Golden Horse - Chapter 2 from the scandalously provocative, shapeshifting 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 set in today’s world (of London) from the original Latin of Lucius Apuleius, which itself came from the Ancient Greek he wrote it in.

Chapter 2

I got off the train with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Willesden was, after all, the main scene of Michael's fantastic story. What if it were really true? What if a dozen covens really did lurk behind the net curtains and concrete facades of the municipal tower-blocks? On the other hand, I was a cocky young lawyer on the very big make, poised to make a few million from a decidedly dodgy Egyptian financier. You didn't believe all that crap about Psychical Research, did you?

A dingy corner of West London seemed, at first, an inauspicious location for such a financial killing and the house to which I had been directed seemed an extremely unlikely residence for a billionaire. It was on the corner of a crumbling, 1960s estate, which should have seen the demolisher's ball a long time ago. But, in its day, this particular example of urban experiment was radical and exciting. Its main claim to fame was the replacement of twenty-storey tower blocks with two-storey 'family homes', each with its own garden. But if its architect was hoping to recreate Hampstead Garden Suburb, he was quickly disillusioned. Within a year, the cutesy gardens and the family homes were the West End HQ of every drug-dealer, pimp and dosser on the block.

It was the kind of place that featured in hard-hitting photographic exhibitions at the Heywood Gallery. And the kind of place that attracted naive architectural students on Open House Weekend. On every other weekend, it simply attracted the police and the poor sods who actually had to live there.
The estate - bucolically (ironically?) called 'Mildmay Farm' - had been in the news enough times for it to seem vaguely familiar. I even recognized the burnt out cars and the boarded-up shops. The buildings themselves - could they ever have seemed exciting and innovative? - comprised twelve identical 'town-houses', built around a central quad. The quad itself was home to a dirty little playground, full of the usual assortment of glue-sniffing yoof, pitballs on short-chains and discarded needles. The atmosphere was less 'farm' and more piss, skunk and pound-shop aftershave.

The door to Number 4 was re-enforced with a metal grate. The ground-floor windows were similarly locked and barred. There were four burglar alarms, winking threateningly. There was a complicated intercom, which (naturally) didn't work. I banged at the door. And again. And again. After about ten minutes, there was the sound of bolts being drawn back. The door, still secured by a short security chain, was opened an inch and a wary, heavily accented voice asked who was there.
"What d'you want? What you selling? And if you're after a loan, you gotta know better than to come here. The shop's on the High Road. Isn't it."
I explained the brief and passed Dr Massoud's letter through the jangling gap. There was a rapid exchange in Arabic and I was, at last, admitted to the Holy of Holies. The Land of Cockaigne, Shangri-la, the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey, on which my golden future fortune was entirely - if rather precariously - based.

Dr Massoud might have been the richest Egyptian in London, but he affected the dress and hygiene habits of a Cairo beggar. As he shuffled to meet me, it took great effort not to physically recoil at the sickening smack of unwashed pants, advanced-staged halitosis and knock-off Brut.
But there was no choice but to shake his filthy hand - (I could not afford to offend my unknown benefactor at this crucial first stage) - and follow him down the passage to the kitchen, his mules slapping and sticking to the smeary lino. My host appeared to be about to sit down to lunch. He perched on a rickety old chair, fiddled with his amber beads, and scowled at the woman sitting opposite him. Since there was enough food only for two, he quickly dismissed his wife and bade me take her place. I looked in dismay at the tiny plate of hard falafel. Dr Massoud waved his arms expansively over this largesse:
"Please."

I had hardly started eating, when my generous host pressed a small buzzer under the table. As if by magic, a girl appeared. A girl who had stepped straight out the Arabian Nights. Straight out of the wettest of wet dreams. The harem queen. The Desert Sheik's youngest and fiskiest wife. The rose of Damascus. The Shulamite. If she was a permanent resident at number 4, it looked as if my luck might just have turned. She smiled a tiny, conspiratorial smile, and I toasted her silently: here's to a 1001 nights in your exclusive company.
"Astea, this is Mr Johnson. He is to stay with us for a week or so. Business matters. It is your duty to make him as welcome and as comfortable as possible. Take his bags to the spare room and show him the shower and the bog."
The thought of showering in such a dirty hole made me feel dirtier than ever. I assured the girl that I had no need to wash in the middle of the day and that I should, in any case, soon be obliged to go out. My host seemed dismayed at this sudden departure, but I assured him that I'd be back as soon as I had finished at the bank.

