To the Ends of the Earth Page 7
The madness wasn’t only in his voice and his eyes. It seemed to have affected his whole body, for he was dancing, his legs moving up and down out of rhythm, waving the knife around and around. I could do nothing but watch, and that seemed to enrage him even more, because his leaps became wilder and wilder….
And then, and it’s the only time that I thanked my landlady for the vile greasy carpet, his foot slipped. He put one hand, the one with the knife, on the floor to save himself and collapsed onto it. For a moment his body jerked and then was still. I thought he’d just winded himself and in a moment would get up and begin his mad dance, so I advanced cautiously. And then I saw it, that great pool of blood, spreading from under his body. So much blood, spreading toward me. I felt the acid rise in my throat and I vomited into the blood.
THERE IS so much more that happened that I don’t quite know where to start. Obviously I rang the police, still giving them my, surely now unnecessary, pseudonym. But they seemed to know it. Perhaps every police station in the land knew it. Soon a couple of DCs arrived, saw the mess, and called whoever was necessary. I explained what had happened, and the SOCO boys seemed to think that the physical evidence supported my story.
Poor Jacob. I felt both sad and guilty that I had caused his madness, that he had been responsible for two deaths and attempting the life of a third, me.
The police took me to the station, gave me a shower and change of clothes (where had they come from?), and ensconced me in an inspector’s room—he was away in Lanzarote on his annual leave—and fed and watered me as if I were a visiting dignitary.
“Orders from above,” they said, and I wondered what I had done to deserve this treatment. After all, I’d been evading capture for, what, a couple of months, though it felt like a century, and though they surely could not know it, I’d ultimately been responsible for the death of two of their officers. I didn’t want to say my mother had considered Jacob to be one of the family. She had been taken in as much as I had.
Later I was put into a supersmart car, surely not a police vehicle, and driven across London to a large block of flats in the Bankside area. The driver was a chatty bloke, and on the way, he told me much about Bankside. He was quite an expert, could almost have been a professor.
“Five hundred years ago,” he told me, “Bankside was much like Soho is today, a bustling, bawdy place, full of taverns, theaters, and probably not quite criminal activities. Since then it has tarted itself up considerably. One of the now-defunct theaters has been reconstructed, and now the timber and plaster of Shakespeare’s Globe again fills with eager theatergoers anxious to see what they fondly imagine was something like the original productions.” Perhaps they are, though my driver didn’t seem very sanguine about this,
“Just to the north, one of the best views in London can be had from the middle of the Millennium Bridge, with the iconic dome of Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral forming a violent contrast to the ninety-nine-meter chimney and hideous block of the Tate Modern art gallery.”
We arrived. I was ushered into a lift, which had just two buttons in it, labeled Ground Floor and Penthouse. As I was on the ground floor, I figured that the penthouse was the one to choose. I shot up at what felt like stomach-churning speed. The lift stopped, the door opened, and….
Well, it hardly needs me to tell you who was there. If I do, then you must be pretty thick! But never treat the reader as lesser than yourself, I’ve learned.
It was of course Lex. He’d been following my progress from whatever dizzy heights he works from the night of the fire until he actually lost me when I went to ground in London.
To satisfy both your and my curiosity, I can tell you now, because he’s moved onwards and upwards to even more dizzying heights, that he was then a sort of liaison official between GCHQ, MI5, and MI6. A very, very important person. VVIP.
The meeting was tender, joyful, glorious. We didn’t exactly run into each other’s arms, but a very close second. It had been such a long, long time, and I shuddered to think that once I had even considered him as the guy who nearly burnt me to death.
I touched his face, feeling the familiar outlines, and he mine, tracing the scars, which were fading but would never actually disappear.
We said things, private things but important to us, and then we went to bed, where, naked, we clung to each other so that every part of us seemed to be inextricably joined.
Then the tenderness became passion. Suddenly he twisted round and raised his legs, capturing my head between them, and now my face was near the fork, and I could see his cock, so hard and erect.
Because his legs were in the air, locked behind my head, with two fingers of the other hand, I found his arse and, using them, entered him. He gave a cry, not of pain but of excitement, and immediately he did the same to me.
There was his cock just in front of my face, just in front of my mouth with his legs forcing my head closer and closer until the two must meet together.
My fingers pushed against his arse, fingers inserted into the hole. He groaned and his cock was there and waiting to be swallowed, and I felt the hardness of him and the softness of the skin, and he was inside my mouth.
Suddenly he was quiet, no struggling, no twisting, except that he found my cock, and I felt warmness and wetness enclose it and fingers inside me, reaching up and finding something so wonderful and exciting. And we were forcing our cocks into each other’s mouths and hands were stroking and rubbing and fingers extending and finding until, with cries, we both came. My mouth was filled with his coming, and I pulsed into my lover’s. I swallowed his and he mine. We lay there together for a while, recovering, and then resumed a more orthodox position, he enfolding me and I enfolding him.
And I thought and then whispered into his ear, “If you ever leave me, I shall follow you to the ends of the earth.”
MICHAEL GOUDA was born in London, England.
He went to Bristol University, obtained a respectable degree, and took up teaching in the Worcestershire town of Evesham.
He took early retirement to a limestone Cotswold cottage, where he lived with a series of neurotic collie dogs, a domineering cat, and a determination to write. Since then he has written over one hundred and fifty short stories and published longer works with Dreamspinner Press and M.L.R. Press.
Unfortunately an attack of Polymyalgia rheumatica, a type of chronic inflammation of the muscles, meant he had to go into a home from which he still writes and publishes his LGBT stories.
He likes to introduce incidents from his own deplorable past into his stories of crime and misadventure. Being a romantic at heart, he rarely allows a tragic ending, however downbeat may be the indications in between.
You can contact him at michael@tanyardbank.plus.com
By Michael Gouda
To the Ends of the Earth
Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS
www.dreamspinnerpress.com
Published by
DREAMSPINNER PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
www.dreamspinnerpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the Ends of the Earth
© 2019 Michael Gouda
Cover Art
© 2019 Aaron Anderson
aaronbydesign55@gmail.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
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Digital ISBN: 978-1-64405-233-4
Digital eBook published May 2019
v. 1.0
Printed in the United States of America