House of Dark Delights (20 page)

One

August 1884

N
OTICE, IF
you will, the heroic dimensions of the generative organs,” said Professor Elijah Wheeler, gesturing toward one of the satyr statues as he reclined in the pool, sipping a glass of wine.

Inigo smiled to himself as he contemplated the statue, which depicted the penetration from the rear of a buxom beauty bent over at the waist with her arms gripping a column of the bathhouse.
Heroic dimensions.
Not horselike, or grotesque, or even freakish, as they'd ofttimes been described, but
heroic.
He liked that.

“In concert with the normal legs and the diminutive horns,” Wheeler said, “such a representation would appear to suggest the original concept of a young satyr as envisioned by the early Greeks. This bathhouse, on the other hand, is clearly Roman, and of much more recent construction—around the time of Christ, give or take. Romans in that era generally depicted satyrs as half man, half goat, with hooves, thick, shaggy haunches, larger ears, and less prominent, or certainly less tumescent, genitalia. Wouldn't you agree, Lee?”

The dark-haired, bespectacled young man soaking in the far end of the pool with his nose in a history book—Thomas Lee, Wheeler's assistant in his mythological studies courses at Harvard University—looked up, blinking. “Sorry, Dr. Wheeler. What were you…?”

“The satyrs. More evocative of ancient Greece than of Rome, given the outsized penis and so forth, wouldn't you agree?”

Lee's ears flushed crimson as he glanced at the third member of their party, who had arrived at the chateau just the evening before for a weekend visit while touring the landmarks of Europe.

Catherine Wheeler, the professor's petite, auburn-haired daughter, was one of those independent-minded young females who, despite a fair degree of natural comeliness, inherited in this case from her father, did her best to cultivate an aura of seriousness. A self-proclaimed “disciple of the natural sciences,” she wore, despite the oppressive heat, a high-buttoned shirtwaist, tweed vest, and sensible, ankle-length riding skirt. A drearily utilitarian leather pouch hung from her belt, next to the chain of a man's pocket watch that she had checked twice during the half hour she'd been sitting there, for reasons that eluded Inigo. Equally baffling was her habit of calling her father by his Christian name. When Inigo had asked her why, she'd replied,
Because that's his name.
She appeared to be corsetless, given the natural contours of her waist and bosom, a fact that might have imparted some sexual allure but for her calculated dowdiness.

Of the four people lounging by the pool that afternoon, Catherine alone had declined to immerse herself, explaining that, unlike her traveling companions, she'd neglected to pack a bathing costume. At breakfast, Lili had offered to lend her one, but the young woman had declined. She wasn't much for taking the waters, she'd explained, and in any event, she didn't plan to linger very long at the pool, having planned to spend the greater part of the afternoon exploring the geological formations in the cave.

“Rest easy, Lee,” chuckled Wheeler, having noticed his assistant's discomfiture. “Catherine's sensibilities are not so fragile that she would swoon at the proper anatomical terms. She's a scientist, don't forget. And really, these statues aren't much worse than what she saw at Pompeii, and she was only twelve then.”

“Elijah's right. Don't be such a square-toes, Thomas.” Catherine, sitting with her legs curled under her at the edge of the pool, a walking stick across her lap, pulled a cigarette case from a pocket of her skirt and flipped it open.

“Are those American?” asked Inigo, sitting up eagerly.

“Lucky Strikes. Help yourself.” She leaned over to offer the smokes to Inigo, lounging in the water several feet from her.

“Much obliged,” he responded, employing an expression he'd picked up from an American dime novel called
The Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood.
He slid a cigarette from the case, sniffing it appreciatively.

Thomas Lee scowled as he watched Catherine light Inigo's cigarette, a reversal of traditional roles that amused Inigo far more than it seemed to amuse their young visitor. A subtle, covetous undercurrent coursed through the water from Lee's direction.

