Golden Horse - Chapter 13 Part 5 - adapted from the scandalously provocative, politically incorrect Latin classic 'Asinus Aureus'

Accidentally turned into a horse by his lover (who’s a witch) a young lawyer's plan to defraud a billionaire goes wildly wrong. Destined to see the cruel crazy erotic world through equine eyes, finally he manages to escape to become an animal rights activist.

Retranslated and (liberally) adapted in today’s world (of London) from the original Latin of Lucius Apuleius (a Tunisian Roman citizen), which itself came from the Ancient Greek he wrote it in.

WARNING: The Greeks and Romans had no problem with 'adult themes' and outlooks on life (from 2,000 years ago!) which are sometimes very different from today's and may shock some readers to the core.

As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road. Take it."
"Golden Horse" is your fork.
Afraid of what lies ahead? Then turn back.

Part Five

It was impossible to tell the time. There were no clocks, no illuminated faces on Philippe Patek watches, no street-light seeping through the heavy curtains and certainly no sign of the dawn. There were no sounds of late-night revellers and no sounds, either, of early morning workers. It could have been any time of the night, from midnight to five. All I knew was that he was asleep. Fast asleep. Sated, satisfied, exhausted by tonight's pyrotechnic display of masculinity. I gently licked my lips and tasted, still, the evidence of his ardent desire. I could still feel the tell-tale, snail-like trail shining across my naked breasts. Now more than ever did I long to see him. To see his face. His body. His merry, sleeping cock.
His arm lay heavily across my bare stomach. Gingerly, even fearfully, I lifted it off and crept out of bed. I had spent the whole of the afternoon and evening memorising the lay out of the bedroom, the location of the various tables and chairs. Now, stumbling along, hands out-stretched like a blind-woman, I navigated my way across the enormous space. Wincing at the creak of a floor board, swearing softly as the leg of a chair scraped my shin, nearly giving up as I found myself inexplicably in the shower, sobbing silently as I repeatedly failed to be where I need to be.

But, somehow, after what seemed like an hour, I managed to locate my hand-bag and somehow, with hands trembling so much that I could hardly open the clasp, I found my mobile and switched it on. All at once, the room was full of its strange, purply light, alive with shapes and shadows. An artificial, electronic world, as mysterious as the depths of the sea.

And all I needed to do was to turn around. To shine the light on the bed and see. Ecce, homo!
But I suddenly realized, with absolute certainty, that I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life. I was about to ruin everything. Not only this desperately exciting affair, but my whole mental, spiritual and physical well-being. Forever. I could almost hear the voices telling me not to be such a bloody fool. I also realized that my sisters had realized as much. Their seemingly throw-away idea was in fact a meticulously crafted, deliberate plan to ruin me.

But, by then, it was much too late. I was gripped by a curiosity as fatal and irresistible as that of Pandora herself. Or Eve. Or Psyche. Or Semele. All those poor fools whose stories litter the world's mythology. Girls who couldn't wait. Who had to know. Whatever the consequences. They say that curiosity killed the cat and I was convinced that it was about to kill me, too. At one and the same moment I knew two things with absolute certainty. I knew that I had to turn round. I had to shine the light on the bed. And that - if I did - the world would end.

The simple act of moving my body one hundred and eighty degrees seemed to take eternity. But, finally, I was gazing full in the face of .... The face of whom? Of God? Of Love? Of Beauty Itself? Of perfection, of fullness, of wholeness, infinitely mysterious and infinitely desirable, a bottomless pool in which I would drown forever and yet never die. I felt such a visceral adoration of the man lying on the bed that I knew my desire would never, could never, be sated, but would stretch out eternally. My thirst would never be slaked. It would only be sharpened by every new sexual act. Every revelation would lead to a greater desire to know more, for more to be revealed. My desire was destined to grow and grow and grow until it filled the entire, infinite universe. This was It. This was the Supreme Revelation. The Beatific Vision. The Summum Bonum. The Unio Mystica.

Just as I was realizing the full import of this world-shattering, mind-blowing encounter - I WAS SEEING GOD FACE TO FACE - my phone suddenly started ringing. At first, I couldn't place the sound. The banal, quotidian noise was so absurdly at odds with this supreme mystical experience that I was literally at a loss. Poised between two worlds. Caught between Narnia and the wardrobe. After a minute, the ringing stopped and I could soon hear the raucous tones of my oldest sister filling the room.