I hung about for a bit, chewing the cud (and the khat) with the good doctor, and then felt able to make my escape. I planned to find a gym, where at least I could wash off the dirt of both the journey and the destination. I also needed to eat something. The famous market seemed an ideal first stop.
As with so many markets, from Walthamstow to Medina, this particular maze of cut price tat claimed to be the longest (tallest, biggest, widest?) in the world. It was fucking enormous and packed with a seething mass of bargain-hunting humanity. Teenage with niqabs, skinny jeans and smart phones, pretty black boys with enormous afros and gold chains, elderly Irish women with shopping trolleys, angry mothers, drunk fathers, stoned Rastas, drop-out Sloanes, fast-talking Hassids, dealers, chancers, buyers, sellers, tramps and pimps. I wondered for what seemed like days through endless stalls, the leather jackets, the electric razors and novelty birthday cards, the pirate dvds and boot-leg perfumes, in search of something edible.

Finally, after a long season in every circle of hell, I found a kebab stall and hurriedly bought the biggest doner on offer. I was just about to take the first tantalising, chilli-sauced bite, my mouth all but drooling with the prospect, when a hand clamped down hard on my shoulder. I froze, the kebab lifted half-way to my mouth. What fresh hell was this? I could scarcely bring myself to turn round. Who could be the owner of this imperious, talon-like grip? Sistris? Her sinister, side-kick sister? Ricky, returned from the grave and demanding legal representation? Dr Massoud begging a free meal? The police? The head of chambers? The chairman of the Bar Council? When I eventually brought myself to turn and face my unknown assailant, I was so relieved that I almost laughed out loud. I was looking straight into the face of Peter Formica, an old friend - I use the term in its loosest sense - from Oxford days. Here, at least, was a beacon of sanity in a mad, mad world. A beacon of sanity, normality and stability. Or so, dear reader, I thought.

I was so relieved to see Peter that I could have hugged him. I could have kissed him on both cheeks, on all four if it had been remotely possible. But, as we were standing in the middle of a busy market at two o'clock on a busy Monday afternoon, I contented myself with shaking his hand warmly. Peter snatched his hand back as if he'd been electrocuted. He stared down at it in disgust, his lips curled back in something very like a snarl. He then proceeded to spray his hand meticulously with a small bottle of anti-bax. I was momentarily thrown-off balance by this bizarre behaviour, but I then remembered that Peter had always been fastidious to the point of mania. At college, he would never drink at the bar before he had wiped the bottle with an antiseptic tissue and he would always bring his own crockery to the dining room. On one memorable occasion, he was seen cleaning a small square of dance-floor so that he could shimmy in a germ-free security. It seemed that the intervening years had not reduced this worrying OCD. I tried valiantly to put the meeting back on an even keel.

"So, Peter! How's it going, mate? It's been a long time. Fancy meeting like this after all these years! But what the fuck are you doing in this arm-pit of the universe?"
Willesden had not so far impressed me and it seemed a very unlikely habitat for someone with a D.Phil in molecular biology.
Peter drew himself up to his full height and pointed to a polished badge on the left-hand pocket of a spotless uniform.
"As of last week, I am proud to call myself Chief Hygiene Inspector of Brent Council, with particular jurisdiction over mobile food-outlets."
I was just thinking that this must be poor old Peter's dream job, when he put on a pair of disposal plastic gloves and snatched the kebab clean out of my hands. Then, taking out a pair of regulation tongs, he threw it into a specially-marked polythene bag.
"Where did you buy it?"
He barked out the question with all the moral indignation of a Gestapo interrogator.
"Umm. Over there. See it? Dream Kebab?"
"I might have guessed. That dump's been closed down four times already in the last month."
I watched, sadly, as he marched off, full of righteous anger. More specifically, I watched sadly, as my delicious kebab was whisked officiously away, hermetically encased in a sterilised specimen bag. Never to be seen, or eaten, or even tasted, again.

