"Come For Me, Dark Man"

By Anne Tourney
anne_tourney@hotmail.com 
From Sacred Exchange, a book of collected stories of BDSM and spirituality available on www.amazon.com  

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Long before she gives herself up, the woman hears the song. Its notes are alien, yet instantly familiar. The melody sets off a deep low burn, like a stolen gulp of whiskey, or the scent of a lover's body as he moves forward with his eyes fixed on her mouth. She begins secretly buying records, hoping one of them will hold that song, and soon she's a captive to the music. The rich, raspy voices fill her bedroom, bringing elements of another world--dust and sunlight, hunger and heat, liquor and lust. Their sinuous tonality is like nothing she's ever played on the upright piano in her parlor. The notes sink into her flesh and deepen the curves of her body; they flow through her blood vessels and set up a hard thud between her legs. Her house rocks like a backwoods juke joint. She packs up the records and hides them in the attic, but her sacrifice can't drive away that original melody. They call it the blues, but when she hears that music, she hears red--cunt red, lush and infernal.

Night after night she wakes up from a parched sleep. She hears the whistle of a freight train rolling by, so close that its juddering motion rattles the windows. She has heard that imploring cry for so many years that it never wakes her anymore, but tonight the call has changed. Could that be her song, warped into the train's low moan? Her heart pounds, her breath catches in her mouth, and her fingers stroke the sweaty groove between her breasts. Her flesh feels unfamiliar. Her pulse is offbeat.

<<Come for me, dark man>>, mutter the gears of the train. Grace hears the song for the first time on a sweltering May afternoon. She doesn't think much of the singer at first; there are so many men drifting through town, trying to get a meal in exchange for a few hours of work, or an afternoon serenade. Looking out the window over her kitchen sink, she often sees hobos walking along the railroad tracks that border her backyard. She tries not to meet their eyes; she's afraid that one of them will demand an act of charity. They are everywhere these days, these poor drifting men. Does anyone consider the poverty of a woman who's lost her husband, the deprivation that she feels at her core?

On the day she hears the song, Grace is hanging her clothes out on the line. Not much laundry anymore; she hardly ever changes her dress, never wears stockings, and doesn't even bother with underwear most of the time. She's decided to wash her sheets today, and she's made herself a cool tent under the damp cotton. That's where she's sitting, with her bare legs gleaming in the grass, when the man steps into her yard.

"Your husband should fence you in," he says.

In spite of the heat he is dressed in a dark suit, red with dust at trouser cuffs. He wears a narrow tie, and a pair of ancient boots. Over his shoulder hangs a guitar. She can't see his face under the brim of his black hat, but she feels the full burn of his stare. She must look like a fool sitting there on the ground, sprawled out like a little girl, her laundry basket abandoned. The man is appraising her, surveying the length of her legs, the curve of her hips.

"My husband's in the house.”

"What's your name?"

"Grace. What's yours?"

He doesn't answer. Her face goes hot, as if she'd made a gross blunder, although she hasn't said anything that she wouldn't say to any other man. Grace jumps up, swatting grass off her skirt. In the gloom under the brim of the man's hat she sees only the pale caramel sheen of his skin, the weight of his full mouth. His lower lip is cleft in the middle, like a plum.

"Could you spare some food? I can do odd jobs. Play you a song.”

She turns and walks toward the house, half hoping he will leave her alone, half hoping he will follow. When she opens the screen door, the familiar squeal sounds like a cry of panic. He stays outside for a few moments, standing behind the screen. She reaches out to open the door, and then he is stepping inside, filling her kitchen.

"Fix me something to eat," he says. Somehow, now that the door has closed behind him, he isn't a beggar anymore. Grace's heart pounds. She keeps her back turned while she makes him a sandwich. She hears him set his guitar down on the kitchen table, pull out a chair, and sit down.

"Your husband upstairs?" He begins tuning the guitar.

"My husband is dead. He was killed in France .”

She doesn't know why she didn't perpetuate the lie she'd told earlier. She could have said that her husband was napping. Out of work, like everyone else. Sleeping the day away, as Grace often does.

"You get lonely here alone?"

"No.”

"What do you do for company?"

"I have friends all over town," she says. Another lie.

"What do you do when you need a man?"

"I don't need any man." Grace rubs the damp tangle of hairs at the back of her neck.

"You can bring me that sandwich now," he says.

She sets the plate down on the table beside her guest, but he doesn't touch the food. He sits with one long leg crossed over the other, regal and composed. He hasn't removed his hat, and his face is hidden as he strums the guitar. She feels a strange pang of jealousy for the instrument, with its scarred, deep-waisted body. His right hand spans the guitar's belly; his left grasps the slender neck. He plays a few chords, then reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a broken bottleneck. Grace puts her hand to her throat, covering the soft spot above her windpipe.