"Well? Did you do it? What's the story? Are you shagging the elephant man or what?"
At that, she hooted with laughter.
"Amina? Amina? Are you there? Amina!"
The 'man' on the bed, so recently fast asleep, woke up. At first, he seemed unaware of what had woken him. He stretched and turned over, ready to fall asleep again. But, as he turned over, he saw the phone, the light and me. Naked and shivering. Cringing. Watching him with a thousand eyes. Devouring him with a thousand mouths. Without speaking or even looking in my direction, he got out of bed. I watched, paralysed, as he dressed - slowly, methodically and silently - and left the room. I could hear him walking softly down the stairs and gently opening and shutting the front door.
I was only then that I allowed myself to cry. Great, wracking sobs that shook my whole body. I hurled the phone against the wall and curled up in the bed like a wounded animal.

I howled an inhuman cry, loud enough, surely, to split the universe itself. The primal scream of the fall of Lucifer, of Christ on the Cross, of the numberless damned. I had lost what they had lost. I, too, was forsaken by God, abandoned, bereft and utterly alone. Sleep, when it finally came, was the comfort of oblivion, of annihilation. Like a patient etherised on a table.

The morning came with a bolt of shocked horror. My mind raced like an ice-cube in a cocktail shaker and I threw up repeatedly in the absurd marble bidet. Even I knew that I had to get out. I couldn't stay in the room. A minute more and I'd throw myself out of the window into eternity. And so, with a superhuman effort, I found a dressing gown and walked, as teeteringly as a stroke-victim, down the endless stairs. As soon as I reached the ground-floor, I realized that I was not alone. The mornings were usually as quiet as the grave. My breakfast would be laid out on the buffet and I would hear no-one until at least ten o'clock. But, on this particular morning, the ground floor was full of the sounds of activity. A discrete activity, but activity nonetheless. The switch of a plug, the opening of the fridge, the hum of a coffee grinder. The noises seemed somehow embodied. I knew that they were not made by
the friendly, familiar Voices, but by someone real. And new. And frightening.

I pushed open the heavy door and stood in the hitherto un-entered kitchen.
"Virginia Josephs.'
She stretched out a perfectly manicured hand, with cool, long fingers and a single, huge ring.
"Call me Ginny. And ignore the surname. I always try to. Marry in haste, repent at leisure."
She took off her sun-glasses - why she was wearing them in the first place was anyone's guess - and studied me minutely.
"And you must be Amina. The latest little fool who thought that she could take control and make her own rules. It's always the same. And it's always a mistake."
She sat back and continued to scrutinize me. From the top of my hair to my little bare toes.

"I suppose you're not so bad looking. A distinct improvement on the others. Things were looking quite promising. My son was beginning to think that you might just have made the grade. Might. Until you ruined it all."
She was suddenly on her feet, standing an inch away from my face, and towering above me in her heels. With an imperious flick of effortlessly aristocratic hands, she had undone the silk cord and exposed my quivering naked body. She was soon running her cool palms all over my very private parts, expertly and somehow appraisingly. All within a second.

I jumped away as if I electrocuted.
"Get the fuck off me."
I wrapped the flimsy house-coat as tightly around me as possible and retreated into the furthest of the cavernous kitchen, breathing heavily and glaring at the over-sexed bitch. I felt as cornered and endangered as a fox at bay. It only then occurred to me what was the most obvious explanation of the whole sorry story. I had been auditioning for a high-class knocking-shop, with a very specific and very kinky remit. If 'Ginny' hadn't been (deliberately?) blocking the exit, I'd have run out of that room faster than Donald Trump from a mosque. As it was, I had no choice but to stay where I was and listen to what she had to say.

It was all so vile and hateful that I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and stamp my feet. She polluted the kitchen. She shouldn't be here. She mustn't be here. This was the cook's domain. The cook and the housekeeper and sometimes the butler. And where were all the servants? Had they left, too? Or had he simply turned off the computers? My mind was a swirling, seething mass of unanswered, unanswerable questions. I was dimly aware that the woman had been speaking for some time, but I only caught the last few, poisonous clauses.

