Jenny Plague-Bringer

Chapter Three



Senator Junius Mayfield, of the great state of Tennessee, great-uncle of one officially dead boy named Jonathan Seth Barrett IV, smoked a cigar as he reclined in an antique Federal-style divan embellished with hand-tooled scrollwork and curving arms. The divan was from an age when Americans made things, Junius thought. The timber had probably been cut in Virginia and carved by a master craftsman, an American with the skill and industry to do more than drool in front of some computer screen all day.

The divan was like the senator: old, creaky, so far out of fashion as to be comical. Just waiting for the inevitable crack, the day it transformed from a valuable antique into scrap wood.

Junius smoked his cigar and sipped a glass of fifty-year-old Scotch in the candle-lit suite of a very exclusive hotel. “Hotel” wasn’t the proper word for this establishment, located in an old Greek Revival mansion just outside the District of Columbia, but that was the polite word for it.

A well-endowed young lady with blond hair, pretty as a fashion model, was handcuffed to one of the four high posters of the antique bed. She wore bits of white ribbon and lace in her hair, like a bride, and she had recently become topless. She knelt on the bed, still dressed in her lacy white panties and silk stockings. The straps of a leather scourge lashed across her backside, and she bounced forward against the poster and cried out.

The scourge was wielded by a dark-haired woman in a black mask that hid her eyes, black leather lingerie, and high stiletto heels. Their costumes clearly divided into them into good girl and bad girl, angel and devil.

“Please,” the blond girl in white lace begged. “Please, stop!”

The girl in the black mask gave her a cruel smile and lashed her again.

Junius himself would watch from the divan, too old to indulge himself like he used to. He was more of a watcher now. Junius would take in this little tableau, then straighten his tie and attend yet another fundraiser dinner, eating gray chicken while pumping defense contractors for extra campaign cash. From one whorehouse to another, but Junius would be switching roles.

Same old, same old.

Junius watched quietly as the masked girl spanked the blond girl, against the blond’s pretended struggles and protests. The blond girl wriggled and screeched as her cheeks were smacked red, and then the masked girl reached between her legs and stroked her. The blond girl’s head turned toward Junius as she cried out in pleasure, real or pretended.

The blow came from nowhere, striking Junius just behind his left eye. He’d been kicked by a horse once, as a boy on his father’s farm, and the feeling was similar. This kick might have been from an invisible ghost horse, something from an old Indian tale.

After it hit him, the world dimmed and half his body turned numb. For a moment, all Junius could see was the preacher at the scrapwood mountain church he’d attended with his grandparents, a sweaty, bug-eyed man slapping the pulpit and shouting about fornication and hellfire. Then that faded, too, gone like a flash of lightning.

A thin, dark drop of blood crept out from his left nostril, making its gradual way toward his dry, wrinkled lips.

The esteemed gentleman from Tennessee slumped down in the divan, inch by inch. The candle-lit room grew darker and darker around him.

The two girls on the bed, caught up in their performance, didn’t notice anything strange until he toppled out of the divan and crumpled to the floor. The whiskey glass dropped from his hand, sloshing aged Scotch onto the 19th-century Khotan rug, followed by his burning cigar. He was vaguely aware of the sound of two shouting girls, and he wasn’t aware of much after that.