Dark Enchantment Read online

  He spreads my palm, weaving his fingers with mine. His eyes never leave my face. He lifts my hand to his mouth and touches the tip of my little finger to his lips. They are full, dangerous-looking lips, and his breath is warm. He really is shockingly handsome. He puts one fingertip at a time to his mouth, sometimes touching with the tip of his tongue, sometimes his teeth, finishing with my thumb. Then he exposes my palm and bows his face to kiss it, those glittering dark eyes veiled by black lashes. He kisses my palm tenderly, yet with unabashed hunger. Then, lowering my hand but not releasing it, he steps into me until the whole length of his body is against mine. He’s not crushing me, not even pressing against me properly. Just sharing the sweep of my tingling flesh.

  My better self is demanding, Why aren’t you stopping him?

  In this chilly, lifeless place he is so warm. He slides a finger under my chin to lift it and my breath catches in my throat with a noise like a sob. His lips stoop to mine.

  At that moment the lights flicker back on all around us, but I am paralysed by his touch and unable to react. He makes a small frown – regret, resignation – then bends to brush his lips against my ear.

  ‘Selamün Áleyküm.’ Peace be upon you. His voice is deep. It crawls under my skin and sinks into my bones.

  Then he steps away, his look a lingering promise, and walks off. He leaves me breathless and squirming in my skin, my hands moving without volition to my tingling breasts, my eyes fixed on his figure and then, when he has vanished into the gloom, on the line of bare footprints he leaves behind: dry footprints pale on the damp slabs.

  We dine, on the penultimate day of our honeymoon, in a small restaurant near our hotel, in the old Sultanahmet area of the city. It’s a traditionally dressed room, so we’ve taken off our shoes and sit on low couches in our alcove. The wooden walls are dressed with geometric-patterned rugs and oil lamps burn on every table. There is one modern painting right inside the front door, of the creature after which the restaurant is named: the Chimaera. It roars, triple mouths open.

  I wish I hadn’t let Keith pick this place. I can’t keep my mind off the painting. It seems too reminiscent of the man I am trying not to think of: the lion symbolising magnificence and strength and pride, the goat denoting lust, the venomous snake tail suggesting … What? Wisdom? The Underworld? Evil?

  I know what the snake would symbolise in Western art.

  We eat our way through platters of meze. Our lips shine with olive oil, our eyes with playful lechery. Keith takes advantage of moments when the waiters’ backs are turned to stroke my inner thigh, sliding his fingers up under my skirt to flick and tickle me through my panties: impolite in any society, indefensible in one as strait-laced as this. But I’m restless, twitchy and eager for transgression. I only giggle when he leans in to whisper in my ear.

  ‘When I get you back to the hotel, do you know what I want to do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to bend you over the foot of our bed and slip my cock into you from behind. And I’m not going to close the curtains before I do it. You know our window looks out the inner balcony …’

  Shivers chase up my spine. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So anyone in the rooms on the other side will be able to look across and see me humping you. Anyone passing in the corridor will get a look in: cleaners; hotel guests; that cute guy from reception. My butt slamming away, giving you a proper stuffing. Something to remember us by.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I giggle, squirming, both mortified and horribly aroused. This is not the sort of thing we’d dream of doing back home. My knickers are sticky under me as I move on my cushion. We sit back, flushed, doing a very poor job of looking innocent as a waiter deposits another couple of plates before us. Butter beans swim in a tomato sauce. Little filo tubes ooze white cheese. Then I press against Keith’s arm, meaning to whisper in his ear, How about if you tie me to the bed?

  I never get a chance to speak. The air bursts around us in an ear-splitting roar and the whole building lurches. As the lights flicker out I grab Keith’s arm and we’re slammed back into the cushions.

  It’s a bomb. These days, it’s the first conclusion we all jump to. It hasn’t gone off underneath us though; when I open my eyes the only window in sight is gaping wide, wooden shutters and glass alike shattered, but the room looks intact. People start to scream – some out on the street, some here in the restaurant with us – but my ears are ringing so loudly I can hardly hear them. There are flames. The oil lamp from our table has been knocked to the floor and the carpet has caught fire.