"And I very much doubt whether you'd have had the intellectual capacity to understand the importance of what we're trying to do here. Your behaviour last night has proved as much. I would say that I was disappointed in you, but that would imply that I had any expectations in the first place. I have no idea where he found you, but you had better return there as soon as possible."
She peered down at me with ill-disguised contempt.

"And it surely goes without saying that any attempt to find my son or to contact him in any way at all will inevitably end in failure and distress. I expect you to have left - " she paused to consult a tiny, limited edition Cartier watch - "by eleven. The house is shortly to be sold and the agent has clients due at midday on the dot. You are hardly a selling point. It's all coffee and fresh bread these days. Not winging exes."
With that, she turned her back on me and clipped smartly out of the room, out of the house and out of my life.

For about an hour, I couldn't move. I remained where I was in the corner of the kitchen. I had sunk down to the floor and sat there, paralysed, my heart beating to a crazy rhythm, the bile rising thickly and a constant dizziness causing the room to sway about, sickeningly. It was, I suppose, merely a panic attack, but at the time I really thought that I was about to die. I contemplated calling an ambulance, but quickly decided that I'd rather die than live without him. And let's see how much of a selling-point a corpse is, Mrs-fucking-Josephs.

Wallowing in such morbid thoughts, I suppose I regained a modicum of self-control and self-respect. Somehow, somewhere, I became aware of a clock striking and I knew that I needed to start packing. I didn't really want to die. Not just yet. And certainly not here.
It didn't take long to pack, for the simple reason that I had brought nothing with me. Since I never went out - except to meet my sisters - I had spent all day, everyday, in a dressing gown. It was odd to be wearing clothes again. It was even more odd to be out of the house. Back in the world. The real, hateful world. Fairy-tale over. Finis.

The driver could see that something was very wrong and suggested everything he could think of. Did I want the hospital? The doctor? A priest? Did I want to borrow his Nokia to phone a friend - or the Samaritans? Did I want a shoulder to cry on? Or a swift half at the Nag's Head? He was so ridiculously sweet that I nearly stopped crying. But then I remembered the unspeakable things that had just happened to me and I was soon sobbing uncontrollably. Crying like never before. Crying like I'd never stop. A Pacific ocean of useless, childish tears. By now we'd arrived at Tite Street and were pulled up right outside my own front door. The driver would only agree to unlock the car-doors once I'd promised that my whole family was waiting inside, ready to scoop me up in one big, loving embrace.

It was a lie, of course. Lucy and Bea may be big, but they know nothing about either love or embracing. In any case, they were never at home at this time of day. Since, it was Thursday, they were presumably having their bowels flushed out by some twerp in a plastic over-all. I didn't know why they didn't just bite the bullet and have a tape-worm fitted. I also knew that my father would not be at home for another few hours. He and Adam would be on their weekly visit to the local swimming baths.
The house was, therefore, utterly silent. So silent that I was almost afraid to cry, to break its cool, afternoon tranquillity.

The first thing I did was race up the stairs and switch on the computer. Of course, I had tried to log on in the taxi, but my 'phone battery was flat from weeks of non-use. With fingers trembling so much that I could hardly type, I somehow managed to find the web-site. What else I found, or didn't find, brought me to the brink of death itself.

Every vestige of him was wiped away. It was as if he'd never existed. A total blank. Nada, nada, nada. I tried everything, roaming site after site, like a thing possessed. But since I had never known anything about him, not even his name or his job, it was like searching for the deus absconditus himself. After about an hour, I decided to check out the Estate Agent's site. There was the house, right on the front page. In all its beauty. With a farcical price-tag. As I scrolled through artistic shots of the rooms I had once known so well, I felt such a sense of loss that I was soon crying all over again. Crying for a house.

I spent the whole afternoon on the internet. I returned again and again to the dating site. I checked my e-mail inbox, my face-book page, my tweeter feeds and instagram account at least twenty times an hour. By about 7pm, I realized that I was becoming hysterical. I was locked in a crazy, hopeless spiral. I felt like Sir Percival being told that the Grail had never existed in the first place, that he'd imagined it all. I was staring at a blank screen and a very blank future. I quickly realized that if I didn't stop I'd be in the loony-bin. And that really wouldn't help matters.

