Wisdom

Adult/Youth, Incest, Pedophilia

This story contains depictions and/or descriptions of sexual activity between adults and minors. If it is not legal to read this sort of material in your locality, you object to this sort of material and/or you are under 18 years of age, please stop reading now and exit this story. This story is a work of fiction. No character within bears any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, and no scenario within is intended to depict any actual event and neither should the same be inferred. This story remains the sole property of the author. Comments are welcome and may be sent to the author at edward_sellon@protonmail.com. Disagreeable comments will be ignored. This story may be downloaded for the personal enjoyment of readers, but those wishing to re-post and/or re-print the same must first obtain the permission of the author.

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Chapter II - Aurora

I slept like a rock. I must have dreamed but, when I awoke, I couldn't remember a scrap of whatever had passed through my mind during the night. As my eyes fluttered open, I could see the dull light of the oncoming morning seeping around the edges of the black curtain that covered the glass doors at the far side of the bedroom. But all that told me was the bedroom faced east. Having no idea where in the world I was, I couldn't judge the time. It took me a few moments to realize I wasn't anyplace that resembled a prison and so, feeling a bit like an idiot, I looked over at a clock on a nightstand and saw it was a few minutes before six o'clock.

Normally, I worked long hours, chasing this story or that -- and that had certainly been true these last few months, even with all the traveling thrown in. Before, when I had been at the newspaper, I was always up with the birds, tapping away at my desk in the newsroom, fueled by cigarettes and coffee and the occasional snootful of blow snuck in the restroom, or scrounging in every dark corner or well-lit office where scraps of information were to be had. The evenings I spent with my ink-stained buddies, grousing about our editors, sharing not-so-old memories and slowly sinking into booze-soaked stupors.

Some nights, for the price of a hand job or my pussy, I copped good coke from a football columnist, who got his from a sports agent, and woke up in strange beds with newsroom wretches I normally, I told myself, wouldn't have favored with a second glance during the day, my head feeling like a bowling ball and my tongue like the floormat of an old jalopy. But then, after a quick shower, a faster scrub of my teeth and a jolt of coffee, I was up and at it again, checking my messages, nodding off at editorial meetings, driving all over, shamelessly asking awkward or unwelcome questions, joshing with cops and coroners and social workers, getting yelled at and doors slammed in my face, and, at the end of the day, dreaming, as I headed toward the bar, of Cosmopolitans and very dry martinis and that delicious white powder that kept me bending my elbow most of the night.

I prided myself on giving everything I could in the service of my cynical crusade. I was as hard and tough as any of the boys. While they took long lunches and started getting wasted well before the sun started going down, I was working my phone or I was out on the streets, hustling. No one, but no one, was going to outwork me, and I could drink all those bastards under the table.

The little lies I told myself about my iron constitution came crashing down one day while I was climbing up four flights of stairs at the courthouse on Foley Square. I was suddenly short of breath and my legs felt like they were wrapped in heavy chains. A stabbing pain shot through one of my arms and lanced into my chest. I had to sit down on one of the steps and was suddenly overcome with a wave of nausea, my body shedding a torrent of sweat. I rested there for several minutes until the nausea passed and the sweat, which had soaked my blouse, began to dry. I was relieved no one else had come along to ask me fool questions and maybe insist on calling paramedics. Still, the episode frightened me, and I was relieved when my doctor told me I had definitely not suffered a heart attack. He did add I was burning the candle at both ends and subtly let me know I better knock off the yeyo before my heart did seize up.

I sort of listened to him. I did go cold turkey on the cigarettes and the coke, and I drank less, and I started devoting some nights, then more nights, to exercise rather than downing one drink after another. In short order, I felt better and looked better, which my sex buddies appreciated. I had more energy, which I devoted to working even harder, writing even more. I was up at the crack of dawn and conked out with the vampires.

Now, lying on the large bed, my body clock having triumphed again, I thought of all I had seen the day before, the images my eyes recorded replaying over the wide-screen cinema in my head. I thought of Yanni and Sweet, naked and having sex, their cum flowing into each other's mouths. I thought of the beautiful but dangerous young Guardians, brilliantly and arousingly resplendent in their scanty uniforms, the gleaming cold metal of the weapons under their arms and on their flanks. I thought of the two naked young boys I had seen in the forest, walking hand-in-hand. Where had they been going? I wondered. Had they been on their way to make love in some shaded glen? Or had they already enjoyed each other, licked and sucked and fucked each other, walking together while enjoying the deep contentment that comes from good sex? I thought of the boy and girl I had seen, so young and yet so obviously skilled at sex. I thought of the undeniable pleasure I had seen on the girl's face as the boy, grunting his own ecstasy, slid his hard young cock in and out of her young pussy, the two of them enjoying each other in an abandon most adult couples would have been too ashamed to display. I thought of Lina pissing into the mouths of Martin and Emma, and how eagerly and freely those two formidable youngsters had drunken her down and then shared the pale golden liquid with each other and Lina herself. I wondered about Yanni and Sweet and Pop, making love in their cottage the night before. I imagined what it must have looked like, their bodies moving together, his adult cock and their boy cocks, mouths and tongues everywhere, stiffened organs nestling in every hole.

And then I thought of Lina again, perhaps sleeping in her cottage just a few feet away from me. Who had been in her bed last night? Had Martin and Emma been her lovers? Had the three of them spent the night naked, their holsters and pistols lying nearby, the two children drinking the juices that flowed from Lina's pussy in addition to the piss they had drunken earlier in the day? Or had Lina enjoyed other lovers, other members of her army of young hard-bodied killers? How many fingers and tongues had moved over her breasts, explored the flesh and moist folds between her legs, and sampled the flavors found at the rosette of her ass? How many times had she come before falling asleep? Had she thought of me at all?

My mind filled with these musings, my hand irresistibly moved down to my cunt. My middle finger found my clit while the two fingers at its sides spread the puffy pink lips of my pussy. I started slow, moaning softly. Gradually quickening the movement of the middle finger and its orbits over and around my swollen clit, my other fingers came into play, splaying open my sex until my whole hand -- two fingers, three fingers and more -- dove into my moistened hole, grasping, clawing for my G-spot while my other hand roughly squeezed my left breast and then painfully tweaked its nipple. My torso rose off the bed, hurling away the counterpane and sheets until my body was thrusting unimpeded toward the ceiling and then slamming back down onto the mattress. My cunt began to flow, the viscous juices coating my hand and my fingers, my pussy gleaming as I sprayed all over, darkening the bottom sheet with my spendings. As I thrashed about, my eyes were tightly shut, a loud, agonized moan escaping me as my orgasm, one of the greatest of my life so far, built and crested, the climax roughly shoving me back down onto the mattress into a pool of pussy cream and sweat. My mind was nearly blasted away by the pleasure, but my fingers, as if operating on their own, kept up their work, bringing forth a series of smaller but intensely sharp orgasms accompanied by audible effusions of juice. Rolling onto my left side and curling inward, my body hunched against the active hand, shivering in its delight as high-pitched keens rose from my throat, lessening in volume as the waves of pleasure eased.

Breathing heavily, I slowly opened my eyes and tried to gather myself as my hand slowly came loose from my soaked twat with a loud squelch. My chest and belly rising and falling from my deep breaths, I raised my right arm to look at the hand. The ends of my fingers were dripping, and I studied the clear liquid coating the hand, dappled here and there with dying bubbles and streaks of a thicker white cream. I brought my hand to my mouth and began licking it, savoring my own flavors. I had eaten dozens of other pussies, but had, immodestly, never found a flavor, so sharp and tangy sweet, to match my own. I licked greedily, cleaning my hand with my tongue as efficiently as a cat licking its paws. When I was done, my arm collapsed onto my body and I rolled onto my back, looking up at the ceiling, staring at nothing. How does Lina's pussy taste? I wondered. If she and I make love, will she like my flavor?

Yesterday evening, I had promised myself that in spite of the depravity that surrounded me in this place, I would keep my pussy as tightly shut as the hatches of a submarine, but I now knew that was all so much fart gas. If Lina gave me the slightest hint, my supposed journalistic ethics would fly out the window. I would run to be by her side, to be naked with her in bed or anywhere she cared to choose, to have my tongue on her pussy while her tongue entered mine.

I took a deep breath and sat up in the bed. I had to admit that, the tremendous orgasms I had just enjoyed notwithstanding, I felt very rested. I left the bed, went to the bathroom and took another shower. I again emerged with a towel around my head and the plushest terrycloth robe I had ever worn swaddling my body.

Barefoot, I padded to the kitchen and made my usual breakfast -- a pot of coffee. Normally, when it came to my meals, I grabbed stuff on the go, eating in my car after leaving a fast-food drive-thru or scarfing something at a sidewalk falafel or hot dog stand. As assiduous as I had recently been looking after my body, my diet was still a disaster. I looked in the refrigerator and saw Yanni hadn't been lying; it was loaded with all manner of food and drink. The freezer was the same, stuffed with frozen meals and ice cream, meat and poultry and seafood, and even canisters of Margarita mix. I was tempted; there was a blender on the counter, after all. But I settled for my cup of the aromatic dark caffeinated mother to us all and a breakfast burrito I tossed in the microwave. While the burrito cooked, I idly looked in the cupboards and they were crammed too. God, I thought, they had set me up good. If I cooked at all, it might be worth something having all this stuff here.

I gobbled the burrito in four bites and, holding a second cup of coffee in my left hand, went to the front door of the cottage and opened it, looking out into the dawning of a crispy cool glorious morning as if I was a hausfrau in some corner of suburbia expecting to see my neighbors puttering around their front yards before school buses rumbled up to collect the kiddies and the parents shoved off for work. In the light of day, the cluster of cottages amid the grid of streets and sidewalks did indeed supply, even more than the night before, the appearance of some sort of pleasant small-town neighborhood, but one that was eerily quiet.

I looked over at all the cottages that Yanni had pointed out the night before and saw no activity whatsoever, finally looking next door at Lina's cottage. A chilly breeze blew through just then, rustling the bushes and stalks of flowers in the yard, but the Dutch door at the front of her cottage was shut, and I couldn't detect any movement behind the drapes just within the front windows.

