it, darling,” I said. “There’s nothing she can do about it.”
By the time we had reached home, we had dismissed her from our minds.
The following morning there was a gold-tinted envelope in my mail, sent special delivery. It contained two notes. One, from Portia Teele, read:
Dear Les:
I’ve never before asked you to do me a personal favor. Tala Mag told me what occurred last night and feels that it was a misunderstanding on both your parts. She had no opportunity to tell you that she is a writer and would desire your assistance. I have read her manuscripts; she has a great deal of talent. Please see her for my sake.
PORTIA.
The second note was heavily scented. It contained but a single line:
Dear Mr. Marlin:
Please come to my apartment at four this afternoon.
TALA MAG.
I was in something of a spot. I couldn’t afford to antagonize Portia Teele who was my best client, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with this Tala Mag. And why insist that I come to her apartment? The proper procedure was for her to come to my office.
By the afternoon I had made up my mind to go, solely, I assured myself, because Portia Teele had asked me to. Yet in back of my mind was a vagrant desire to see this exotic Tala Mag again. Anyway, what had I to be afraid of? I’d never had much trouble putting a demanding woman in her place.
I arrived there twenty after four, deliberately, to show her that I wasn’t in the least anxious. She lived thirty stories above Park Avenue in a penthouse. Well, one thing was certain: she certainly wasn’t an impoverished struggling writer.
The biggest man I had ever seen admitted me. Not the tallest, although he must have been a least six-six, and not fat either, but simply built in a huge, powerful mold. He was, in addition, ugly as sin, with hardly anything in the way of a brow or a chin. I’m of average size and build, but he made me feel like a pigmy as he stepped aside to let me by.
* * * *
Tala Mag came forward to receive me in the foyer, and she was wearing a spider-web blue negligee and a pair of blue mules and not another thing. A pleasing combination—blue against the rich gold of her skin, and there was plenty of skin showing, and the rest of it, voluptuously curved, shimmered under the negligee.
So! She was taking up where she had left off yesterday. As I followed her into the library, I determined to get out as soon as I could.
She said nothing about last night and made no attempt to come near me. She took a sheaf of typewritten pages from the desk and nodded toward a comfortable leather chair. I sat down and started to read. She retreated to the other end of the room and mixed highballs. She handed one to me and then offered me a cigarette. As she applied a match to my cigarette, she leaned over and her negligee fell away from her throat and there was no covering over her breasts. They were golden and rose-tipped and dangling with the bending of her torso. I dropped my eyes quickly to the manuscript.
A sensation of mingled horror and revulsion crept over me as I read. How can I describe the story she had written? It wasn’t quite pornographic and yet it was more than that. There was not a sentence or a paragraph which standing alone, could be called obscene, yet the effect of the whole was incredibly vile. It concerned unholy lust and unspeakable orgies and hideous tortures, but it was chiefly the point of view that shocked my hard-boiled soul. She reveled in evilness, extolled it, until virtue was to be despised and vileness all that made living tolerable.
I went to the desk and tossed the papers down and turned to her. She was looking at me expectantly, with mouth half-open.
“You like it?”
I shrugged. “Put it this way: no publisher would touch it.”
“But if you, with your reputation, took it to a publisher?”
“That won’t help either,” I said. “Sorry.” I started to go.
She came to meet me, and somehow her negligee had fallen open and was trailing behind her. No doubt that she was startlingly attractive, but the only effect of her nudity on me was one of anger.
She caught my arm as I tried to pass her. “Mr. Marlin—Lester—you know that you are devilishly handsome.”
I said tightly: “You’re wasting your time.” And I jerked my arm roughly away from her.
She ran around me so that she was in front of me again and threw her arms about my neck. I admit that as I tried to pull her off, pulses pounded in my veins. The memory of Helen blurred with the furious agitation of her torso and thighs against me. But not sufficiently to make me succumb to her. Violently I tore her arms away from about my neck and, with an exclamation of rage, threw her to the floor.
She sat up, glaring up at me, her bared breasts rising and falling. When I was a step from the door, she called out: “Emil!” And a split-second later her servant’s enormous body filled the doorway.
I was too angry to be afraid. I said in a voice that quivered: “Let me pass.”
He stood there as solidly as a rock. And as if she were telling a dog to fetch something, she ordered: “Get him, Emil.”
I stepped backward as he came at me with his great arms apart. Realizing that my only chance was an attack, I threw myself forward, plunging my right fist into his midriff. My knuckles felt as if they had struck corrugated iron.
And then his arms were around me, and I knew that I was through. I thrashed in his grip, but I might as well have tried to struggle in a steel vise. Slowly his arms tightened, constricting my ribs, my lungs. Breath choked up in me. The motion of my kicking legs grew feebler, then stopped altogether as, my face pressed against his massive sweaty chest, I sank into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER II
THE ROOM OF TORMENT
When I opened my eyes, I found that iron chains, dangling from the ceiling, were fastened about each of my wrists. My feet just about touched the floor, so that I had to stand erect. My clothes had been taken from me; they lay neatly piled on a chair nearby.
For dazed moments I thought that this must be a nightmare; that Tala Mag’s huge servant must be a figment of my imagination; that perhaps even Tala Mag was only a dream of dark desire. And then I saw that I was still in the library where I had read her curiously vile manuscript. Furniture had been pushed from the center of the floor where I hung from the chains.
This was ridiculous, of course—to have something like this happen in a modern apartment house in the heart of the city. I took a deep breath and called for help at the top of my lungs.
Behind me somebody laughed. Twisting my head over my shoulder, I saw Tala Mag, still clad in that diaphanous blue negligee, coming toward me.
“It may interest you to know that this room is soundproof,” she said.
My voice broke off. I was staring with bulging eyes at the murderous whip she held in her hand. Part of its black length wriggled like a live snake on the floor behind her.
“What