I knew that I couldn't afford another lunch. Contrary to popular opinion, barristers are not all morally bankrupt millionaires. Most of us are jobbing journeymen, employed by their chambers on a very ad hoc basis. Whether we work or starve is entirely down to the whim of the clerks. And the chief clerk of my particular chambers had taken against me right from the start. It was obviously racism, but this was very hard to prove, even by a man with a first class degree in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford (floreat in aeternum).
Case after case was given to my colleagues, many of whom were a good deal younger and basically thicker than yours truly. I watched, in impotent frustration, as they cut their teeth on juicy murders, sinister gang-land killings, financial corruption and international money-laundering. If I was lucky - or if the clerk felt that I was becoming too restive - I was sometimes thrown a crumb or two, an adoption case, a parking fine, a drunk-and-disorderly. I had been qualified for years and had yet to see the inside of the Old Bailey. This was not only humiliating, it was financially crippling. I might have inherited some prime real estate in Lagos, but the current troubles had kept me at far more than arm's length from this particular gold-mine. A man's got to live, and it was with this noble end in mind that I had pitched up Willesden. But, on first inspection, its pavements did not seem exactly paved with gold.

Resigned to starvation, I contented myself with the thought that my gym membership was good for at least another month. I may be hungry, but at least I could be warm and clean for a few hours. I congratulated myself for having chosen a gym with outlets in even the grottiest corners of suburban London. I pushed open the familiar green doors, showed my pass to the bored, phone-checking security guard, and entered an entirely new world. A bright, white, clean world. A world in which it finally seemed safe to touch things, to sit down, to breathe, without fear of deadly infection. Even Peter Formica would be safe here.
The squalor of number 4 seemed to hang about me like a pall. I made a bee-line for the showers and there, for the first time in 24 hours, Lady Luck smiled upon me. On a little ceramic shelf was an unopened bottle of Yves Saint Laurent shower gel and a carelessly discarded pair of Speedos. I gave my poor, abused body a long and luxurious shower and eased myself into the dinky little posing pouch. The trunks were at least two sizes too small, but since my cock was the most prized and most consistently admired part of my entire anatomy, I gave a Gallic shrug of insouciance and stepped boldly out of the shower, across the marbled concourse and into the echoing chamber of the swimming pool itself.

I am not a vain man - at least, not always - but even I couldn't fail to notice, and to enjoy, the admiring glances. I strutted up and down for a luxurious few minutes, basking in the warmth of universal admiration. I did a couple of thrusts and flexes, a couple of squats and press-ups and generally limbered-up (showed off). I then took up my position by the diving board, legs apart, arms akimbo, pecs rippling, crack tantalisingly revealed and crotch bulging. Johnny Weissmuller redivivus. But, in fact, if the truth be told, I don't really like the actual swimming. The Atlantic rollers of my childhood had instilled a life-long fear of drowning. I would have been more than happy to remain on the edge for the rest of the afternoon, safe and dry, watching and being watched, but an astounding apparition forced me to take the plunge, in every sense of the word.

I was coming to believe that there must be some truth in Michael's freaky story. That there really was magic in the air of North West London. Why else, how else, had the lovely Astea tracked me down to an obscure swimming pool in the local gym? For there she was, cutting an athletic, effortless swathe through the fast-lane. My old partner in crime, Dr Massoud's most unlikely servant, my very own brown-eyed girl, my soul-mate, my destiny. In the couple hours since this vision had first appeared in my life, she had seemingly shed the seven veils. In fact, she had shed almost every veil and was wearing the skimpiest swimming attire that I had ever been fortunate enough to see. Her bikini top, clearly two sizes too small - (see how much we have in common!) - was provocatively tied at the side by a flimsy knot. Her impossibly cute buttocks were cut cruelly in-two by a sharp thong. As she swam, these two downy peaches of provocation rose rhythmically and mesmerically from the water. As I stood, open-mouthed and transfixed at the vision unfolding before me, I'm afraid that my interest in the nymph must have been all too obvious.

She swam over powerfully and looked up, as entrancing and deadly as Calypso to the ship-wrecked Ulysses.
"What do you think you're looking at, Mr Slimy Lawyer? Never seen a woman before? And don't think I don't know exactly what you're up to, both in this crumby pool and back at the ponderosa."
There was only one response to a challenge like this. Before you could say 'Tarzan', I had jumped manfully into the pool beside her. It all started innocently enough, with a couple of lengths of the Olympic-sized pool. Whoever thought that swimming was a good idea beats me. I'd have been much happier with a kidney-shaped Jacuzzi in a garden in LA. And I'm embarrassed to say how I struggled to keep up with the slippery mermaid and how exhausted I was. There was but one compensation for my sorry lack of sporting prowess. The regular splaying of the girl's legs inches from my mouth.
We kicked about for a bit at the deep end, treading water and pretending to chat ('Been a member long?', 'Come here often?'.... English translation: 'Fancy a fuck?'), but it wasn't long before we were entwined as closely as Hermaphroditus himself. We were no longer two, but one. The Roman poets knew a thing or two when they set their sexiest poems in rivers and the sea. There is something effortlessly erotic about water.