The little I so far knew about Lina, though, led me to think she likely wasn't in the cottage. Her job and her nature, I was sure, had her up early every day. If she had been there at all last night, she was somewhere else already, her magnificent body poured into that outrageously sexy uniform, those huge pistols hanging under her arms and strapped to her muscled flanks. She was up and moving about with her athletic grace, her face stern and mouth set as she gave orders, ensuring her army of young killers protected her beloved Master and this immoral realm.

In a moment of clarity, I admitted to myself I had never met anyone like Lina ever before. Oh, I had met and interviewed hard cases of all sorts, cops and criminals alike, some of them genuine killers, some willing to give their lives (and the lives of dozens or hundreds of innocent others) in the service of their compassionate god. But, to my mind, Lina was in a class by herself. I had slept with dozens of women. But none of them, in their attractiveness or sexual power, compared to Lina. Back home, I knew a Park Avenue dominatrix, a regal French-Canadian blonde with a bewitching smile and gorgeous breasts and a decidedly delicious, shaved pussy, whose clientele included some of the most powerful men on the planet, luminaries from the worlds of finance and politics who paid big bucks to grovel before her incisive cruelty, and yet even she was a fading apparition next to Lina. She scared the hell out of me but that made her all the hotter in my eyes. There was a human being under all that firepower and skin-tight black leather, I was certain, and I wondered what it took to know that person. I knew the Master knew. But how was I to know? What I did know was that I longed to be with her, to be safe in her strong arms.

Sighing, I turned away from Lina's cottage and looked up the street, momentarily startled when I saw two young girls walking on the sidewalk in my direction. They were both golden-haired, pretty and slender. Though both wore matching cotton jackets to ward off the morning chill, both were nonetheless half naked, the jackets unzipped to reveal their chests and midriffs. Each wore the seemingly ubiquitous belly chains as well as yellow bikini bottoms, yellow low-cut athletic socks, and yellow low-cut canvas sneakers on their feet. One of the girls was obviously older, a few inches taller than the other girl and sporting B-cup breasts topped by erect pink nipples. The other girl, though her nipples were also erect, was flat chested. I guessed they were around fourteen and ten years of age, respectively, and thought they might be sisters since they resembled each other in face and figure. The belly chain worn by the older girl was silver, displaying a few diamonds and several more rubies. The belly chain of the younger girl was bronze. Curiously, her chain bore only rubies.

As the girls passed my cottage, they looked at me, smiled and waved, cheerily wishing me good morning. My mouth fell open and, at a loss, I simply waved back, wishing them a good morning in return. They walked on, the older girl crouching a bit to whisper something in the younger girl's ear, not so subtly pointing to me as she did so. In response, the younger girl giggled and brought her hand up to her mouth to cover her sudden laughter. As they moved down the sidewalk, I could see, as the younger girl slipped her other hand into the hand of her companion, the firm buttocks of their trim young asses hardly stirring in the casing of their skin-tight bikini bottoms.

I blinked my eyes in confusion, wondering what the older girl had said, and was suddenly a bit miffed to think they might be enjoying a joke at my expense. The little brats, I thought as I involuntarily clutched at the front of my robe and closed it over my breasts. Where the fuck did they get off laughing at me? I mentally slapped myself then, thinking I was too paranoid. This place is already getting to me, I thought. I had no way of knowing what the girl had said, after all, and the way they were dressed was a common enough sight on European beaches. Still, I couldn't help considering the universe those girls inhabited. Were they sisters? If they were, did they have sex with each other, with their parents? Where were they going so scantily dressed? Had they been fucked by the Master? Was it possible those two young girls were even more sexually experienced than I was?

I turned around to head back into the house and nearly tripped over a stack of newspapers: that day's editions of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. I picked them up and brought them inside, donning my horn-rimmed reading glasses to begin my usual study of current events while sitting at the table in the small dining area. A small bit of amazement coursed through me as I began reading the newspapers. They had obviously checked me out but good and knew I was a news junkie, that I began every day with several cups of coffee and a stack of newspapers.

I was halfway through the Times when a knock startled me. I looked up and saw Yanni through one of the oval glass panes set in in the front doors. He smiled and waved at me. As usual, he was shirtless. I couldn't resist his charm. I returned his smile and waved back, then got up and let him in.

"Good morning!" Yanni said cheerily as he stepped through the doorway and into the living room.

"Good morning," I replied with a small laugh as I pulled my reading glasses up from my eyes and perched them on the top of my head, just below the crown of terrycloth that swaddled my hair.

Yanni really did light up a room and a large part of me was glad to see him again. I noticed something was off about him, though, but I couldn't immediately tell what. It took me a few moments to realize he wasn't naked. He was wearing a bright yellow bikini swimsuit that covered his genitals and most of his ass. In a way, he was sexier in the garment. His cock was semi-hard and the glans, its outline clearly visible through the elastic material, tented the front of the swimsuit, causing its upper edge to slightly detach from the sloping muscles of his lower abdomen. The rear of the swimsuit covered most of his buttocks but molded itself to the curve of his ass and left visible the creases where his bottom met the top of his legs. On his feet he wore a pair of yellow low-cut athletic socks and yellow canvas sneakers like the ones I had seen on the feet of the two young girls.

"You're wearing clothes!" I exclaimed, unable to resist giving voice to my observation.

Yanni laughed as he turned around, proudly displaying the bulge of his penis. "Today is Yellow," he replied simply.

"Yellow?" I asked, a bit confused.

"The Master re-named the days of the week," Yanni explained. "Today, Saturday, is Yellow so most everybody wears yellow -- at least when they're not naked. You remember when we drove by the Guest House yesterday and you saw the assistant lovers wearing red?"

I nodded.

"Well, yesterday, Friday, was Red. Tomorrow, Sunday, will be White. But, just like in a good part of the outside world, tomorrow is also the day of worship."

I found Yanni's explanation fascinating. The Master, like any other cult or revolutionary leader, was trying to completely control the environment and thought of his adherents, even to the point of re-making the passage of time in his own image, like the French revolutionaries declaring 1792 to be Year One or Pol Pot, when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, proclaiming 1975 to be Year Zero. "Eighteen Brumaire, indeed," I said.

The reference confused Yanni. "Huh?" he uttered.

"During the French Revolution," I explained, "the new regime wanted a complete break with the past, so they re-named the months, re-organized the weeks, and so on. When Napoleon seized power a few years later, he did so on Eighteen Brumaire, which had been November 9th under the old calendar."

"Oh," Yanni said, apparently not grasping my point or very interested in the same in any case.

I shrugged off Yanni's disinterest, the brief exchange having informed me the Master knew history -- and its uses. "So, you look good," I said sincerely as I closed the doors behind me and moved back into the dining room to sit at the head of the table, downing the last of the coffee in my cup. "Very sexy."

"Thanks!" Yanni said, a broad grin on his face as he took a seat across the corner of the dining room table to my left.

"I made some coffee," I said, gesturing at the pot in the kitchen. "Help yourself."

"No," Yanni said softly. "I don't drink much coffee. I used to, lots of it. But not anymore."

"You live healthy?" I asked, a slightly teasing tone in my voice as I rose to pour myself another cup.

Yanni got the joke and laughed. "I try to," he replied with a smile. "I have lots of sex." He assumed a mock seriousness and added: "You know, they say lots of sex is good for you."

Sitting back down at the table, I returned his smile and asked: "Well, speaking of healthy, and sex, how late were you up last night?"

Yanni grinned and laughed. "I knew you were curious!" he exclaimed happily. "But actually, we weren't up that late. I was more tired than I thought and so was Sweet. And Pop was tired from a long day at the Studio, so I guess we shared love for only about an hour or so before we all fell asleep."

"Poor you," I said with a teasing smile. "You're getting old. And to think you promised me such a good time." I could hardly believe we were talking in such a casual and friendly manner about his sexual romp with two preteen boys, as if we were two old girlfriends good-naturedly shooting the shit over the failings of our husbands.

Yanni gave me a leering smile. "Oh, if you had been there," he said, "I'm sure all of us would've gotten a second wind."

I instantly decided not to further explore that possibility, not even in jest. "So, tell me about Pop's day at the Studio," I simply asked.

Yanni nodded. "Mhm-hm," he grunted softly. "Pop is one of the elite boy models, so he spends a lot of his days at the Studio. He's doing a boy orgy video right now and he said the shoot took all day yesterday and it's been going on for a few days now. But it's supposed to wrap today so he's already back there." Yanni looked at a clock on the wall. "He's probably in make-up by now."

"A boy orgy video," I mused. "That sounds interesting." I was actually far more interested than I hoped I let on. "Is that something the Master is shooting?"

"No. Piarist is shooting that vid."

I remembered Piarist was the name of an old Catholic order that was particularly devoted to the care of youth. I resisted the urge to smirk. It was obvious there existed a healthy appreciation for ribald wit among this pack of pedophiles. "Who's Piarist?" I asked.

"One of the directors over at the Studio. Piarist's not his real name."

"I figured," I said with a wry smile. "What's his real name?" I was momentarily apprehensive Yanni would refuse to answer the question, but he gave it up without hesitation.

"Lorenzo," Yanni replied.

"Besides obvious reasons, why does Lorenzo call himself Piarist?"

"It's like, I guess you'd say, a stage name," Yanni explained. "All the photographers and videographers at the Studio, all the creative people, take a name other than their own."

I nodded in seeming understanding. "And how many directors are there?"

"Right now, officially, about ten," Yanni said.

"Why do you say officially?"

"Well, two of the directors, Augustinian and Trinitarian, used to make vids but now they work directly for the Master, shooting his Afternoon Meditations, recording his life, and stuff like that."

More religious orders, I thought. I shook my head slightly, trying to sort the questions Yanni's simple statements were causing to bubble up in my brain. "Okay," I said. "Augustinian and Trinitarian; what are their real names?"

"Giovanni and Jacqueline," Yanni replied. "But everyone calls them Gio and Jackie. They're brother and sister."

I chugged a swig of coffee. "Of course, they are," I said with a mockingly vigorous nod of my head, a smile of stupefied surrender on my face. "And I presume they fuck each other, just like you fuck your sisters."

"Oh, yeah," Yanni said. "They've been together since they were kids. They have two kids of their own." He suddenly became a bit more animated. "Oh, and I forgot to mention, Lorenzo is their younger brother."

I waved one of my hands in faux approval, exclaiming: "Why not?"

Yanni laughed, amused by my histrionics. The lovable bastard obviously enjoyed shocking me with the depravities that were commonplace in this world.