Jealousy!
thought Inigo as he drew in a lungful of fragrant Virginia tobacco.
Excellent.
Perhaps he would pretend to woo her, just for the melodrama. Not that he had any serious designs on her. Her avowals of sophistication aside, it was abundantly clear to him from her dress and demeanor, not to mention the way she avoided looking directly at the statues, that she wasn't at all comfortable with Grotte Cachée's atmosphere of casual licentiousness. She might call Lee a square-toes, but he'd bet anything she was just as much of a prig, if not worse. The seduction of such a woman was, in Inigo's experience, a tedious venture that, even if successful, yielded lackluster results. He preferred his conquests experienced and enthusiastic. One peek at the old heroic dimensions was all it generally took for that type to lie down and throw up her skirts.

“Julia did insist on keeping Catherine out of the Pompeian brothels so she wouldn't see those frescoes,” Wheeler continued, Julia being his beloved wife, whom he'd lost to cancer five years earlier; he'd mentioned her several times during supper last night, and again at breakfast this morning. “She'd wanted to keep her away from Pompeii altogether. She was concerned for her daughter's innocence, as any mother would be, but she relented when I explained the historical significance of the ruins, and the benefit to Catherine's intellectual advancement. Julia and I felt strongly that females, especially those as thirsty for knowledge as Catherine, deserved the same academic opportunities as males. So, what do you make of them, Lee?”

“Sir?”

“The satyrs. More Greek than Roman, yes?”

“I…” The young man peered over his reading spectacles to survey the statues, his brows quirking in interest. “Yes. Yes, I suppose they are.”

“Why on earth would first-century Romans have sculpted satyrs in the style of Greeks from centuries before?” Wheeler asked rhetorically. “It's a conundrum, and a maddening one. I shan't get a good night's sleep till I figure it out.”

Catherine sighed through a plume of smoke. With an indulgent smile, she said, “As always, Elijah, I shall never understand how you and Thomas can devote so much time and energy to all this mythological twaddle. I'm sure there are interesting facets to it—I loved fairy tales myself when I was a girl—but is it really worth the devotion of minds such as yours? Who cares which variety of satyr some long-dead sculptor chose to carve? They're
satyrs,
for heaven's sake. They aren't even real.”

“They were real to whoever carved these statues,” Thomas countered.

“He was a sculptor,” she said. “He was told to carve satyrs, so he carved satyrs. He probably just made them up out of his imagination, using statues he'd seen in the past for reference.”

“Not at all,” said Inigo.

All heads turned toward him.

“I, er, would assume someone posed for him—just some ordinary fellow,” he lied. “I mean, look at them, they're so true to life.”

“What they're true to,” Catherine said, “is a male fantasy of sexual freedom and prowess.”

“Precisely,” Wheeler said, “except that I wouldn't say it's a fantasy so much as an ideal. A satyr like those represented here, being both macrophallic and ithyphallic, which is to say both well-endowed and erect, personifies the supreme in masculine sexual vigor, which has been a highly underestimated force in the development of civilization. You should have read my second book,
Mythological Carnality and Its Impact on Western Europe.
I went into great detail on the subject.”

The supreme in masculine sexual vigor,
Inigo mused as he lounged against the side of the pool, puffing on his cigarette. He liked that, too. In fact, though he normally had little patience for scholarly types and their long-winded discourses, he found himself liking Elijah Wheeler more and more as the conversation progressed.

“The satyr was a type of incubus,” Wheeler explained, “as was the dusios, which is what the statue in the cave would appear to represent, given the inscription, Dusivæsus. I'm not sure what
væsus
meant in Gaulish—I shall try to look it up—but the root word
dusi,
in conjunction with the anatomy, couldn't really mean anything else.” Wheeler and Lee had spent most of that morning in the
Cella,
taking notes and making drawings.

“I wish I knew what the second inscription meant,” Thomas said. “The one that's scratched over the first.”

“As do I.” To his daughter, Wheeler said, “It's crude and irregular, but I can just make out the letters, and I swear they look like runes. That can't be right, though, because runes were native to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, not France.”

“I copied that inscription down, the runic one,” Thomas said. “The library here appears to be exceptionally well stocked in books of ancient lore. Perhaps we can find the answer there.”

