyed and just as irritable on waking as she was through a lot of the day, "Shit, I ask for one thing from you if we're sharing a bed. No funny stuff. And then I wake up to find you rubbing yourself against my leg with a massive boner, like some dog with no control over his actions whatsoever!"

"I...I...it's not my fault, I was asleep," Gabe stammered, blushing fiercely.

Saphy glared at him with an angry glint in her bright eyes, her flame red hair was even more messy and spiky from being slept on and gave her quite a sinister, threatening look that actually had Gabe retreating across to the other side of the bed. After a moment, however, her expression changed, her frown was transformed as her mouth creased into a smile and she let out a laugh of mixed mirth and triumph.

"Ha, you should see your face," she smirked, "I never knew I could be that terrifying. After all the murderers and secret societies of the last week, you're scared of being in bed with me?"

"Well, I'm not feeling immediately threatened by any of those other scary people."

"It's ok," she said, surprisingly reasonably, "I know that guys have no control over their bodies. I've known enough to know that you wake up like this all the time. It's nothing to do with me, right? I mean, it's not like you were having a sex dream about me or anything."

"Yeah, right," Gabe mumbled, blushing even deeper.

"Anyway, I think it's about time to get up," she went on, "We've got work to do. We're going back to the Louvre."

Gabe, however, could only think about his dream and what it meant. Did it tell him anything about the mystery or was it just his own hopes and fears? Had he really had a sex dream about Saphy? It did not seem that he felt that way about her. Sure, she was strangely fascinating, especially as she had opened up to him the day before, but he could not imagine lusting after her. No, he told himself, the dream did not mean he desired Saphy, just that he envied how confident and comfortable in her own body. That was why he had seen her in the mirror, wasn't it? Still, he had obviously been pretty aroused by the whole experience and Saphy had definitely been a part of it. Maybe it was just a sex dream.