I took a deep breath, sighed and downed another draught of the coffee. I stared into space for a few moments, then turned back to Yanni and asked: "So what's their story, these siblings who make kiddy porn?"

Yanni shrugged. "They've all been with the Master a long time," he said, "longer than me, even. They all met when they were kids, and it was the Master who turned them on to photography and making movies."

"He turned them on to more than that, I'll bet," I said flatly.

Yanni laughed. "Yeah," he said in agreement. "The Master turned them all on to incest, especially Gio and Jackie, but they were all his lovers and helped him make his photo sets and vids and have been with him ever since. A lot of people here think that Lorenzo especially is one of the best directors we've ever had. His vids have always sold a bunch."

"So, what's with the directors taking the names of religious orders?" I asked.

"Huh?"

I could see Yanni was genuinely confused by my question. "The stage names you mentioned," I explained, "those are all names of Catholic religious orders."

"Really?" Yanni said. "Gosh, I never knew that. I always knew the directors couldn't use their real names, but I always thought the stage names were like what Sweet told you yesterday, you know, that everybody who's part of the Master's family has the right to pick a new name if they want."

I wondered over that. Yanni was obviously intelligent and extraordinarily intuitive but seemed to have little intellectual curiosity. I might have been tempted to say he displayed the innocence of a child but recalled the sight of him so avidly having sex with a preteen boy. How could he not have known the meaning of the names of the Master's directors? Had he never thought to ask? Had the Master never thought to explain to him? Was he, despite all he had shared with the Master and all the Master so plainly meant to him, ultimately an instrument of the Master's will and nothing more? Hadn't there been moments when the Master, alone with his lover Yanni, imparted knowledge, shared wisdom, or had it all merely been the undulation of naked bodies, the meeting of stiffened penises, the explosions of ejaculate into welcoming holes? Whatever the case, the Master, in his choice of names for his directors, evidently had a sense of humor, and I, oddly, found that reassuring.

My wonder over the breadth of Yanni's mental acuity notwithstanding, he had told me a lot. When I had embarked on this odyssey, I had met heretics who were familiar with the works credited to the Master, but didn't believe any Master existed, pointing to the different names to be found stamped on the pictures comprising the photo sets or in the credits of the videos. The most those infidels were willing to admit was that there might be one studio from where all the product flowed, but that the product itself was the work of several "artists." It turned out, I now knew, the unbelievers were only half right. There was indeed one studio, but the artists in residence there indeed had a master, whose will and vision animated their work.

"So, what is it the Master does, then?" I asked.

"Well, the Master really doesn't shoot many of the vids," Yanni said. "He used to in the old days, when there weren't that many directors, but not anymore. I remember when I was a kid, like when I was Chief Boy Lover, and we'd be naked and sharing love with each other and whoever else, it seemed like he always had some kind of a camera in his hands, no matter where we happened to be playing. But now he mostly concentrates on his own photo sets, like he did when he started making kiddy porn; it's what he calls his art. He was always more into photography than shooting vids anyway. But like I told you yesterday, nothing goes out that he doesn't approve, so he looks over all the photo sets and he helps edit a lot of the videos, not to mention coming up with the ideas for a lot of them too. But then he hands off those ideas to the directors and they're the ones who actually shoot the vids."

"The ideas? You mean you just don't point a camera and shoot?"

Yanni seemed slightly insulted. "No," he insisted. "And I don't know why you say that because I know you've seen the Master's work. You know how beautiful it can be, how much love you can see in it, find in it, which should tell you how much love went into making it. It definitely caused you to love yourself a little bit more."

I had wondered when my masturbation to the videos I had so far seen would be thrown up in my face. "I don't know that the photos I've seen and the vids I saw yesterday were any kind of revelation," I said through a quickly formed carapace of dismissiveness. "I jerk off to a lot of things, after all, especially anything that features Brad Pitt or Cindy Crawford. And if there weren't any pics or vids around, there's always hairbrushes, dildoes, vibrators and such."

"Now you're just lying again," Yanni said softly. "And I don't know why. You should know by now how much I care for you and that you can tell me anything. You don't ever have to be afraid or ashamed with me."

Yanni, that fucking pedo, had succeeded in touching me once again. At that moment, I simply had no doubt every word he had just said was true. There was nothing I couldn't reveal to him, nothing I need fear sharing -- and I also knew, without even asking, he would keep in confidence anything I told him, even to the grave. God, I thought, fucking story or no fucking story, I do so want to give in and allow us to be friends.

Yanni fell silent a moment and then added: "But I forgive you because I know you don't mean it." He smiled then. "And I think you're trying to just get a rise out of me."

"You fucking perv!" I shot back, but then couldn't help but laugh. "Maybe," I agreed. I turned a little more serious and added: "You know we're talking about kiddy porn."

"Yeah," Yanni declared. "But not just any kiddy porn. The best that's ever been. Better than Lolita Love or Photos by Carl or LS or Siberian Mouse. It'll change the world someday."

Upon hearing at least one of the titles Yanni recited, something stirred within me, but it was just a small tremor, so I brushed it away, and quickly put it out of my mind. I was left staring at him in incredulous wonder. "You really believe that," I said.

"Yes. People will see the love, people will talk about the love, and they'll start to wonder why they shouldn't be part of the love, enjoy it for themselves."

"You think the Master's going to turn the whole world pedo? You are far gone, kid."

Yanni shrugged. "I admit probably not tomorrow," he said, "or the next day or the day after that. It'll probably take a long time, I know. You and me, even the Master, won't be around to see it. But, in time, people will see the truth. It'll probably happen long after all of us are dead, but it'll happen. And then everyone will know and remember the Master, and how his pedophile cock led the way."

I shook my head. "You're fucking crazy," I said gently. "All of you, fucking crazy."

"They called Jesus crazy."

My eyes widened. "You're comparing the Master to Jesus now?"

"Why not? Jesus was just a man too."

"Yeah. And look what happened to him."

Yanni shrugged. "The Master accepts the mission he has now is bigger than he is," he said. "His job is to live the truth, record the truth and bring it to as many people as he can. In time, everybody will find the truth within themselves; they'll see the truth and live it just like he does. Someday, the truth will belong to everybody but, for right now, the Master knows how dangerous it is. But he's lived with danger his whole life. He isn't afraid. Just as we'd all die for him, he would die for the truth he's given us and that we all share."

"Yeah," I said sarcastically. "The guy's a regular Valentine Michael Smith."

Yanni's eyebrows arched. "Who's that?" he asked.

I threw up my hands, thinking, with a touch of dismissive annoyance, my explanation would bore Yanni. "He's the chief character in a novel by Robert Heinlein," I said in a rush. "It's a science fiction novel. He's raised by Martians and they're much more advanced than us and he comes back to Earth, and he founds a religion that promotes sexual freedom, including incest. And he becomes, like, a new messiah."

"Wow!" Yanni exclaimed. "That sounds like a cool book. What's the title?"

"Stranger in a Strange Land," I said.

"I gotta read it!" Yanni said. "I'll look for it in the library."

I marveled that this little world even contained a library, but pleasantly surprised by Yanni's reaction, I added: "You won't like the ending."

"How does it end?" Yanni asked. "Tell me. I don't mind knowing the ending."

I didn't know how to leaven what I was about to say so I just blurted: "He's surrounded by a crowd of people who are upset by his religion, and they tear him apart."

"Oh," Yanni said, thinking for a moment. "Gosh, that's sad. Just like they did with Jesus. Well, I hope that doesn't happen to the Master."

I decided not to interject that Jesus had been crucified, not torn limb from limb. "Don't you worry about it?" I asked with genuine concern -- at least for Yanni.

Yanni nodded. "I do," he replied. "More these last few days since the Master decided to let you come here. Except for Maya, everybody else that counted was against it, not just Lina."

"You too?" I asked, a bit hurt, suddenly realizing this sick fuck's approval meant a lot to me.

"Yes," Yanni said. "Me too."

I sighed and bowed my head. "Thanks."

Yanni regarded me. "You asked me a question and I answered honestly," he said. "Friends should never do any less."

I raised my head, actually perking up a bit at his mention of our being friends.

"You asked me if I was worried," Yanni continued, "and I was honest about that too. But it's like I told you yesterday: finding the truth for yourself is never easy and bringing the truth to others is harder still, even dangerous, just like it was for that Valentine Michael Smith guy. I love the Master; I've loved him practically my whole life, and I worry about him. As well hidden as we are here, I know it wouldn't take too much for somebody -- somebody with brains, like you -- to find us. And bringing you here; knowing you're going to write about everything you see, is an awful risk."

Yanni paused a moment, looking down at the floor and thinking. He raised his head and, while looking into the distance, said: "But the Master explained that, as careful as we have to be, we still have to spread the word, have to find a way to bring the truth to others, get them to understand, even if they accept it only a long time from now. After all, what good is the truth if not everyone shares in it?" He turned his head to look at me then, the light of an unsettling intensity suddenly blazing in his eyes. "He said you will be his weapon, that if any one of us went back to share the truth, people would laugh at us or put us away or even kill us. But you" -- he pointed a finger at me -- "you'll bring them the truth. They won't accept it at first and they'll hate you for telling them. But it'll be the beginning -- and maybe more than the beginning." He pointed a finger at me again. "You."

I was awestruck by this revelation and a heavy breath escaped me. For years, I had prided myself on my journalistic ability, my relentless snooping, and my self-regard, such as it was, had certainly been heightened by my pursuit of this story. Almost from pure instinct and supposition, I had discovered things, uncovered things, met and interviewed a myriad of people no one else imagined existed. Doggedly flicking at the switch of a flashlight that had been short one battery, I had gone looking for unsuspected dark corners and found them. I was on the case; no one and nothing would escape me. But now I was finding out I had been drawn in, like a prize steer to a pen at a county fair, like a bug to the yawning maw of a roach motel. This story, the one I had thought would make my name and fortune, had never been mine; almost from the start, it had been commandeered, co-opted, hijacked. My crusade was the Master's mission. He wanted me to tell the world, knowing the story would be regarded so fantastic I'd be laughed out of the profession, pilloried for just setting it down, but that my words, like the gospels of a nascent faith, would seep through the eddies of time, waxing the fold until only a few scattered heretics were left. The Master intended to be my archangel and I was to be his messenger.

"Fuck me!" I breathed.

"What's wrong?" Yanni asked.