Her serpent tongue quickly found the deepest, most sensitive, most secret places of my face and mouth. My throbbing cock quickly found its merry way, past her muscled arse, inside the wet thong. She floated onto her back and let me stroke her bulging, straining breasts, her athlete's waist, her swan neck. Her beautiful, Naiad's hair floated around her like Ophelia. She was so utterly passive, so totally open to me, that she did, for one glorious, never-to-be-repeated moment, become the drowned maiden of so many erotic myths.
We were abruptly and cruelly woken from this aquatic reverie by the blast of a whistle and the harsh voice of the bullet-headed life-guard.
"Oi! You two! Romeo and bleedin' Juliet! Get out! Now! Both of you! And find a bedroom. This is swimming pool not a knocking-shop."
Momentarily separated by the necessity of using of separate changing rooms, we were soon re-united and coursing through the late afternoon streets, oblivious to everyone and everything except each other. But, on arrival at our mutual lodgings, I was in for another cruel disappointment. What is it with my life these days? However much bread I cast upon the water, it always comes back as so much shit. While I was, reasonably enough, expecting an afternoon of unbridled passion with the nymphomaniac nymphette, Astea announced that she had to start cooking the supper.

I ground my teeth and gripped my cock in hideous frustration, but such was her effortless eroticism that even watching her cook was like an infinitely tantalising foreplay. I could watch her forever. Whatever she did, it was a turn-on. A bolt of thunder to the bulging fire-ball between my thighs. I followed her every movement, greedily, obsessively, as she sashayed between the sink, the chopping board, the oven, the fridge. How could such a banal activity as cooking become so erotically charged that the whole kitchen sizzled with the charge? Nigella can lick her fingers as often as she likes, she is a mere babe in arms compared with my domestic goddess.
Every so often she would take pity on me, marooned on a stool by the window, and blow me a sluttish, promissory kiss. But most of the time she simply talked. And her conversation was not, unfortunately, about our forthcoming night of passion, but was exclusively concerned with her mysterious employer, Mrs Massoud. The woman's whose lunch I had (almost) eaten.

"So, as you probably noticed, the good Mrs Massoud is not an Egyptian like her husband and me. She is a West African, like you. More specifically, she is a Ghanaian. And she is also beautiful. Extremely beautiful. You caught only a fleeting glimpse of her before she was banished to the women's quarters, but you must have noticed. Someone with your obvious appreciation of the feminine must have noticed."
"I have eyes only for you."
Astea refused to rise to the bait and continued the panegyric of her elusive mistress.
"She is the original African Queen. Nefertiti, Dido, Cleopatra, Katherine Hepburn - they are nothing compared with her."
"So what, may I ask, is she doing with a dirty old Arab like Dr Massoud? Shouldn't she be living in a presidential palace in Lagos rather than a Council Estate in West London?"
I laughed cockily and for a wonderful, golden moment, Astea actually stopped cooking. She stopped pounding dough, grinding herbs and skinning chicken. She actually turned round and looked at me. She. Looked. At. Me. The goddess of love looked at me and I lived to tell the tale. She wiped her hands on her apron and put them on her hips.
'Dear little boy. Are you really so innocent of the ways of the big bad world? Has it so far escaped your notice that rich, ugly old men always marry beautiful women?"

Sitting in a kitchen, on a tall stool, with my legs dangling and kicking above the floor, watching a woman cooking, I did indeed feel both child-like and childish. I could have been back home in Nigeria, watching the old servant cooking supper and listening to her endless tales of witch-doctors and missionaries. As if to cement the fantasy, Astea strode over, mussed up my hair and drew me to her ample, maternal chest. Between contented nuzzles, which did little to get the dinner prepared, I manage to mutter a few muffled words.
"Well, maybe you're right, but he doesn't seem exactly lavish in his largesse."
Astea pushed me away so hard that I nearly fell off the stool.
"Some people have more patience than others." She glared at me. "When the good doctor dies, his widow will be one of the richest women in London, if not the whole of Europe. That is, if you don't get your hands on the money first."
I started to protest but she silenced me with a long kiss.