"Listen now," he says.

Then he plays, using the broken bottle to coax dangerous, sexy sounds out of the strings. She has never heard anything like that guitar's throbbing wail, the sliding pitches that seemed to shudder through her flesh. He's playing in E minor, the dark key. She feels a pull deep in her body, as if the music were being drawn out of some underwater cave where her desires live. The music has a driving rhythm that mounts slowly, like the approach of a train--faster, faster, leading up to the tantalizing space of time in which a person could jump on board if she wanted to, before the train disappears.

<<Come for me, dark man, dark man come down, You're gonna give it to the dark man when that train rolls into town. Gonna hop on board the train, meet your master in the car, Better get down on your knees, 'cause this train is goin' far.>>

The words make her nipples prickle under her cotton dress. They make her feel wild and sad at the same time, as if the wildness were some part of her that she has been mourning for years. Through her vertigo, she senses that some transaction is going to take place with this stranger in her kitchen. When the song is over, he will want something. She will want something. A bargain will be made.

When the song ends, the stranger sets his guitar on the table. He stands. Grace is shaking. He takes her by both hands and holds her slender wrists. Her rib cage rises and falls like the withers of a scared horse. He lets go of her wrists and lowers his hands to soothe her, the way a master would calm his frightened beast. His fingers are embedded with grit. Wherever they travel, she feels the ancient accumulation of experience--on her shoulders, the small of her back, her hips and buttocks. Then under her skirt, on her inner thighs, and in the wet, wet shallows of her cunt. He brings his fingers to her mouth and makes her suck her own juices. She tastes herself, tangy and musky, on his tobacco-stained skin.

One hand around her throat, the other gripping her hair, he pushes her to her knees.

"I know what you want," he says.

"How?" He cups her face in one hand, lightly stroking the curve of her jaw. Then he slaps her. She gasps. His palm is as rough and hard as raw wood.

"Don't ask questions," he says.

But she knows what he means. Grace has always wanted more than the tentative caress, the polite fumble in the dark. He unbuckles his belt and pulls the strip of leather out of its loops. He folds the leather in half, the way her father used to hold it when he punished her. Grace catches her breath, remembering the bite of her father's strap against the backs of her thighs, the way her buttocks burned for hours afterward. She once asked her husband to give her that secret pleasure, but when she saw the stark confusion in his eyes, she never asked again.

"You like my belt. I see you looking at it.”

Grace nods.

"You need this belt?"

"Please," she whispers.

"One day I'll use it on you.”

The stranger lowers the belt behind her neck and holds it loosely with one hand while he unzips his fly with the other. She closes her eyes. He feeds her his cock, using the strap to guide her head. His hips move like the train she heard when he played the guitar.

<<Come for me, dark man.>>

When he comes, he tastes of a soul-deep bitterness. He tastes of rust and wild fennel and leather. He tastes of the bent notes that he played on his guitar. He tastes like her own blood.

"I'm going to come back for you," he says. He lets the belt fall and fills his hands with Grace's hair.

"When?"

"You'll know when it's time. You're going to hear it. Listen for the train.”

He replaces his belt, packs up his guitar, and then he is gone. He never touched the food she made for him.

In the nights that follow, Grace has dreams that leave her weak with shame and wonder. One night she dreams that she is standing naked in a boxcar, her hands tied above her head, while the man with the guitar gives her what she needs. A "licking," was the word her father used, and that's exactly how the blows feel: like tongues of fire. Again and again the strap strikes her thighs and ass, until the heat spreads through her entire body. The dark man orders her to stand with her legs spread apart, and his belt laps her pussy a few times for good measure. God, how she craves this cleansing. She opens her mouth to cry for mercy, but the word that explodes from her lips is More. The waves of fire turn into a tide of pleasure, and she wakes herself with her fierce cries.

Grace's nightgown is bunched up between her thighs. She touches the damp cloth, half expecting to find blood on her fingertips, but it's only the wetness she released when she came.

* * * * *

Grace brings in a little money mending and altering other people's clothes. Anything to keep herself occupied. Over and over, the needle pierces the fabric. Its gleaming head rises through the cloth, then disappears again. The sound of the thread penetrating the rough cloth is as harsh as a lover's gasp. All sound is amplified. She can't touch her piano anymore without craving that music; after the first few bars of Hayden or Scarlatti she has to get up, go to the phonograph, and play another one of those records.

That music. That lewd music, rough and sweet at the same time, like a dripping honeycomb. Unfit to play in her house. What would her husband do if he was alive to see her standing weak-kneed in the kitchen, listening to some stranger play a dirty song on a guitar?

Filthy. Immoral. She can't wash her memory of the scene. She sees the stranger standing in her kitchen, blocking the afternoon sun like an eclipse. She has to stitch that day together piece by piece, because once she heard him play his guitar, she lost the threads that hold minutes together.