"If what you say is true," I replied, "I might as well pack it in now and just go home, give up on all of this." I paused a moment, thinking. "I've seen it with my own eyes and only now do I realize that, if I can hardly believe it, how will anyone else? Even if they do believe me, they'll sweat me for an eternity, trying to find this place, lock me up if I don't give up my sources. My First Amendment rights won't mean dick. Any publisher I might get will run for cover and any judge I might face will trip over themselves to put me away." I whipped my reading glasses off my head, letting them fall to the table, and dropped my toweled head into my hands. "Oh, God," I groaned. "I wonder if it's too late to get my old job back."

Yanni laughed. "Don't be such a drama queen," he said lightly, reaching over to take my hands in his. "I can't disagree with anything you just said but stop and think. Think about who you are."

I lifted my head and regarded him. "What do you mean?"

Yanni smiled. "You're too good a reporter to give up," he said. "You're too ambitious and too stubborn, and you're too obsessed with the beliefs you say you have about this bad old world to just stop. You and I both know you're going to stay and you're going to write your story and you'll face whatever happens after. A part of you will enjoy it. I think you've always wanted to be a martyr to your cynicism, always wanted everybody around you to admit what you've known all along: that the world is a shithole." He paused a moment and drew a breath. "But, as cynical as you are, you'll be the first to change. Because what you've always really wanted is to change, not just the world but yourself."

I pulled my hands away from his. "Stop saying that shit!" I said tightly, baring my teeth. "I'm never going to come around to your way of thinking. I'm never going to fuck kids and believe it's part of some new transformative truth. I'm here to observe and report and write a story and that's all."

Yanni smiled again. "So, you're staying then?" he asked.

I looked directly at him, silent for what seemed like a minute or more. "Yes, I'm staying," I said at last. I lowered my voice to a whisper and added: "Damn the torpedoes." I kept my eyes on his lovely face, offering him my hands. He softly grasped them, still smiling at me. "Why do you believe, Yanni?" I finally asked.

Yanni's smile faded a bit as he pondered an answer. "Everything is dead," he said slowly. "The whole world, dead. Every government, every system, every religion, every idea, all dead. We've come to the end of ourselves. We've been living in the dark so long we don't know any way out. We don't even want a way out." He fell silent then, thinking. "The Master is the way out," he whispered. "All of us, living the way we were meant to live, naked and loving, adults loving children and children loving them back, children loving each other, great orgies of love under the sun and moon and stars."

"Love," I said, recalling the mantra I had heard the day before. "Always love."

His eyes shining brightly, Yanni nodded. "Love," he repeated. "Always love."

Yanni caressed my hands as I sighed a great sigh. "So, what now?" I asked. "What hoops will the Master have me jump through next?"

Yanni grinned. "Your first big interview," he said.

My head shot up. "The Master?!" I exclaimed eagerly, perhaps too eagerly.

Yann shook his head. "No," he said simply. "But the next best thing."

"Who?" I punched him playfully. "Tell me, you sick fuck!"

Yanni laughed, gently rubbing the bicep I had just punched. "The Goddesses," he said.

"The Goddesses?" I blurted in confusion as my expression clicked down to a sullen blankness. "Who the fuck are the Goddesses?"

"Well, that's what I call them, and a bunch of other people too. They're the Master's women. Sometimes they like being called that and sometimes they say they don't. Anyway, I'm supposed to take you to them. They're going to be waiting for you at the family dining room over at the Main House. You'll have breakfast with them and maybe lunch and you can ask them whatever you want, though they might not answer everything you have to ask."

"Fuck me!" I exclaimed. "Did you have a hand in arranging this?"

Yanni blanched while narrowing his eyes. "No," he said. "I didn't ask but my guess is the Master set it up. I told you" -- he was suddenly a bit sheepish -- "except for Maya, everybody that counts was against letting you come here, especially the other Goddesses, but, at the same time, they understand the Master's reasons for allowing it. I'm sure he didn't order them to do it; he never gives orders, not really. But he probably let them know he'd like them to talk to you, and, once they knew that, they talked about it among themselves and decided to do it."

"So, who are the Goddesses?" I asked.

Yanni shrugged. "Well, there's Maya," he said. "She's the Master's oldest child and also his Chief Wife."

I did a double take upon hearing that. His child and his wife?! I silently exclaimed. What fucking sickos! And then an accusation was spit at me from my depths and I kicked myself. What a little hypocrite you are! Okay, still, even if I am a hypocrite, I've got to get a grip, I thought. Questions, questions, questions.

First things first. "Why was Maya in favor of me coming here when the other Goddesses weren't?" I asked.

"I can't say for certain because neither the Master or Maya have talked to me about it," Yanni replied. "And I haven't asked. But, knowing them the way I do, I guess it was probably because she knows his mind, the way it works, better than anyone else. She probably guessed right away what he intends your visit will achieve. And she's the High Priestess of our religion" -- he suddenly stopped himself, momentarily considered the word he had just used and replaced it -- "our faith, maybe better said, and so she'd be in favor of anything that would help spread the truth."

His answer was like an errant bowling ball in my mind, knocking away a few pins but leaving the bulk standing. "The High Priestess?"

Yanni nodded. "Maya's in charge of our faith," he explained. "The Acolytes, the holy rituals, the sacred orgies and whatnot, she oversees all of it. Heck, she pretty much founded the faith. She was into child sex and incest to begin with, even when she was a little girl."

My skepticism irresistibly came to the fore. "Even when she was a little girl?!" I exclaimed with unrestrained dubiousness. "Oh, c'mon!"

Yanni nodded. "No, really," he insisted. "Her grandparents were heavy into this Christian church -- the Children of God, I think it was called -- and the people in that church believed that child sex and incest were holy, which I always thought was cool. You know, that people in a church could be into such groovy shit. Anyway, Maya's mom Parvati grew up believing it too and then so did Maya. And then, later, Maya got into Paganism and Santeria and Satanism, explored all sorts of shit, even went away for a while to India to study Tantra, and she used a bunch of stuff from all those faiths to build up our faith all around the Master. I heard her say once that that's the way all great religions get started; they borrow stuff from other faiths to build their own. She said the Christians, when they were getting started, borrowed from the Jews and from the Romans too. Anyway, in a lot of ways, she's the one who made the Master the Master. I mean, all of us always loved him, but Maya was the one who first realized how special he was, and how much more special he could be, and she got the rest of us to realize it too."

"How did she do that? Bring all of you to that realization, I mean?"

Yanni shrugged. "She started building the faith when she was still a kid," he explained, "even before she was ten years old. But she never forced anything on any of us. All of us went along -- each in his or her own way, and some of us went along faster while others went along slower -- because we sort of already believed everything she believed -- at least about him. For example, Lina went with it from the start. But Maya believed it from before the beginning, from the time she was a little girl. Her faith is that deep. More than that, she was in love with him, not just as a father but as a lover and then as a husband. I mean, from what I've heard, `cause I wasn't around then, it was spooky. Their being together in that way, as more than father and daughter, was a certainty for her from pretty much the beginning of her life."

Yanni paused a moment, thinking. "Or maybe it wasn't so spooky," he said. "You know, sometimes really special things happen right in front of our eyes but because they happen day by day we don't realize how special they truly are. Like women giving birth. That's a miracle, don't you think? One cell finds another and, once they come together, they grow, and ultimately become a unique human being. Anyway, what happened between them was sort of like that and it really was a miracle. They started out as father and daughter, but holy and pure incest made them more than father and daughter, made them all they became and all they are today. All of us saw it, or at least saw parts of it -- their transformation, I mean -- so there was really no choice for the rest of us. None of us could deny the truth and none of us wanted to anyway. It was a miracle that happened right before our eyes, so all of us had to believe."

Yanni again paused a moment. "And he felt the same way about her," he eventually said. "All of us could see that. She was his daughter, yeah, but also his lover. He shared love with her from the start of her life, licking her baby pussy. He popped the cherry in her pussy when she was five, making her into a woman. He popped her ass cherry even earlier, when she was three. When she was still a kid, though, he didn't talk about their future much, at least not to me, but I knew he knew they were destined to be husband and wife. Heck, we all knew. And that's what happened. They got married when she was ten. It was a ceremony in front of our whole family, and it was so beautiful."

Yanni regarded me then and smiled. "You should've seen it," he said, casting his mind back to a day that obviously already loomed large in the legends of this depraved family. "We had the ceremony outside, in the tropical garden of the old compound. The Master was naked, wearing only a white ribbon in his hair -- his hair was longer then -- and another one tied around the shaft of his cock, and a pair of white opera pumps that had these white bows on them." His hands swam about his own hair and then indicated his genitals and feet to aid his description of the minimal nuptial accoutrement worn by the Master that day. "And Maya was pretty much naked too. She didn't wear a bra or panties. All she wore was a white veil, a white lace garter belt and white fishnet hose that had these crystal rhinestones set into them. And on her feet she wore these white wedding slippers with a pearl and bead applique. She carried a bouquet of white calla lilies. She looked so beautiful. Her chest was still pretty flat then. Her titties had just begun to grow; they were these little bumps on her chest." He briefly held up a hand to bring together its index finger and thumb to indicate the tininess of Maya's budding breasts on that day. "Anyway, you couldn't have guessed then how big they would get later." He paused a moment. "Or maybe you could have. Her mom Parvati has pretty big breasts too."

I was irresistibly curious. "Why," I asked. "How big are they now?"

"They're thirty-four double Ds," Yanni replied, "really firm and all natural." He paused again, thinking. "But her nipples were thick, just like now. And she still hadn't gotten any hair on her pussy, so she came to him bald, just like he likes it. Anyway, Maya's grandfather Isandro performed the ceremony -- he was an ordained pastor -- and, by the time it was done, the Master's cock was hard, and we could see and smell Maya's pussy juices; they were running down her legs. So, then, at the end of the ceremony, the Master and Maya kissed and then they fucked in front of us -- such a beautiful fuck, so full of love -- and then we all began an orgy that lasted a week." He smiled then, the memory of the bygone orgy an obviously fond one. "Everybody sucked and fucked all over, in the garden and then at the Marina House. That was the big house at the old compound. Wherever you looked or went -- in the ballroom, in the game room, on the pool deck, in the TV room, and certainly in the bedrooms -- there were naked bodies, kids and adults balling. As for the Master and Maya, they went upstairs to his bedroom and fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked. Except for the people they invited into the bedroom to share love with them, and I was one of them, I don't think anybody outside that room saw them for about a week." He laughed.