"We know all about you and your clever little games. Just don't try anything too clever, ok. You're playing with fire."
There was a long, rather strained silence. The sexy atmosphere was somewhat undermined by this perceptive reference to my more venal side. I tried to steer the conversation back to the mysterious Mrs M.
"So one day she'll inherit the earth, but in the meantime she puts up with a husband that looks and smells like the Cairo sewage system."
"What a fool you are and how little you understand. You are a poor, blind fool stumbling about in a world you cannot hope to understand."
I felt understandably piqued by this high and mighty tone and started to tell her so. I was silenced by a basilisque stare and the hieratic raising of an immaculately henna-ed hand.
"My mistress is the mistress of powers undreamt of here in the ignorant West. Even you, I fear, have lived so long amongst this benighted people that you have lost all perception of alternative reality. It is a great pity. You are an African. A West African at that. But you have entirely sold your birthright. To Mammon."
I bristled and shrank into my suit. She could read me like a book.
"So you should listen to me. Learn from me. I understand the powers of darkness, the powers of the night. I have the proper respect for those who can channel and harness such powers. For good or ill."
Astea still had her back to me. She was crashing the saucepans angrily and talking a great speed, but so quietly that I had to strain to hear.
"So, night after night, every night, she puts her husband to sleep. To a sleep so deep that it is indistinguishable from death."
"If she's as powerful as you say she is, why doesn't she just kill the bugger right now and inherit the filthy lucre while she's young enough to enjoy it?"
"It's simple. The longer she waits, the bigger the inheritance will be. And anyway, her powers are not infinite. She can use her spells to maim and cripple, even to separate the soul from the body, but never to cause permanent death."
Astea paused again. She went to the sink and started to clean the meat. The smell of blood filled the room.
"But there is another, far more important reason why she is happy to wait."
"She gets a ready supply of cockroaches for her spells?" I suggested, as an enormous specimen of the said creature scuttled across the formica table to the skinned chicken. Astea ignored the comment.
"Night after night, every night of every week, my mistress sleeps with the most beautiful men in the metropolis. And its all down to witchcraft. Witchcraft, pure and simple. White magic, if you prefer."

I had a sickening sense of déja vu. Or, more precisely, of déja entendu. For the second time in twenty-four hours, I had been told about witches living, and working, in North West London. Witches whose sole remit was sexual gratification. Or should I say sexual exploitation? I wondered if the men had any say in these supernatural liaisons. I shifted uncomfortably on the stool and wondered, not for the first time, what sort of world I had unwittingly entered. Maybe love spells were innocuous enough, maybe they were even quite fun (I was not adverse to experimenting), but West African witchcraft was usually associated with something far more sinister. At least these days. Who hadn't heard of poor Victoria Climbié? Astea ridiculed the connexion.

"That lot up at the Pentecostal Church reckon they know all about witchcraft, spirit possession and exorcism. But all they know is how to torture some eight-year old epileptic. A ten year-old with a nervous twitch. Everyone's heard of Victoria Climbié, but for every story like that that makes the head-lines, there are a hundred others that go unreported. Now I'm a good Moslem girl who'd rather slit her own throat than step foot in a church, but even I know enough about the 'Lady Apostles' to put them away for the rest of their vicious, evil lives. What they do has nothing at all to do with witchcraft and everything to do with power-games and child abuse."
I swallowed nervously and watched Astea as she talked. She still had her back to me, but I followed every twist and turn of her majestic, muscled arse, every toss of her luxurious, Cleopatra hair. There was an unhealthy juxtaposition between the urgent stirrings my loins and the subject of our conversation. I say 'conversation', but as you will no doubt have noticed, there was not a great deal of input needed from me.
"They know nothing. Nothing at all." She licked her fingers slowly and thoughtfully. "These witch-finders are nothing more than bored house-wives with delusions of grandeur. They're all desperate to be in the Sunday supplements. To be interviewed on Woman's Hour. News at Ten. To be bedded by the Pastor." She spat with contempt and anger. A gleaming globule glistened on the chicken. "They wouldn't recognize a real witch if she ..."
"Turned them into a frog?"