Grace drives the needle into her finger. Sucking hard, she makes the small pain blossom. She has an urge to penetrate her own flesh. She could pierce her earlobes and wear gold earrings, like the women who weave and sway along the streets in the seedy parts of town, using their bodies to beckon men. But what she really wants is a harsher assault. Hard leather, hard hands. The steel tip of a boot in the small of her back.

A drop of blood, welling out of her finger, falls onto the hem she's stitching. She wonders if other women have the same desires. Doesn't all desire come from the same well? In the pit of her being that well opens like a shimmering eye, brown as primeval water, like the eyes of the man with the guitar.

* * * * *  

 <<Forgive me for wanting him the way I do,>> Grace prays. <<Forgive the weakness of my flesh and the irresolution of my will. Forgive me for abandoning you when you have not abandoned me. Forgive me for leaving you to serve another.>>

What is it like, to be immersed in a master? It's like the dusk that comes over Grace just before she faints. First she steps into a ghostly gray borderland. Then cotton fills her head, blood darkens her vision, and she falls. Kneeling on her pew at church through the long communion service, Grace begins to sway, and she knows that she's about to go under.

Grace murmurs prayers as she waits to take the host, but she is not thinking about the body of Christ. The dark man offers her the sacraments she has always longed for: the thunder of a heart running off its rails, the redeeming pain of leather against her flesh, the deadly radiance of the soul's eclipse. As the congregation shuffles up to the altar to take the bread and wine, the choir sings a new hymn.

 <<Come for me, dark man, dark man come down, You'll be swingin' on that freight train when my dark man comes to town.>>

Rosy mouths open, releasing the words like ravens. Bile swells in Grace's throat. She lurches out of the pew, half-falling into the aisle. Heads turn. Bursting out of the chapel's doors, she inhales deeply, but the soft air can't eliminate the thick taste of her longing. She sits down on the stone steps and lowers her head. Through the folds of her skirt the smell of her own musk, wild and feral, rises up to meet her nostrils.

Wherever she goes, that song follows her. As soon as she hears the notes, the wall she has built with faith and self-reliance crumbles. Lately she hardly recognizes herself. Her pupils are so dilated that the blackness edges out the fragile blue iris. Bruises wind around her arms like serpentine bracelets. That's where his fingers held her wrists, when he pushed her onto her knees. All up and down her street, her neighbors whisper. She gives them plenty to talk about; she's been telling everyone about her conversion.

"You can't know what it's like," she tells any woman who will listen. "When you hear the song the first time, that's only the beginning. When you look into his face, and he comes down on you like a thunderhead, it's like nothing you've ever known, but everything you wanted.”

They look at her with curiosity, then with fear.

 "You won't know what to call him, not at first. You can't call him by the name of any lover or god, because his love isn't like anything you've ever known. After he touches you for the first time, your body will know exactly what to call him. You can't call him anything but Master.”

"Come with me," she begs them. "Please just come. We could catch the train together, when it's time.”

But the other women back away. They know that Grace has lost her mind--or something else. Even as they hurry back to their homes, they feel Grace's hunger, under the thin silk of her refinement.

* * * * *

When he needs a woman, they are never hard to find. In the houses along the railroad tracks, there is always a housewife or widow whose desires have been shaped by the moan of the train whistle. She is waiting for music that she's never heard, anything to disrupt the pattern of her days. She doesn't know this yet, but she will give up her body and soul for a song. One afternoon, when she's alone in the house, a man will step out of the tangle of wild grasses along the tracks. He will be tall, dressed in a dark suit, boots, and a hat. He will calm her with his battered elegance, seduce her with the same song he's been singing for years. The song has never been recorded, and if you ask about it in any juke joint, no one will have heard of it. Only his women know.

After weeks of waiting, it's finally Grace's turn. She finds herself hiding in the woods beside the freight yard, her heart hammering. From a distance she hears the snort and sigh of the train, and she thinks she has an eternity to decide. Before she's ready, the beast is rolling by. She doesn't know anything about hopping trains. She has no idea what to do.

<<Come for me, dark man,>> warble the frogs in the grass.

 <<Come for me, dark man,>> echoes a mockingbird in a mulberry tree.

 <<Come for me, dark man,>> cries her thundering blood.

Then she remembers skipping rope as a child, picking up the rhythm of the other girls' chant, waiting for the moment to jump in and catch the arc of the rope. She waits until a boxcar door yawns in front of her. She fixes her eyes on the ladder. She runs, a bit too fast, and her hands slip on the rungs, her ankles turning in the gravel before she regains her grip and hoists her body up the ladder into the car. As soon as she wobbles to her feet, she is thrown forward into the darkness. The boxcar wall rises up to meet her, and she falls hard.