I sat in stunned silence. This time Yanni had thrown a monster spare, answering not only questions that had lined up at the foul line in my head but also ones I hadn't even thought to ask. But, as always, the answers simply led to an infinitude of more questions. I struggled to formulate successors to the queries just satisfied while absorbing all of the corrupt odyssey he had recounted. A father performing cunnilingus on his daughter when she was an infant, having sexual intercourse with her when she was merely five years old, having anal sex with her when she was eight and then, in a grotesque mockery of a wedding, marrying her in some degenerate ceremony when she was ten, all with the apparent approval and complicity of her own mother and grandparents? And the daughter, so brainwashed by the tenets of some twisted iteration of Christianity, that she believed, apparently from her earliest awareness, that it was her destiny to marry her own father and found a perverted sect that now animated thousands of adherents and perhaps might someday reign as a global religion? I could hardly believe any of it, yet knew every word was true. Yanni was the sort who was sincere in everything he did and said. Not only was he not a liar, but, as he himself had revealed, he liked me, even cared for me. The horror story he had related, which to him was a legendary romance come to life before his own eyes and those of his confederates, had actually happened -- and, despite my spasm of high dudgeon, had my pussy dripping. Momentarily nonplussed, I stared into the distance, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

As acute as he was, Yanni seemed not to notice, continuing with his discourse. I noted the light that suffused his lovely face as he went on. I thought of the detail with which he had described the wedding and its sordid aftermath, the particulars of what little the Master and his child bride Maya had worn that day. It was obviously an enduringly precious memory to him. I then thought that I had perhaps been a bit harsh when I earlier thought he suffered from a dearth of intellectual curiosity. More accurately, I was beginning to realize, there were some things he cared to know and others he didn't -- and he had the sense to know there were some things about which he might harbor a curiosity but shouldn't ask about. At the very least, however, his account of the wedding revealed he knew something about flowers, and ladies' footwear and undergarments, and I had met few men, at least heterosexual ones, who would've unashamedly admitted to that. I didn't know why then but those observations about seemingly insignificant items led me to conclude there were obviously depths to Yanni I had yet to plumb. He had a love of beauty and a reporter's eye, which to me was high praise.

Yanni kept talking and I turned my head to look at him. As I regarded him, my face softened, a small smile bowing my lips. In that moment, I thought of him, heaven help me, as a human being, rather than as major cog in some devilish pedophile cult. I simply couldn't help really liking him. He recalled and described past events with such a loving affection, so plainly deeply felt, that it was impossible for me, at least at that moment, to levy any further censorious judgment against him. I was suddenly tempted to laugh. He was a blabbermouth, all right, but I was glad of it. He was a living repository of all he had witnessed and heard over the years, before and since he had come into the Master's world. I then thought, cynically, I would mine him for all he was worth.

My good mood was suddenly tempered, however, when I then thought Yanni and I being thrown together was no accident. He was by no means a minor player in this dissolute realm, I was certain, and yet he was spending his time minding me, apparently disclosing anything I saw fit to ask after. He had just revealed, for example, that my coming here was less a result of my dogged efforts than the Master's own design. Why? Knowing that, it didn't take a genius to conclude the Master had to have something greater in mind. But what was it? What did that wickedly diabolical mastermind have in store?

I sat there and listened. Though my notepads were in my carry-on in the bedroom, I wasn't worried about missing or forgetting anything Yanni was saying. As flawed as human memory often was, mine was better than most, which I had proved to myself time and again when comparing the certainty of others to my notes. I would scribble everything down later, and a flood of further questions would be the result. But, for now, I just let him ramble on. I wasn't about to interrupt his stream of thought or his colloquy by getting up to retrieve a pen and pad. Just keep talking, beautiful, I thought. Just keep talking.

"But the Master and Maya have always been soulmates," Yanni said, "since long before the wedding even, like they were meant to be together, and the fact they were father and daughter just made the connection deeper, more meaningful. Even now, you can see it; it's sometimes like they don't even need words, like they read each other's minds. It's true; I swear." He held up his right hand as if he was taking a pledge and then crossed himself. "And the fact that he was a pedophile, had fucked and was fucking so many kids, just made her love him even more." He paused and thought a moment. "So, all of us loved the Master and knew what it was like to be loved by him. We all saw every day how much love was inside him, how much love he had to give, all the cum and piss that came from his cock, and how happy he made all the kids he gave his love to. So, it wasn't hard for us to begin believing that there was more to him than just being a hood and a pedo, a father to all of us; that there was lots more to all of the love we were always sharing and that we saw him sharing with others. It had to mean something more, had to be part of a plan, not just for us but everyone else too."

I marveled yet again. In his quieter and gentler way, Yanni was obviously as much of a zealot as his menacing sister Lina.

"But it was Maya," Yanni continued, "who thought about it and thought about it and put it all together. She knew that even if we didn't need it, others would need a" -- he paused a moment to consider the right word -- "a structure, a way to believe, and, just as importantly, I guess, a place to believe. She was the one behind us buying this island and building practically everything here, and, if not for her, I don't think all of this" -- he spread his hands to indicate the depraved realm surrounding us -- "would exist.

"The Master was always happy doing what he was doing, which was running his businesses and making money, seducing and fucking kids and making kiddy porn. I mean, he was into Wicca and sex magick and Tantra, but mainly because he was just always so into sex, not because he thought he was a figure of any religious significance. At least, I don't think he ever thought that. In fact, I heard him say a bunch of times that he appreciated there could be a spiritual component to sex, but that he didn't have any use for organized religion or holy rollers or any shit like that, and I know a big part of him enjoyed being a hood. Even now, he likes everything about the faith kept loose -- at least as far as he's concerned. If Maya didn't exist, wasn't a part of his life, we'd probably all still be back at the old compound. I mean, there'd still be naked kids all over the place and we'd all still be sucking and fucking, but it wouldn't be as special as it is now, not have the meaning she helped bring to it all, not to mention the promise for the future. Maya's the one who made him into a god and herself into a goddess."

"You mentioned Maya's grandfather and grandmother," I said, "how they were into this church that believed in child sex and incest, and then their daughter was into it too, and then she got Maya into it. Tell me more about them. What was the name of the church again?"

I actually remembered the name of the church, but it pays to ask questions more than once to see if the answers change. Still, knowing Yanni hadn't the slightest inclination to dissemble, I almost felt guilty asking that question a second time.

"The Children of God," Yanni replied.

I actually knew something about the Children of God, though not much. Having long ago dispensed with any belief in a Supreme Being, I didn't have much interest in religious issues beyond my own reporting assignments. I knew the Children of God got its start as some hippy Christian cult in 1960s California, that it was run by some megalomaniacal nutcase named David Berg until his death in the early 1990s, when his wife took over. Like all cults, it had an apocalyptic bent and it attracted some notoriety in the 1970s, when it began employing a tactic known as "flirty fishing," essentially whoring out female members of the group to attract adherents. Around the same time, it had accusations of child sexual abuse leveled against it, allegations later fleshed out by books written by former members. Their practice included something called "Loving Jesus," which consisted of its members getting laid by Christ, though, since the group was nominally Christian and thus condemned homosexuals as sinners, it asked its male members to imagine themselves as women while the Savior porked them. Crazy, crazy shit. Had that cult somehow led to this one, this construct of the Master and his daughter/wife Maya? How much did the two churches have in common?

"I really don't know too much," Yanni added. "A lot of the stuff that went down with Maya's people happened before I knew the Master -- and I don't really like to ask about stuff I'm not told about."

Since what Yanni said confirmed what I had thought moments before, I believed that. Yanni was as obviously devoted to the Master (and, by extension, to the Master's daughter/wife Maya) as his formidable sister Lina and there was no way he would ever presume or step on the toes of his deities. But I knew Yanni was, despite his seemingly carefree effeminate manner, smarter than he let on, that he possessed an extraordinary intuition, and, most importantly, he heard things -- and remembered them.

"That's okay," I said. "Just tell me what you do know."

Yanni thought a moment. "Well," he began, "Maya's grandfather Isandro was a doper, a big-time doper, and he got caught and he ended up in prison. He got sent away for a long time. And, while he was inside, he got involved with the Children of God, and he became a Christian and he got ordained as a pastor. And he also met Maya's grandmother, Molly, while he was inside, and they fell in love, and they got married after he got out."

I was confused. "Wait a minute," I interjected. "How did he get involved with the Children of God? And didn't you say he got sent away for a long time? If he was such a big-time doper, how did he get out? And how did he meet Maya's grandmother while he was in prison?"

Yanni shrugged. "Like I said, I don't know much," he replied. "How he got involved with the Children of God, I don't know. Maybe they had people inside. As for him getting out, I don't know much about that either. What I've heard is that the case against him fell apart because of some technicality" -- he raised his hands to make air quotes with his fingers -- "so they had to let him go. As for Molly, she was the secretary for the unit he was living in while he was inside. That I do know `cause I've heard Maya talk about it. Anyway, he started fucking her grandmother while he was still a prisoner, which is a big no-no, but all sorts of stuff happens inside that people don't want to hear about. Anyway, they never got caught."

I emitted a mild snort. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that if you wanted to see the dregs of society, just go to any prison -- when they changed the guard? "Okay, so then what happened?" I asked.

Yanni shrugged again. "Well, I know all that happened in California," he said. "When he got out, he didn't go back to running dope; he went to work for the Children of God as a preacher and, after a while, he was a big cheese with them, part of their leadership." He scratched his head in uncertainty. "Their top people called themselves something. I forget what."

The appellation came back to me. "The Chain," I said.

Yanni's face brightened. "That's right," he said. "The Chain. Well, anyway, he was one of them, until he wasn't."

"Why? What happened?"

Yanni didn't shrug this time. "Maya's mom Parvati says her father was too pure, too much of a believer even for the Children of God," he said. "She says that the rest of those people in The Chain didn't really believe in what they were preaching, at least not part of it, that they were running a scam so they could fuck kids on the sly. But her dad really believed and wanted to bring the truth to the whole world, just like the Master does now. Isandro was really into child sex and incest, really believed in the holiness of it all, even more than the people at his church, and he got his wife Molly, Parvati's mom, into it too. He was fucking a lot of the kids in the church, and Parvati, Maya's mom, was born by this time, so Isandro and Molly were sharing love with her too, right from the start of her life. Anyway, there was a lot of heat on the church because of all the stories going around of kids getting fucked, so they got rid of him. Parvati and Maya both say he was made a scapegoat."