My companion suddenly turned around, her beautiful eyes flashing with fury. Since she was also brandishing a foot-long meat cleaver (the kind of goat that found its way into this particular kitchen was not the most tender), I soon regretted my flippancy. But she did not, on this occasion at least, castrate me. She decided instead to educate me. To deliver a lecture on modern witchcraft.
"A real witch, a bona fide, 21st century witch, has no distinguishing features. No warts, no caldron, no black cat, no book of spells. No Hogwarts education. They look just like you and me. Just like my mistress, the good doctor's third and most beautiful wife."
I nearly choked on the bottom-of-the-range, glucose-covered date.
"You expect me to believe that that disgusting runt has got three wives? Who does he think he is? Bloody Solomon?"
Astea shrugged and sniffed dismissively.
"I wouldn't expect an infidel like you to understand, but it's all in the Koran. Allah the All Merciful has allowed the faithful to take as many wives as they see fit. As even you seem to know, the greatest of the Patriarchs, from Abraham to David himself had many wives and many more concubines. But you probably won't see much of the other two. They spend most of their days in the Marble Arch Marks and Spencer, drowning their troubles - of which they have many - in an endless round of retail therapy. They do not have the advantages of their youngest colleague. They do not enjoy multiple orgasms with multiple men every night of the week and three times on Sunday."
"It's all right for some." I said, moodily. The way things were going, it didn't look like I'd achieve one orgasm in a month of Sundays. My beautiful interlocutor did not take the hint. She carried on, and on, about her mistress. She seemed so obsessed that I began to wonder if there was more to the relationship than mistress and servant.

"She never uses her extraordinary powers for harm or hurt. And she quite easily could. I suppose you could even call her white witch. Her spells are only ever cast in the furtherance of erotic satisfaction."
"And what more noble end than that?" I was beginning to despair of ever achieving erotic satisfaction myself. The swimming-pool clinch was taking on a dream-like quality and it looked increasingly unlikely that the culinary foreplay would ever become the play itself.
"And so it is, my poor innocent friend, that every night, she changes herself into a different animal and enters the bedroom of a different beautiful young man."
Astea suddenly stopped talking and once again turned to look at me. Or rather to scrutinize me, minutely. Much I was desperate for some attention, this seemed more of a medical examination than the look of love.
"I have been very stupid and very blind." She said, finally. "I shall have to keep you securely under wraps, locked in your room. If my mistress ever gets a proper look at you, there will be no escape. You can run all you like, but you will never hide, never escape. You will be her sex slave for life. Or at least until you reach the age of thirty, when she will spit you out like a sour grape."
Astea looked genuinely concerned for my safety, but as far as I saw it, things were getting better and better every minute. Despite all appearances to the contrary, this dirty little hovel really was the Promised Land. Inside its gated, grated, municipally-thin walls were two beautiful women gagging for sex and a silly old miser just waiting to be defrauded of his ill-gotten gains. It was as a good as a Roman Comedy, with the big advantage of actually being true. Were I cat, I'd be purring. Being - for the moment at least - merely a man, I contented myself with licking my lips and smiling in anticipation. And playing along with this crazy fantasy.
"I put myself entirely under your protection, mistress. I shall promise not to move my bed without your express permission. You can even tie me up if you like."
The thought of being the sex-slave to such a thoroughly superior dominatrix was a surprisingly stirring fantasy. Astea herself seemed disappointingly unmoved by the suggestion, so I let her carry on with the strange story of Mrs M's magical powers.
"It's very simple really. If she wants to get out of the house and the good Doctor is downstairs counting his pennies, she simply transforms herself into a bird and hey presto! Every open window in London is within reach. Of course, metamorphosis of this sort is one of the simplest, oldest and most widely practised of all magic spells."
Changing yourself from a Ghanaian nymphomaniac into a seagull and back again didn't seem to be to be exactly simple and neither - in my experience - was it widely practiced, but I said nothing and let Astea carry on with her 'lecture', which ranged from the Arthurian romances to 19th century Papua New Guinea. I wasn't the least bit interested in this anthropological excursus, but I was intrigued by three things. 1. How did an Egyptian servant know so much about such an arcane subject? 2. How was it possible for a woman to be so irresistibly beautiful? 3. How and when could I witness the transformation of my client's wife?

Perhaps the servant had somehow absorbed a modicum of her mistresses' doubtful gifts. She certainly seemed able to read my mind. As soon as I tuned in again to what she was saying, I caught her telling me that if I wanted to see this miracle for myself, with my very own eyes, she'd keep me posted. But we had to be careful. Very careful. There is nothing witches hate more than being spied on. And I didn't want to be turned into a beaver, now did I?
As I tried to remember where and when I had last heard mention of this unlikely animal, Astea turned her attention back to the meal. We both fell silent. I, for one, had a very great deal to think about.

Chapter 3 will be posted soon

© 2017 Mimi L. Thompson

You can see other my latest post here https://steemit.com/thewritersblock/@britlib16/jesus-is-nailed-to-a-cross-short-story-contest-thewritersblock-religious-fiction