And so I forced myself to stop. I forced myself to leave the room and walk downstairs to join the others. For the past hour or so, I had heard enough sound to realize that I was no longer alone. And by now I craved company. I crossed the familiar parquet floor and opened the door of the living room, where my father and my middle sister were enjoying, if that is at all the right word, pre-dinner drinks. Since Beatrice never bothered to address my father, unless it was to ask for a loan, the atmosphere was less than harmonious. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. I assumed she was on a date with Arkady, watching some council-estate kids knock each other unconscious. For my oldest sister, boxing was just another sort of porn. This was probably true of her fiancé, too, however much he talked the talk about deprivation and opportunity and the channelling of aggression.

No sooner had I entered the room than my father, his dear face wreathed in smiles, cried out a hero's welcome.
"Darling! Darling girl! The wanderer returns! And so much sooner than I had thought. Than I had hoped! You look wonderful. You have obviously had a super time and must tell us all about it."

With much difficulty and obvious pain, my poor old Dad lifted himself from the chair, with the help of two stout sticks. He stood, swaying unsteadily, while I hugged him. Really hugged him. I held him tight and felt every bone beneath the thick, Harris Tweed jacket. In less than a month, he seemed to have lost a couple of pounds. At the very least.
"Fix yourself a drink, my dear and come and sit down next to your poor old Dad. You must be exhausted. Airports are the very devil. Or did you do the decent thing and go by train?"

I did as I was told. I fixed myself a quadruple gin and braced myself for the worst. I did not like the look in Bea's eyes. Not one little bit.
"So what've you brought back with you, eh? My dreary old study could certainly do with a new painting or two. Especially one executed by your fair and skilful hand."
He lifted his eye-brows, questioningly.
"Well, don't be shy, Amy! What's the title of your new masterpiece? Florence from the Arno? Assisi at Dawn? Wisteria at the Villa Hadriana?"

He leant back in his chair, took a sip of whiskey and smiled his unique, inimitable smile. It broke my heart. But what happened next smashed it into a thousand pieces.
Bea stretched out her stubby, leather-encased legs and blew out a long plume of cigarette smoke. She knew how bad this was for someone in Dad's delicate condition, but she couldn't have cared less. She then leant over and pattered his withered left knee in an outrageously patronizing manner.

"Dear Daddy. How I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid that daughter number three has been telling some rather big porky-pies. She hasn't any new paintings to show you, because she hasn't done any painting. In Italy or indeed anywhere else. For the past few weeks, she has been shacked up in Knightsbridge with a decidedly dodgy, pervy weirdo. But - "
At this point, my sister broke off and stared minutely at me.
"Yes, I'm sure I'm right! He has just today given her the old heave-ho."
Beatrice crowed with delight. I emitted an involuntary cry of pain and anguish. Our father sat in bewildered silence, looking from one to the other of us, vainly seeking an explanation.
I stood up.
'Dad. Dad. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.'
My voice was cracking with tears.
'It's so hard to explain. It's all a mess. But please, please, believe that I never meant to hurt you.'
'Then why did you lie? I simply can't understand it. I can't understand you. I can't understand any of it. When have I ever come between you and your beaus? When have I ever been anything but wholly supportive of your romantic endeavours? You surely know that nothing on earth would make me happier than to see you happy and settled. So why? Why? Why all this need for subterfuge?'

He was almost crying and so was I. My sister was laughing. I simply couldn't think of anything to say to explain the situation. To excuse myself. To lessen my father's hurt and confusion. All I could do was agree with what he'd said and apologize all over again. It didn't help. The atmosphere was distinctly frosty as we trooped into the dining room.

© 2017 Mimi L. Thompson

The next part will be published soon

For previous chapters (some of which are posted as nsfw because of 'adult themed' content not photographs) please visit my blog page. Your support is much appreciated and comments are most welcome

You can find my other ebooks on Amazon Kindle Unlimited "Under The Shadow of Vesuvius" - Coming of age in the age of depravity in the Malibu of the Ancient World.

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