I took note of Maya's mother's name, which was taken from the Hindu goddess Parvati, the deity of beauty, children, love, marriage and fertility, among other things. Though I hadn't yet met Parvati, I thought that, based on what I already knew, the name was probably apropos in a place as nuttily deviant as this.

To Yanni's explanation of how Isandro came to grief, I simply nodded. "So, then what happened?" I asked.

"He got a job as an assistant pastor in a church in another state," Yanni said, "and that's how Parvati ended up meeting the Master."

"What church would hire him after all that scandal in California?"

"A church in the neighborhood where the Master grew up," Yanni explained.

Now we're coming to it, I thought. "What was the name of this church?" I asked.

Yanni didn't hesitate. "Berry Hill Baptist Church," he answered.

"Why did they hire him?" I repeated. "And how did Parvati come to meet the Master?"

Yanni smiled, as if he was going to enjoy answering my questions. It was surely going to be a sordid tale and my outraged reactions would amuse him, the bastard. Anticipating the wickedness he was about to relate, I couldn't help but return his smile. My pussy began a fresh round of leaking.

"The Master grew up in a really nice neighborhood," Yanni began. "He lived in a big house with his grandmother Lilia, his dad's mom. His grandma was the one who raised him, at least until he was nine years old. The houses in the neighborhood were built around a bunch of these man-made lakes and the Master's house was right beside one of the lakes. There was a river -- really a boat canal -- not too far away and the church was on the other side of that river, but that neighborhood wasn't so nice. It was, like, a working-class neighborhood, I guess you would say, and there were factories and motels and whatnot, and it wasn't so safe at night. Anyway, I guess it was the only church around there `cause people from his neighborhood were members, including his grandma. The church had this outreach program, trying to help druggies and homeless people and prostitutes and street hoods that were trying to go straight. So, Isandro, who had a master's in drug counseling that he got while he was in prison, was hired to head up that outreach program."

I was fascinated. According to Yanni, Isandro had once occupied rarefied reaches of the criminal underworld only to end up overseeing the denizens of the lower depths. It was like a Gorky play come to life. I kept quiet, waiting to see where the story would go.

"But Parvati says the real reason her dad got hired," Yanni continued, "was because most of the big cheeses at Berry Hill were pedos, from the head pastor on down, and they wanted someone working with them who was a pedo too."

Bingo! I thought. Here was the turpitude for which I was always on the hunt. Keep talking, you gorgeous, perverted man! Please just keep talking! The headwaters within my pussy were gathering again, about to go unvexed to the sea.

Yanni indeed kept talking. "The church had a youth program too," he said, "and the assistant pastor who headed that up was pedo. The Master was one of the kids in the youth program and, when Isandro started working at the church, Parvati joined the program too."

I dared to interrupt. "How did the Master get into the youth program?" I asked. "Because his grandmother was a member of the church?"

"Actually, no," Yanni replied and then his face scrunched a bit. "That can be a long story."

"Tell it, brother, tell it!" I exhorted, as if I was a congregant helping to wind the stem of a frothing preacher, which was in keeping with the situation.

Yanni laughed. "Well, I'll hit the highlights," he said. "The Master had a friend named Caesar. They met when they were nine and they were really, really close, more like lovers than friends."

"At the age of nine?" I asked, marveling.

"Oh, yeah," Yanni confirmed. "The Master's been having sex since he was six. He had his first incest experience when he was seven, and by the time he was nine he was already not only really experienced when it came to sex but knowledgeable too. And when he met Caesar, he was really into him, and Caesar was into him too, so it wasn't at all hard for them to get together. Anyway, Caesar was the son of one of the bikers in the motorcycle club chapter the Master's dad ran, and that's how he and the Master got to know each other."

I was rapt. The Master had begun having sex at six? He had somehow been introduced to incest at seven? How was any of that possible? In what kind of a world did such things happen? I was so tempted to ask after what Yanni knew of those formative experiences, but I resisted. I didn't want to get off track, plunge down what had to be another of a field full of rabbit holes, and reasoned I'd have the opportunity to inquire about those events some other time. But I couldn't help thinking that if anything Yanni had just mentioned about the Master's childhood was true, then the Master was well suited to be the living god of this pedophile cult. "So, the Master's dad was a biker?" I merely asked.

"Yeah," Yanni confirmed, seeming surprised. "I thought you knew."

"No!" I protested. "How would I know that?"

"Okay, calm down!" Yanni retorted. "You're the reporter lady. I thought you knew. Well, yeah, he was a big-time biker, like royalty even. He was really tight with the club's national leadership, and he was a chapter president for a long, long time."

"What club did he belong to?" I asked.

"The Demons," Yanni replied.

Now that's something, I thought. I didn't know much about motorcycle gangs, but I knew enough to know the Demons was the most legendary gang of them all. Founded in California sometime in the late 1940s, they had thousands of members in chapters not only in the United States but in countries all over the world. Universally feared, they sported the leathery-winged head of a demon on their jackets. If the Master's father had been club royalty, as Yanni had said, it couldn't be too difficult to look into the subject and perhaps discover something about his exploits and also get a more complete picture of the Master's background as well.

"Was the Master a biker too?" I asked, venturing a guess.

"Yeah," Yanni said with a small shrug. "He was raised in it, so he sort of had to be. A lot of people thought he was going to be the next chapter president, after his dad retired, and maybe even the national president. He was really respected and admired in the club. But he was never as heavy into it. I think, for him, being in the club was just a means to an end. He still has a hand in -- from a distance. The guy that runs the chapter now is his man." His face softened as he again paused to think and softly added: "Otherwise, he outgrew it."

I couldn't help thinking Yanni said the last as if he was speaking of some sage attaining apotheosis, like Buddha under the Bodhi tree or at least Joey Gallo emerging from Sing Sing after reading a library's worth of books.

A thought occurred to me. "But wait a minute," I said. "You said the Master and Caesar were lovers. Isn't any hint of gay sex severely frowned upon in criminal organizations, especially those clubs of big, smelly bikers?"

Yanni regarded me like I was a drooling idiot. "Oh, c'mon!" he said. "You have to know there are a lot of guys in the outside world on the down low. They love sticking their cocks up another guy's ass or at least getting their cocks sucked by another guy. They just do it on the sly." He got a touch indignant then. "In fact, I've known a lot of rough, tough guys, hoods and whatnot, who say they're really down on gay people, but they suck cock like it's going out of style and even take it up the ass." He punctuated his observation with a dismissive wave of a hand.

"Okay, okay!" I said. "What do I know? You're the expert."

Yanni laughed. "Bitch!" he said.

"Fudge packer!" I shot back, and we laughed together.

"Well, anyway," Yanni continued in a seemingly sudden rush, "the Master and Caesar were really tight, and, when they were eleven, Caesar got to know these two brothers, Gary and Steven, who were having sex with their grandfather, and the Master and Caesar started making it with Gary and Steven, and it was Gary who introduced the Master to a boy named Dean, and it was Dean who was a member of the youth group at the church, and that's how the Master got involved with the youth group. And it was because the Master was involved with the youth group that his grandmother became a member of the church. She was a Catholic before that, but she wasn't too serious about it. I mean, she believed and all, but she wasn't too heavy into the church. But after she became a member at Berry Hill, though, she became an even bigger believer in Jesus."

I ignored Yanni's remarks about the Master's grandmother. What did I care about her or the sudden renewal of her religious faith? No, I focused on what I really wanted to hear about. "And the assistant pastor who headed up the youth program was a pedophile, you said," I reminded him.

Yanni nodded. "That's right," he said. "His name was Jack. Dean took the Master to meet Jack, and the three of them started making it. Jack had a wife named Peggy and she comes home from work -- she worked at a bank or something like that -- and she walked in on the three of them naked. Jack was sucking the Master's cock while Dean was sucking on Jack's cock. The Master's told me Jack had a pretty big cock."

"How did she react?" I asked.

"She was into it," Yanni replied. "She was pedo too. The Master says that when he joined the youth group Jack was in his early thirties and Peggy was, like, eight years younger, so she must have been in her early twenties. Her real name was Margaret but whenever all the kids were over at Jack's house, Jack and Peggy used to show X-rated movies on a movie screen in their living room -- you know, to get everybody in a sexy mood -- and some of the movies had this porn star that was called Aunt Peg, so all the kids started calling Margaret "Aunt Peg" or just "Peggy." He paused a moment, picturing the scene in his mind he had mentioned earlier. "Anyway, she walks in, and the Master says she had a big grin on her face, and Jack and Dean introduced her to the Master, and she starts taking off her clothes, saying she wanted the Master's cock in her pussy, and the Master fucked her while Jack and Dean got into a sixty-nine. Later on, Jack fucked the Master and the Master fucked Jack. And, after all the balling they all did that afternoon, the Master was part of the youth group."

I couldn't help emitting a sardonic laugh. "Just like that?" I said a bit sneeringly.

"Yeah," Yanni said simply. "Anyway, the next day, the Master went back to Jack's house on his own, but neither Jack or Peggy were there. But he met this girl named Lori. She was a teenager. She was, like, fifteen or sixteen then, and she helped Jack and Peggy run the youth group. She was, like, an ex-junkie and she had been living on the streets and selling herself and whatnot. Jack and Peggy brought her to live with them when she was, like, thirteen, and they got her off the dope and got her turned on to Jesus and sex -- holy, loving sex -- and they were both making it with her and, just like Jack and Peggy, she was making it with all the kids in the group. So, when the Master met her, she was on the pool deck of Jack and Peggy's house wearing just bikini bottoms and she was sunning herself, and she told him her deal, and they got to talking and they really got into each other, so they ended up fucking on the pool deck, and then they went into the house and they fucked in the shower and then they started balling in the living room, right on the sofa, and that's what they were doing, fucking on the sofa, when Jack and Peggy walked in. So, Jack and Peggy got naked, and they had a foursome, and, from then on, because the Master and Lori were close, he got really close to Jack and Peggy -- he would spend a lot of his time at their place -- and so he got to be a big deal in the youth group."

"What possible interest could a teenage girl have in an eleven-year-old boy?" I wondered aloud.

