Chapter 16

Ann Fleming made a final dab with the brush in one dark corner of the canvas, then put down both brush and palette and stretched. She walked slowly around the perimeter of the glassed- in cupola that perched atop the huge house. Even the painting had failed to ease her restlessness, as it used to do.

For years, every time the tides of the moon had tugged at her, and the inescapable woman's nuisance rendered her useless for the complete kind of sexual romping her nature demanded, she had come up here and fought the irritability by painting. But when the first warning drops had appeared last night, right after a wildly satisfying sexual bout, she had not wanted to come up here.

For the first time in years, she felt a great reluctance to be isolated from her family, even by the small distance that would allow her to be heard if she yelled at them.

And for the first time since Tommy's birth, she had not douched away the fluid which had been spurted into her, if one were to discount the instances which had occurred in that French farmhouse.

She'd blocked her passage this time, she knew, as much to retain the precious semen inside her as long as possible, as to catch the red stains of her womanly curse.

What was happening to her these days? What was happening to all of the family?

They'd all seemed to be throwing off the effects of their submergence into the depths of incest, even before they left Marseilles. Yet there had been a festering inside each of them, an imitating something which-like the oyster-each had coated to stop the irritation. But it wasn't pearls they had produced. Just a hard, cold core of something foreign and frightening. And at unforeseeable moments, that cold hardness would become warm, then build such inner fires that it couldn't be ignored.

She'd watched all of them closely. They'd all watched each other. Not that any of them be grudged any other the smallest pleasure. But each seemed to have, at those moments when the coldness of that knot within turned to heat, a possessive hunger which made them reveal the naked desires they tried to suppress. It couldn't go on indefinitely like this. Either the evil forces within them could be exorcised, or something disastrous should happen.

All of them had come into this life with a healthy body and with a strongly sexual nature, which also should be healthy. Could those brief episodes of forced incest be the total cause of their breakdown? Would these incestuous hungers never have come to the surface but for the despicable Gerault?

Gerault! I hope he's miserable there on Devil's Island, or where ever it is that they've sent him! If he hadn't done those things to us, we might be a happy family yet, today.

Shakespeare didn't cover it all when he said that the evil men do lives after them. The evil that's done unto you lives on, too. It has a horrible life of its own!

She felt the stir of longing increase in her, and she tightened her vaginal muscles on the steadily swelling tampon within her.

I wish it were a cock-a big, pulsing, spurting cock, filling me up till I splashed over, till it flowed all over me! Oh-h-h! Will this obsession never let up?

Is it a weakness that we can never hope to overcome? And was it the same weakness that made us cooperate with Gerault? Would other people have endured the physical tortures csen death -rather than perform the first incestuous act?

But it wasn't the threat of personal pain that swayed us-it was the threat to another. I couldn't let Tommy be tortured to death-so I gave in. I'm sure it was the same way with him. And with Chuck end Darla. It acts our love for each other that made us do it.