Syrinx Debauched

"You have given me no lines to speak, sir."

Arabella's voice rang back from the empty galleries with an apprehension she hadn't intended. With a full house before her, murmuring among themselves or chaffering for oranges, her note would rise above the hum, limpid and pure as a lone flute. Now the benches were empty; her only auditors were the moldering wooden sculptures on the theater's columns, their colors cracked and flecked off. The echo of her voice seemed too loud to her, too sharp.

"I would have this scene extempore. You see my premise," Morton answered. The gentleman sat in the wings, plunged in darkness; she could see nothing of him but the coil of molten gold that tumbled from his periwig over the wine-red velvet of his coat's shoulder. Candles on the forestage burned low from the afternoon's performance, and one or two had already guttered out, their wicks invisible now beside the feeble glare of their fellows. By that faint and capricious light, the nymphs and satyrs cavorting on the painted flats behind Arabella seemed more sinister than gay. They leered where they had once smiled, pondering the pursuits of the umbrageous forest and not those of the glade. She cast them a glance before looking down at the parchment page she held.

"The Nymph Syrinx pursued by Lustful Pan," she read, squinting. Her lips curved in an attempt at levity. "But here am I alone, my lord, and no god in view."

"That shall be remedied." In the shadows behind Morton, chains rattled like a fall of icicles; that sudden shiver of sound swept over the bare forestage, pooled around the girl's ankles and sandle straps. She was bare below the thigh, clad only in the taffeta confection of the day's acting, where she had played the Amazonian huntress. Arabella trembled and shifted her weight, and watched.

What emerged seemed to her more beast than man. He hunched; rags decayed about his shoulders and hips, and his hair clung together in clumps long unwashed. Whatever it was, a shackle was locked to its waist, and the chain snaked away over the boards, lost in the wings. From beneath that festering mop, Arabella caught the gleam of eyes watching her.

"Behold, the god appears from the wood," Morton said calmly.

"From Bedlam, rather," Arabella spat, taking a step backwards toward the warmth of the footlights. Incredulity twisted her lips and the voice with which she lashed him. "Here is a madman, or one paid to act so. Have you done with your jest, my lord?" She watched the thing shuffle towards her, his chain tinkling behind, and waited- with shallow and quiet breath- for those links to go taut.

"Is the Lord of the Wood a gentle god?" Link by leaden link, the madman's chain fell under the light of the candles. Step by step he stalked. "Did you know, Arabella," Morton went on, with only the faintest lilt in his voice, "that our word 'panic' comes from the great god Pan?"

Arabella's eyes fixed on the chain. Her breathing caught beneath her breasts.

"It is said," Morton explained, "that Pan's shout could strike such a fear into lost woodland wanderers that they would lose all reason. It is said that he could make a human heart spasm in the chest like a rabbit's pursued by wolves across a snowy field."

The last links came into Arabella's view. They were loose on the ground. Softly the beggar snarled.

"And here is the play begun."

Arabella turned and fled.

Perhaps in her terror, she would have plunged over the edge of the stage and down into the pine benches of the pit. All too quickly, though, she heard the rash cackling of the chain, felt a wind at her back, and then the rough weight of him; tumbled, yelping, among the footlights. Her fingertips clawed at the wooden verge of the forestage, but the man was too heavy for her to drag herself forward. The bedlamite forced her onto her back. Arabella's perfect voice crept cravenly from her lips, ululating with her fear.

"Listen to my Syrinx," Morton soothed, with a note of satisfaction. He sounded as if he were moving. "There is the music I wish to hear."

Arabella steeped herself in frenzy. Her heart shook; the foot candles seemed to scorch her bare skin, brought to a pitch of sensitivity by the hunter's presence. When the lunatic's breath washed across her throat, she closed her eyes and imagined oaks burning around her, the lurid glow and hot wind of a conflagration kindled solely to light the wood god's pleasure. When he nudged aside the frailty of her blouse and smudged the sudden sweat on her breast with his dirty fingers, her nipple hardened like a pebble from the stream. The animal in Arabella let spill a dulcet whimper, and could not know why.

Opening her mouth so, Arabella found lips on hers, cool and smooth and articulate in their play. Not the unshaven madman, she realized, but Morton himself, now standing beneath the stage where she was splayed. That kiss trembled with unvoiced delight. He unbound her hair and let it fall into his palms.

Arabella squirmed in the clutches of a great and terrible thing. She ground her thighs together in a vain attempt to dislodge the god that rode her, to soothe the itch that now coiled like a painted adder below her belly. When she felt a knee between hers, she fought and failed with sheer joy of muscular, desperate creatures. The chained man slicked his thigh on her sex, preparing her, and she groaned against Morton's lips.

Morton's tongue and the madman's knobbed branch of a prick thrust into her at once; her soft body shuddered and shaped itself to both by sure instinct. Her back lifted from boards worn to a gloss by the passage of many feet, her breast into the god's hand. Her calf, cross-lashed by leather straps, hooked his shackled waist.

And then Pan fucked his Syrinx to the chime of chains, to the sound of her moans poured helplessly into Morton's mouth, as if she might sing in his throat and so express the music of his silence. Arabella writhed as she gave herself willingly to the candle's flame, to the insistent flesh filling her, to the heat that coursed her skin.

At last, Aubrey Morton broke the kiss. Arabella's cry of climax- high and liquid and pure- wantoned with the shadowed galleries. The satyrs looked on with smiles of paint.

As that flute-song died away into broken gasps, the gentleman reached across the nymph and carefully took hold of his lunatic's leash.