Yanni shrugged. "I don't know," he replied. "I never knew her, so I've never been able to ask her any questions. But the Master is the Master, you know? He may have only been eleven but a lot of who he is now was plain even then, I think."

I arched an eyebrow, my lips pursing in obvious skepticism as I thought Yanni was likening the Master to a depraved version of the preteen Christ, amazing the sages in the Temple with his preternatural knowledge of the Scriptures. This proved to be only the first time, though, I would hear a number of people, including many children, justify the Master's actions by simply citing his existence, and, in time, the reaction to which I gave rein with Yanni would fade. On that occasion, I kept quiet, but Yanni got the message.

"Okay, well, if you don't believe that," Yanni said with a sigh, "all I can do is repeat I never knew her. But the Master says she was a really special person. He says she was really compassionate and sweet, and she had a great bod too, and they were really close when he was a kid and then later on when he was a teenager, at least until she moved away to go to school. They sucked and fucked all the time. And he says Lori was really special to Jack and Peggy too because she was so good at bringing kids to join the youth group, and that sort of fits in with other things the Master's told me."

"Like what? What did he tell you?"

"The Master says that when his dad started training him to be a pedo, one of the lessons his dad made sure got through was that kids almost always lead to other kids, and Lori was proof of that. The youth group was already pretty big when the Master joined, and that was because of Lori. She babysat for a lot of the kids in the church and in the neighborhood, and she'd seduce them, and then she brought a lot of them into the group. And then, later on, when the Master was a teenager and an active pedo himself, he did the same, just like his dad had taught him, and that made him really special to Jack and Peggy, and most of the other pastors in the church too." He chuckled. "The Master says he could do no wrong, that he pretty much had the run of the place and could do what he wanted."

"Who did he bring in?" I asked.

"Well, he brought in Caesar first," Yanni replied. "And then he brought in Peaches and Dawn and Dakota, three of the Goddesses. You remember I mentioned Peaches and Dawn yesterday?"

I nodded, remembering indeed. The two girls who had served as the Master's Chief Girl Lovers far back in the mists of time, who had occupied the position when it was still inchoate but had left behind the solid foundation onto which Lina later climbed. Listening to Yanni, I sometimes felt as if I was listening to half-believed tales of ancient gods who had roamed the firmament before the making of the world.

"And he also brought in Gio and Jackie," Yanni continued. "Lori babysat their kid brother Lorenzo, who's Piarist now. She brought Lorenzo into the church and then into the youth group, but it was the Master who brought in Gio and Jackie, though they turned out to be more important to him than they ever were to the youth group."

"Why?" I asked. "Because they helped him make his kiddy porn?"

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he said. "They were there nearly at the beginning, and they've been there ever since."

I thought about that. Yanni hoped -- fully expected, better said -- that the Master's creed would someday engulf the whole world. He had already told me he believed the Master's work with his camera; the work being done in a criminal studio not too far from where we sat, was the holy writ that would one day capture hearts and turn minds. In days of old, lone zealots living in caves in deserts or on remote islands scribbled their fevered imaginings on parchment, hardly realizing the gulfs of time through which their thoughts would slowly trickle. Now, in an instant, images of naked children rocketed forth from high-capacity servers to engorge the nether regions of millions across the planet, and, within a few decades at most, would, if Yanni was to be believed, wreak their work everywhere, even on souls yet unborn.

I forced myself back to earth to ride the lazy river flowing from my cunt. "Okay," I said, "so what happened next?"

"Well, it wasn't too long after the Master joined the youth group that Isandro was hired by the church and he met Parvati," Yanni said. "They met at a church dinner, and they were into each other right away. Parvati says she knew almost from the start there was something special about the Master, that he was destined for things even he didn't suspect at the time." He smiled. "The Master teases her. He says she was too into what her father believed, that she was looking for a messiah, and that if it hadn't been him, it would've been someone else." He laughed. "But Parvati doesn't listen to him, says that he's full of shit. She says what she felt that was -- and is -- the truth, and he believes it too, now, even if he makes fun of her. Anyway, they had sex the first night they met. They went into church's baptism chamber, and they fucked in the little pool that was in there, and Parvati says that was meant to be too. And, after that, they were just" -- he shrugged in uncertainty then -- "together."

Knowing he was at a bit of a loss to explain the situation, I narrowed my eyes. "What do you mean when you say they were together?" I asked.

Yanni's face scrunched a bit. "I don't know," he said. "It's kind of hard to explain, at least to someone like you." His eyes widened a bit then as he rushed to explain what he meant. "I don't mean anything bad, but you're probably used to one man and one woman being together forever, right? Or at least two people trying to make something like that work."

I was slightly amused, not at all minding Yanni's uncertainty regarding my beliefs about romantic relationships. "If you know anything about me," I said easily, "and I know you do, you should know I'm not necessarily a big believer in monogamous relationships. I suppose they can work but I've seen little evidence of it in my life. And, if you were wondering, I have absolutely no problem with same-sex relationships." And then, despite a cardinal rule I had about revealing too much of myself to anyone, I felt the need to confess something to this pedo, this zealot, this beautiful man with whom I felt so comfortable, with whom I knew I could share anything. "Outside of a few friendships, I can't say I've had a lasting relationship of any sort with anyone for a long time, but I'm open to all possibilities, for myself and for others. But that doesn't include people fucking kids. I do have a problem with that."

Yanni smiled as if he didn't believe the last of what I had said but he didn't immediately say anything, and I chose to do the same. "Well," he eventually said, "the Master and Parvati were together. They were a couple, but they weren't a couple. In fact, because the Master and Caesar were so close, the Master introduced him to Parvati, and they made it with each other and then the three of them were sort of like a trio and yet not at the same time."

I shook my head in wonder. A polyamorous relationship among three children, a preteen Jules et Jim. Who could believe such wild shit? "Well, what does Parvati have to say about it all?" I asked.

"Like I said, she says that she knew even then the Master was on a special journey, and she wasn't going to do anything to interfere with that journey. She says she knew he was going to have all sorts of experiences, sexual and otherwise, that would make him what he eventually became, and all she wanted was to be a part of his life, to be there when he needed someone to rely on, someone to talk to, and she's been that for him ever since. And when he introduced her to Caesar she knew right away what they meant to each other, and that he wanted her to be a part of that, so she had no problem being with them both, but she knew, and she says he knew too, that, as close as he and Caesar were, she would be the one he would turn to when he really needed someone, that if there was a couple in the trio, it was him and her, and not him and Caesar. But, from what I've heard, in all the ways that mattered, the three of them were really close, so people outside the relationship had a hard time making distinctions."

"How did Caesar feel about all that?"

"I don't think he had a problem with it at all," Yanni said. "You've got to understand how much he loved the Master. Like I said, they were more than friends." He paused a moment, seemed to grow a mite melancholic, but, because of my interest in the overall story, my usually fine nose didn't immediately sniff out what he was feeling. "Caesar would've done anything for the Master. Later on, it was the Master who set Caesar up with his own crew in the motorcycle club, and it was Caesar who lived in a garage apartment on Parvati's property, looking after her and her daughters. He was like a second father to her kids, and they all thought of him that way." He laughed. "And Caesar threw the best parties. I mean, he was an expert at throwing parties. Give him any excuse and he would throw a party."

"Why didn't the Master live with Parvati?"

"He was living his own life, and, like I said, Parvati wasn't going to do anything to stop him from living it," Yanni explained. "She says he had his own discoveries to make while he was living his life, and there were certain things he had to accomplish on his own, and realizations he had to come to on his own. Besides, she wanted to live her own life too. She didn't want a significant other or boyfriend or even a husband around telling her what to do, and he was more than willing to let her live her own life, even though the house she lived in later was one he bought for her."

Yanni paused a moment, thinking. "It was a nice house, though," he eventually said. "It was pretty old, built from coral rock years and years before, and it had these wooden floors that used to creak whenever you took one step on them, and it was close to the ocean, so whenever you visited you could always smell the sea. It was just a few blocks from the Marina House at the old compound. And Parvati had this big studio there, in the back of the house, where she had all these herbs and potions on these long shelves" -- he spread his arms to indicate the breadth of the shelves -- "and she was always brewing all this strange stuff, like a witch in a fairy tale. Some of it smelled awful but she made these candles there too, and those always smelled really nice. The Marina House was always filled with her candles. She had a garden there too where she grew broccoli, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, a bunch of stuff, all organic. And there were always fresh avocadoes from a big tree. She used to make these salads that were the best I ever tasted. And she was always knitting, making macrame stuff: baskets, clothes, plant hangers, wall hangings, you name it. In fact, that's all she ever wore, these macrame rope dresses you could see right through. Whenever we went over there, she was always as good as naked, but she never cared about that -- and neither did we. All of us, the kids at the Marina House, used to call her "Mama Parvati." He paused again, thinking some more. "But I know Maya's a little down on some of that, though."

"Down on what?"

Yanni shrugged and tilted his head a bit. "Maya says her mother had it easy," he explained. "She says Parvati insisted on living her own life, away from the Master, simply because she could, because she had a man, Maya's father, who had the money to give her, to allow her, the life she wanted."

I grunted softly at Yanni's relation of Maya's opinion, turning it over in my mind only briefly. I was, at the moment, more interested in the sordid account of the origins of this depraved realm. To hear Yanni's tale, one would think he was describing some far-out, free-spirited, kind-hearted boho hippy babe, not the inheritor of some twisted creed, now the dowager of a pedophiliac empire. But I had to admit I was curious about this woman Parvati, the first mate of a god, the mother of an empress. But I kept my wits about me nonetheless, reasoning, once again, I'd have the opportunity to ask more about her in future and probably grill her personally to boot.

"I'm guessing I already know, but I have to ask you: what did Parvati's parents think of all that was going on?" I then asked.

Yanni smiled. "Well, you probably guessed right," he said. "They were into it all. After all, like I told you, they had been making it with their daughter since she was born, and so they were happy that Parvati was involved with a boy who was so into sex, especially after they found out about the Master's own incest background and that his dad was a big-time biker. They all had a lot in common. So, Parvati introduced the Master to her parents, and they all made it with each other, and he became part of their family, and then, later, Caesar too. Both the Master and Parvati say Isandro was like a second father to him, and, later on, when the Master was building his business, it was Isandro's contacts that helped him become a big-time hood and outgrow the motorcycle club."