She's alone in the car, with the profane light slanting in across her hands, and the masculine smells of steel and dried piss all around her, and the thrust of the machine's giant gears. Face-down, with her cheek resting on the floor, she watches the crackerbox houses beside the tracks. She sees a woman standing behind a picket fence, a woman watching the train. Then a second woman flashes by, and a third. Pretty maids all in a row--women joined like paper dolls, linked across the years by their desires.

 <<Come for me, dark man, dark man come down, Gonna give it to the dark man when that train rolls into town.>>

As the train presses on to the borderland, its kneeling passenger sways back and forth, semi-lucid, so far from her ladyworld. The train will never stop. He will never come. She has become simple-minded in her longing. She is foolish, probably mad. She has left her home, her town and church, and hopped this train like a hobo, all because of a song.

 Just when Grace is about to crack, wondering if she'll break her neck if she leaps out of this car and runs for her life, the train slows down. Stops. With a grating yawn, the boxcar's door slides open--time is speaking of its true breadth. The setting sun captures him in silhouette, angel of darkness, just before he climbs into the car. In this annunciation, he is splendid and terrible to see. Over his shoulder hangs the guitar.

 "You came," she says.

He looks down at Grace, crouching at his feet, then he slides the guitar off his shoulder and places it carefully against the wall. She wants to ask him to sing for her, but she knows better.

"Take that dress off. I want to see you.”

She strips, then huddles naked on her knees, her arms extended in front of her. Her hair sweeps forward, cloaking her face. Her back is an ivory arc, the bones of her spine barely forming a ripple in the convexity. Swelling from the deep indentation of her waist, her buttocks are full and milky white. Her deceptively delicate hands--hand that can reach over an octave on her piano--are arched as if to fix her to the boxcar's gritty floor.

His boot presses down on her hand. Not enough pressure to break the bones, or even to bruise them, only enough to flatten the fingers. Grace's fingers cave under the boot's insistence. The cold steel tip glides down her arm, lifting pale hairs in its wake, then rests on her skull. Particles of dirt dig into her forehead. The boot moves on, the sole coming to rest on Grace's neck, with its graceful cords and silken hollow. His instep bears down on the slim column--the density of his being comes to rest on the most vulnerable part of her body.

 Finally he lifts his foot, then steps around to face her, offering Grace the toe of his boot to kiss. She presses her lips to the leather. In the infinite maze of the leather's cracks, dirt has mingled with tar and blood, hardening the boot into a hoof.

"Are you going to take me?" she asks. Her desire rings in her ears. Her skull resonates with the notes of his song. Tears burn in the corners of her eyes.

"Hush," he says.

 He steps out of sight again, and his boot begins to explore her spine. Inch by inch it claims her back, conquering each vertebra with a tap. She flinches as the metal touches her buttocks, dips into the hollow between her thighs. The point sinks into the wet groove. She gnaws her lips. Her ass rises, and a desperate growling whimper comes from her mouth. Like a cat in heat she flattens her chest and belly against the ground.

The boot withdraws. Grace panics. Then his hand grips the nape of her neck. His fingers dive into her hair, and she is pulled upright, onto her knees. Behind her, he straddles her legs. His left hand holds her hair, while his right strokes her throat. Down the throat, across her collarbone, then under her breasts. He handles the soft flesh roughly, twisting each nipple, stretching the nub until the breast rises from its cradle. She grinds her teeth.

"Don't ask me to take you," he says. "I'll take you when I want.”

He gets down beside her, bracing her hips. His hand passes over her stomach, then goes between her thighs. He parts her lower lips and pushes two fingers inside her. His inspection continues from the inside--first her cunt, then the tight hole behind. His fingers are coarse and soft, warm and cold. In the beginning she thought he was evil, now she realizes that he is everything at once.

 He smacks her bare rump with his palm. She moans. No gentle kiss, no hand stroking her lightly, has ever made her moan like that.

"Use the belt," she begs.

 "You'll get what you need when you need it.”

He pulls a bandanna out of his pocket and ties it around her eyes. In the scratchy darkness behind the cloth, she inhales the smells of him: dust and whiskey, tobacco and wood smoke. He pushes her onto all fours, and she hears him undressing, pulling off his boots. Naked, he mounts her, holding his forearm firmly across her throat as he enters her. He is her lover now, murmuring in her ear, singing the words to the song in a low voice as the train supplies a slow percussion that matches the thrust of his hips. She'll have her pain soon enough, but for now there is only the friction of his cock, keeping time with the engine's rhythm.

Grace screams. There's no more pretense about what she is. It's something much older than love, this roaring need. She cries out like a woman falling, her howl merging with the train's whistle. Her journey is underway. This train runs only one direction: into the night.

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~~~

Copyright 2003

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