“I'll ask Kit Archer if we can have access to it.” Wheeler and Christopher Archer, second-in-command to Émile Morel, Grotte Cachée's current Seigneur des Ombres, had been friends for some twenty-five years. They'd met at Oxford, where they both did their postgraduate work, Wheeler in classics and his American roommate in the history of Europe and the Mediterranean. Inigo knew this because the two old friends had reminisced at length during last night's long, wine-fueled supper.

Wheeler said, “Dusivæsus, if I may call him that—”

“Or her,” Thomas pointed out.

“Point taken,” Wheeler said.

“Or her?” Catherine said. “The statue is either male or female, no?”

“The dusios, in his classic incarnation, had hermaphroditic qualities,” her father responded. “He was, in fact, sequentially hermaphroditic, in that he could change from male to female, and back again.”

She said, “From the way you speak, one would think you really believed in these creatures.”

Creatures?
Inigo dismissed the notion of even pretending to woo Catherine Wheeler. Lucky Strikes aside, she just wasn't worth the effort.

With a shrug, Wheeler said, “There are some invertebrates and fish that have been documented as being sequentially hermaphroditic. Who's to say it's not within the realm of possibility?”

Catherine raised her hand, her expression droll.

“As I was saying,” her father continued with a sigh, “that statue predates these satyrs—by how much, it's impossible to say, but it's clearly Gaulish in origin.” With a glance at his daughter, he added, “The Gauls, of course, being the branch of Celts who lived in France, Belgium, and Switzerland.”

Eyeing her father balefully, Catherine said, “I am well aware of who the Gauls were, Elijah. I studied other things at Cornell besides physics and geology, you know.”

“Forgive me if I find that difficult to remember,” Wheeler replied, “given your conviction that the answers to all of life's mysteries can be found within the realm of bloodless science.”

“I beg you, both of you,” Lee groaned, “spare me another of these tiresome debates till after dinner, when I've got a brandy or two under my belt to muffle the histrionics.”

“Histrionics?” Catherine did not look amused.

“There's nothing wrong with a good, lively debate between friends—or family,” Wheeler said. “Keeps the cerebral juices flowing.”

“Histrionics?”

Not to be dissuaded from his impromptu lecture, Wheeler said, “St. Augustine wrote in
The City of God
of
‘Dæmones quos “dusios” Galli nuncupant,'
or ‘Demons the Gauls call dusii.' He characterized them as incubi, inasmuch as they ‘often made wicked assaults upon women, and satisfied their lust upon them.'”

“I don't understand,” Catherine said. “Aren't ancient statues usually of gods and goddesses? Why erect a statue to a demon?”

“To the ancients,” Wheeler said, “the world was full of supernatural beings, and it wasn't always easy, sorting the good from the bad—or even differentiating one type from the other. For example, in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville included satyrs as real, living beings in his encyclopedia of all known things, which he called
Etymologiae.
He wrote that the Latin term for such creatures was incubi, and that the Greeks knew them as pans, the Gauls as dusii, and the Romans as fauns.”

“He said dusii and satyrs were the same thing?” asked Inigo, outraged.

Wheeler shrugged. “It was complicated, sorting out—”

“But they're nothing alike.” Inigo sat up straight, shaking his head at the mental laziness of some humans. “True, they're both incubi, but satyrs are…well, you know. Supremely masculine. Heroic. They've got the horns, the ears, the…” He held his hands about a foot apart, grinning meaningfully.

“The tail?” Thomas said dryly.

Inigo, pondering the faint surgical scar on his tailbone, said, “Right. Sometimes. But dusii, with that back-and-forth business, male to female…Not that I'm casting aspersions, God knows, because I'm very fond of…”
Careful.
“….the
idea
of such a being, but they're a whole different
race,
for crying out loud.”

“Who's a whole different race?”

Inigo turned to see Kit Archer lumbering into the bathhouse. Someone meeting the
administrateur
and Elijah Wheeler for the first time would never guess they were exactly the same age. Lean and handsome, with just the faintest dusting of gray at the temples, Wheeler wore his forty-six years with effortless grace. Archer, on the other hand, was one of those men who started losing hair and gaining pounds in his twenties, swiftly transforming into a shiny-pated, rotund version of his former self.