  I touch my face with my hands, trying to convince myself I’m still here. There’s a cut on Keith’s forehead, but I can’t think what to do. The room’s too dark to see anything properly, though the red flickering is gaining strength.

  Fire. Fire in a wooden building.

  Keith’s lips move, but I can’t hear him swearing. He fumbles for the rug on the wall behind us. After a moment’s stunned inertia I help him drag it off its hooks and he throws it over the flames, smothering them. My limbs feel like puppets, operated by remote control. But though we stamp on the carpet it is not enough. Our flames vanish, but in other parts of the dining room fire is licking up the walls, people are flailing uselessly or stumbling away. Already thick smoke that smells of burned wool is billowing across the ceiling. I paw at Keith.

  ‘We’ve got to get out!’

  We stagger from our alcove, but our heads are spinning with shock. I can’t remember which way to turn for the stairs down. I make a decision, then remember too late it’s the route to the toilet I’m taking. Keith blunders in to me as I stop. We turn back, but there are flames as tall as us curtaining the archway, and there’s no one else in the room now. The smoke is making it hard to breathe. I can hear Keith shouting. He drags me towards the broken window.

  Then he walks in, through the flame, my Chimaera, straight through the fire without so much as blinking or shielding his eyes. He looks absolutely calm. He’s not scorched; he’s not even sweating. Sparks land in his thick black hair but they wink out. He walks up to me, takes my wrist, then turns away. He’s heading for the flame-wreathed doorway. I don’t resist, but I scream for Keith, and when his flailing hand catches mine I drag him in our wake.

  And I see the flames shrink and recoil from my abductor, guttering back to scorched wood. We walk unharmed down the stairs, and we’re out into the cloud of brick dust that fogs the street before I know what to think.

  Then he releases my wrist and walks away. Keith grabs me and crushes me to his chest, and all I see for many long minutes is his filthy, blood-streaked face twisted with anguish.

  It was a bomb, it turns out, though next day they are still arguing on the TV whether it was the PKK or fundamentalists who’d taken out the government offices over the street from our restaurant. We were lucky; two people died in the blast and several were badly hurt in the fires it started.

  It’s the last day of our holiday. We fly out tonight. Though the cut on his head was superficial and the worst injury either of us sustained, Keith has been badly rattled, I think. He won’t admit it but he opts to stay in the hotel for the day, packing our cases and hanging out on the sunroof with a book.

  I can’t hide indoors. Unlike Keith, I don’t see our escape as a random thing, a piece of luck. I know we were under protection, and that the man who led us out was not just some brave waiter as Keith assumes. I feel the pressure under my skin, writhing in my belly, forcing me onto the streets to confront this city once more. I am in his debt. Keith doesn’t want me to go, but he accepts that I am determined not to waste the one day left.

  I head out alone, on foot. I wear an ankle-length skirt. Perhaps it’s not having Keith’s six-foot blondness marking us out for tourists, or perhaps the city is subdued by the incident last night, but this day for the first time no one tries to lure me into any carpet emporium. I pass through Sultanahmet without being accosted. I take a tram down to the waterfront and cross the Galata Bridge on
foot, past the ranks of rod-and-line fishermen hauling even the smallest tiddler out of the water, to the steep streets of the old European diplomatic quarter. It’s a bit of a hike, and I’m glad to take a drink and a baguette full of kofte in a café. I admire a few mosques and the Pera Palace hotel. Then I pay to ride up the lift in the Galata Tower to the observation gallery.

  The view is breathtaking. Under an orange fug of pollution, the old part of the city masses on the facing hill, over the glittering waters of the Golden Horn. The boat congestion in that inlet is so busy I cannot believe I won’t witness a shipwreck. The skyline bulges with domes and is punctuated by minarets. I know I should hate this city; it is humid and overcrowded, filthy and incredibly loud, with lethal traffic. But I don’t. Istanbul has gripped me; simultaneously ancient and modern, Western and Middle Eastern, it has so much presence, such charisma. It is a place where history is still immanent; time here does not seem linear.

  Then the voice of the first muezzin wails out from a minaret and others join in, in a staggered cacophony: the mid-afternoon call to prayer. I feel the hairs stand up on my neck and tears prickle in my eyes; it’s like the whole city is shouting at God.

  The walk back down from the tower and over the bridge is a lot easier, so I decide to make my way back to the hotel on foot. It should be easy enough to navigate by the minarets of the big mosques, and I’m in no hurry. I head up a long straight street, through the crowds of shoppers. This is the overspill area from the Kapali Carsi, but it’s no tourist market. The stalls either side are more likely to sell cellphone covers, cheap plastic toys, bread and vegetables, than the amber necklaces and embroidered slippers and water pipes of the Covered Bazaar. I press on uphill, enjoying my anonymity in the crowd.

  Then I look behind me, down the slope, wondering if there is a view back over the Golden Horn from this side. And there he is trailing me, a head taller than anyone else, his eyes fixed on me as he cuts through the press of shoppers. My heart lurches in my chest, but that is not my only physical response. Suddenly I want to cry because it is so unfair! I already have the man that I want, the man that I love – why should my sex react so helplessly, with such heat, to this uncanny stranger? Why should I feel a sudden slipperiness, an ache in my pelvis, the beat of my pulse at my wrists? Am I so faithless? Am I such a slut?

  I turn away and keep walking, but I know he’s gaining on me. My mouth is dry but the skin between my breasts is damp. I wonder what Keith is doing. I wonder what will happen when my Chimaera catches up with me. I tell myself there is nothing he can do in a public place. I tell myself I will be a good and irreproachable wife, not the slut that Western women are reputed to be.

  It goes quiet.

  Like someone has switched off the soundtrack, it goes silent. The traffic, the voices, the screech of gulls – everything snaps off. I lift my eyes and see that everyone around me has stopped in their tracks, frozen in place. Hands are lifted, but do not fall. Mouths are open, but no words come out. A cloud of smoke from a wayside snack stall hangs motionless in mid-air, like a puff of candyfloss. I swing on my heel.

  He’s almost at my side; the only moving thing in the whole city, apart from me, for all I can tell. He looks just as he did every other time I’ve seen him – still barefoot, even among the mess of the market. In sunlight his hair looks almost blue, it is so dark.

  Still he doesn’t smile. He reaches out and lays his hand on the railing of the building at his right, and the iron gate swings open soundlessly at his touch. Let me get this straight: he doesn’t push the gate, but still it moves. I am distracted enough to glance at the structure beyond the rails. It’s the ruin of some traditional-looking building, not too big. You see them around in the city, usually mosques that have for some reason fallen into neglect. This one doesn’t have a visible minaret though it does have a dome, so I assume it is a bath-house. Grey swathes of plaster hang from the stonework. The crumbling walls are overgrown with some sort of creeper that has withered to dried sticks in the Turkish summer. Back home kids would take one look and deliver the verdict: haunted.

  He lifts his hand in a gesture of invitation.

  I must be out of my mind. I must be begging for trouble. I walk past him through the gate, under the archway of the outer wall, into the derelict hamam. I hear him follow me, his feet quieter on the rubble than mine. We pass through an antechamber. We’re inside a room that must have been domed and tiled once, but is now open to the sky. Most of the tiles have fallen and are loose underfoot. I’m dreading the sort of squatter mess you’d find in any abandoned building, but not even a plastic bag defaces the artwork of time. It is absolutely silent in here too. My heart is in my throat as I turn to look at him.

  He moves upon me with grace but with a terrible eagerness, gripping my arms and pressing me back against a pillar so he can kiss me. He tastes of cardamom. He tastes of sin. He’s more beautiful than I have words for, and my guilt at betraying Keith is no more than paper in the flame of my hunger for this man, burned to ashes. His body presses against me, just at the groin so that there is no mistaking his intentions, and I feel like I’m going to melt or explode or both. His hands find my breasts, pushing up under my respectable long-sleeved blouse, fingers closing over the nipples jutting through the rough lace of my bra. I moan into his mouth, covering his hands with mine to make him squeeze me harder. He pulls from my lips so he can look down at me, his eyes alight with pleasure. We’re both panting.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask.

  He nuzzles my ear, licking the lobe, teeth teasing my skin. ‘Ifrit,’ he breathes.

  It doesn’t occur to me that this is not a name.

  I don’t have time to think about it, anyway. He pulls me away from the pillar, scoops me up bodily and plants my bum on the top of a block of masonry. I’m almost at eye level with him now. My feet dangle.

  Now he can afford to draw breath. He stills me with a touch to my cheek, then unpicks the buttons down my blouse, his big hands incongruously delicate, just far enough to reveal my bra. He scoops my breasts out of their cups so they lie displayed on the taut fabric, pouting at him. I think my nipples look ridiculously pink against his brown hands, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He plays with them until I gasp and wriggle, drawing them out to stiff points then punishing their temerity with obvious delight.

  ‘Harder,’ I moan. ‘Please.’

  His eyebrows rise but he obliges with a long, cruelly judged pinch that has me seeing stars. Then he arches me over backwards, supporting my spine so he can get his head down and suck my nipples and bite me softly. I hang in space, trusting myself to his hands and his teeth, tears burning in my eyes, feeling and hearing his hot sucking kisses. I must be mad, I think, but my thighs are apart and he’s standing between my knees and his free hand is pushing my full skirt right up; it’s warm on the smoothness of my thighs, it’s probing into the moist flesh between them.

  I gasp: ‘Yes! Oh yes!’

  With a good strong pull he sets me upright in my seat again, breathless and wide-eyed. He needs both hands to help me wiggle out of my panties, and when he holds the little piece of cloth up for inspection it reveals that I may have come out looking outwardly sober and sexless, but I’ve worn my bronze and pink might-get-lucky knickers, the ones reserved for special nights with Keith. My desire is laid bare. I blush, biting my lip, and crooking his own in a dark smile he wraps his arms around me, crosses my wrists at the small of my back and loops the elastic and lace of my panties over and over them, until I am bound with the evidence of my guilt.

  Now I have to trust him. Now I’m helpless to catch myself if I overbalance. Now I can’t fend him off, even if I want to. He kisses me again, lingeringly, but it doesn’t work to distract me from the advance of his fingers up between my thighs, parting my inner lips, delving into my wet welcome. Like his kisses, his touch is expertly invasive. He works my wet flesh with every finger until I’m so slippery I feel I’m going to slide from my perch, until I’m flushed and gasping and
splayed. Then he steps back just enough to be able to loosen his cotton trousers and scoop his cock and balls out over the waistband.

  He’s both circumcised and shaven, which is a bit of a shock to my English sensibilities. Framed by red cloth, his erection looks enormous and desperately impatient, his balls bulging in a smooth, loose scrotal sac. I strain against my bonds, wanting to touch them, but all I achieve is making my breasts jiggle. He slides his fingers deep into me again, then strokes my juices over his cock, working up a bead of his own lubrication. Then he picks up one of my feet and drapes it over his arm, holding me to stop me falling. His hand snakes around my waist as if we are about to dance – and it still feels like a strange waltz even when he shrugs my raised leg right up to his shoulder. He kisses me again, his mouth slow and hungry. He’s still kissing me when his big cock rampages up my slit and, discovering the gate it’s looking for, slides home.

  God, he is big.

  He stretches me to the limit. He fucks me slow and hard and deep. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what he wants, and I have no choice but to give it to him: in this waltz, he leads. And what he wants is to make me come, so I do it: on his pumping cock, on his wicked fingers. I shriek as I come, my voice echoing under the sundered dome.

  When my surrender is complete he pulls out, shimmering with my juices, and plops me onto my belly over the stone. My toes barely reach the floor and it’s far from comfortable, but that doesn’t matter to either of us. My wrists are still captive at the small of my back. He pulls up my skirt, spreads my bum and fucks me from behind, leaning in low so he can embrace my torso in one arm, his cock ramming my open slot, his thighs slapping against my arse and his balls bouncing on my sex. All dignity gone, it seems to me that a hundred dismissed and disappointed purveyors of carpets and taxi rides and antiqued souvenirs are being avenged all at once. I am moaning in counterpoint to his grunts, gathering to a second storm. He is quickening his pace, no longer slow and easy but urgent.