"You mean Isandro set him up in the narcotics business?" I asked, perhaps a bit accusingly.

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he replied, "even more than he already was. You see, the Master's dad was already into dealing junk and meth, but because the Master made such a success of his kiddy porn business at such a young age, he noticed the Master had talent, had a head for business, so he brought him into his deals, first as a courier and then as a manager, and, finally, he sort of stepped back and let the Master run it all. And that's when Isandro wired the Master into his family contacts back in Colombia. Isandro's whole family down there were big coke monkeys. And, soon, the Master was a big-time kingpin. He was bringing in tons every month. And all of that led to all of this." He spread his arms again to indicate the domain that surrounded us.

More and more and more. So much to explore, so many questions to ask. I sat there, nearly goggle-eyed as Yanni told his tales. But I was determined, at least for the moment, to keep my focus, to garner a prelude to my upcoming meeting with the so-called Goddesses, and, ultimately, to keep raging the river flowing from my pussy.

"So, when did the Master impregnate Parvati with Maya," I asked, "and how did everyone react to that?"

"When they were both twelve," Yanni answered. "And, from what I've been told, everybody was happy about it, especially Parvati. She believed the Master getting her pregnant at such a young age was a really big thing, that it was mean to happen, that it was part of their destiny together, but, more importantly, part of his destiny, that it would be something everybody would talk about someday. And I'm told she knew, she just knew, that the baby was going to be a girl, that all the babies she would give him would be girls, girls for him to fuck, but that the first daughter was destined to become his wife, her own father's wife. Sort of spooky, if you ask me, that she knew all that ahead of time. It was, like, she could see into the future and everybody's life was already set."

"Do you believe any of that mumbo-jumbo?" I asked.

Yanni shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I wasn't around then. But I'll admit Parvati can sometimes be intense, and I guess she was that way back then too, even though she was a kid. She'll, like, go into these trances and, when she comes out of them, she'll say she saw things, that she knows things, and sometimes she'll tell you about them and sometimes she won't. Anyway, I'm told she was that way back then too, with the getting of the visions and the spooky knowledge and shit, which I guess is a good thing."

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Well, because the Master, at first, wasn't altogether certain the baby was his," Yanni replied. "I mean, all of them were fucking all over the place, and Parvati was no exception." He began counting on his fingers. "She was getting fucked by her dad, by the Master, by Caesar, by Jack, by all the boys in the youth group, by some of the other pastors at the church, and by the Master's dad too, and I don't think any of them ever wore rubbers, not in those days. But she told him some story that she had powers, that she could choose which of the sperm shot into her pussy would live or die, and that the only sperm she had chosen to let live was his, and he believed that. Anyway, when she got pregnant, everybody was really happy about it, for the most part. I know her parents were happy, and they even approved since her getting pregnant was sort of a proof of everything they believed, and everything Parvati believed too.

"And then, when she gave birth, when she was thirteen, the baby came home, and the Master came over. And the story I'm told, mostly by Maya, is that Parvati swore to him that the baby was his, that it couldn't belong to anyone else, but she would never use the baby to tie him down, that he was free to live his life the way he wanted, that he was supposed to live his life the way he wanted, but that no matter how many other people he fucked, he would always be the baby's father and she would always be his daughter. And then, while they were talking, Maya started crying and Parvati offered him the baby's pussy, and he ate her out and Maya went right to sleep. And then, when the baby was sleeping, he made a vow that someday he would fuck his own daughter, all the daughters he had with Parvati and anyone else, and Parvati said that's exactly what would happen. And it did happen. He fucked Maya for the first time just five years later and he's fucked all the daughters he's had since, with Parvati and all the other Goddesses. And then, after he made that vow, the Master and Parvati fucked, right there, next to the crib, while Maya was sleeping. So fucking hot!" He brazenly rubbed his stiffening penis through the material of his bikini bottoms.

So fucking hot indeed! I stared at Yanni, taking in every detail the way a lucky gambler might rake in a pile of casino chips, my breath slightly quickening. The sluice gate in my twat suddenly unlocked and the flow poured out and down, soaking the plush terrycloth of my bathrobe. I felt the puddle of fragrant juice spreading out underneath my ass and legs, and, for once, didn't care if Yanni's sensitive nose picked up the scent.

I cleared my throat. "And then Maya, the Master's own daughter, became his wife," I stated a bit croakily.

Yanni nodded. "Yeah." he said. "She moved from Parvati's house to come live with the Master when she was eight. And then, when she turned ten, the Master had an orgy to celebrate her birthday, and he proposed to her then, and she said yes, of course. But all that happened before me and my sisters came to live with the Master. The wedding I told you about before, that happened, like, a couple of months after we started living there."

A sigh was all that was left to me. I thought about all Yanni had told me for a few moments and then, with an effort, made myself ready to rise from the chair, get dressed (or at least what passed for being dressed in this place), and accompany him to the lair of the Goddesses. "Well," I finally said, "since you said we're going to see the Master's women, I suppose Parvati will be there. When do you think I might be able to meet with Isandro, Molly and Caesar?"

Yanni suddenly seemed somewhat uncomfortable. "Parvati won't be there," he said flatly.

"Why not?" I asked, a trifle indignantly. How dare someone thwart my reportorial crusade?

Yanni was silent a few moments, obviously considering how best to reply. "Parvati's not really one of the Goddesses. I mean, she's the mother of the Master's Chief Wife, and she had other children with him, and she's part of the Holy Family, and everyone respects her, but she sort of occupies her own space, just like I explained before." He so obviously wanted me to understand something he seemed not to completely understand himself, so he thought some more before resuming his explanation. "I mean, she lives in Maya's apartments in the Main House, along with Maya's sisters. She even has her studio there, just like the one she had at her old house. But she does her own thing. She shows up when she wants to, for stuff like family events and the Grand Orgies, and doesn't show up when she doesn't want to, and today she didn't want to."

"Oh," I simply said, unable to hide my disappointment.

"But that doesn't mean you won't get to meet her eventually," Yanni rushed to say, "especially if you're allowed to visit Maya's apartments."

He really is a dear, I couldn't help thinking. Seeing my disappointment, he had done his best to try to soothe me. I sighed again. "Well," I said, "do you think Isandro, Molly and Caesar will be more amenable to sitting down with me?"

Yanni gave me a sympathetic look. "Isandro and Molly passed away," he said.

I admit I was a bit stunned. "When did that happen?" I asked.

"About ten years ago," Yanni said. "Isandro died in his sleep." He raised his right arm and snapped his fingers. "Just like that. Molly woke up next to him. And then, like a couple of months after he died, she had a heart attack and died too. It hit everybody pretty hard, especially Parvati and Maya. I mean, both of them were pretty young still. He was in his fifties, and she was only in her late forties, I think. Parvati says her mom loved her dad so much she couldn't live without him." He shrugged. "Anyway, it was really sad. I think they would have loved to see" -- he spread his arms yet again -- "all of this."

I took a deep breath and let it out. "And Caesar?" I asked.

Yanni gave me a strange, pained look, and I instantly knew what it meant.

"Caesar's dead too, isn't he?" I said.

Yanni simply nodded, a curt nod before casting his eyes down.

Caesar's death seemed particularly afflicting to Yanni. "How did he die?" I asked softly.

Now Yanni seemed reluctant. "He got killed," he replied simply.

"He got killed? How did he get killed?"

Yanni sighed. "He got shot," he said flatly, but then quickly expanded on his answer. "Maya saw it happen. She was pregnant with Jessica then."

My head rattled in surprised confusion. "Fuck me!" I exclaimed. "Okay, now you've gotta explain all that!"

Yanni betrayed a smidge of frustration. "I told you this could be a long story," he protested and then looked up at the clock on the wall. "And we don't have much time before we have to go to meet the Goddesses."

Suffused by an overpowering curiosity, my own frustration momentarily boiled over. "Oh, don't be such a big crybaby!" I said. But then I instantly softened, realizing I had best try to soothe his sudden apprehension. It was obvious he was reluctant to disappoint the Goddesses in any way, small or large, but I wasn't about to be put off. As each layer of the onion was peeled away, there were more and seemingly thicker layers to explore. "Listen, just tell me what you can as quickly as you can, and then I'll ask you more about all of it later."

That seemed to mollify Yanni, at least for the time being. He sighed and said: "There was a long war with another motorcycle club, the Outcasts. The war lasted for years. Anyway, like I told you before, Caesar had his own crew in the club, but he was always the Master's man. He did a lot of jobs for the Master, like looking after Parvati and her daughters. I guess you could say he was, like, the Master's assistant in the club."

"His assistant?" I said with a smirk. "You mean like a flunky."

For once, Yanni was not amused, giving me a bit of a nasty look. "I don't want to use that word," he said, "because Caesar was really special to the Master, just like I've told you. He was special to everybody. Everybody loved him."

I was genuinely apologetic. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know."

Yanni shrugged and smiled, instantly forgiving me. "That's okay," he said. "Anyway, one day, he was out with Maya -- at a store in a mall picking up a crib set for the baby, if you can believe it. There was going to be a big baby shower and Caesar had planned the party. I told you he was an expert when it came to throwing parties. Anyway, these killers found him there, in the store, and shot him. They nearly killed Maya too, but those fuckers fucked that up and then they ran off. Still, it was a mess, blood everywhere. And that's all I'm going to tell you about that for now. If you want more details today, you can ask Maya later on and see what she's willing to tell you."

Understanding his worry over our time constraints, I nodded. "Okay." I thought a moment, considering what it must be like to see someone gunned down. "Still, if Caesar was so special to everyone, it must have been a horrific experience for Maya, seeing him get killed."

Yanni nodded. "I've heard her say she's never gotten over it," he said. "Caesar was with her all her life. He was like a second father to her. And he didn't hesitate when the killers showed up. He gave his life for her and Jessica. He jumped in front of her, yelled at her to take off, and that gave her the chance to get away. If not for him, Maya and Jessica probably would've been killed too."

I paused a moment to consider that: the legacy of not only concupiscence but also of violence in the so-called Holy Family. They were bound together not only by sexual fluids, but by blood. It was terrible to contemplate and yet rendered the picture a bit more pellucid. I better understood the devotion Yanni and all the others in the family felt for the Master and all they were building. Like the Jews of ancient myth, they had been forged like iron in the fires of a furnace and were now on their way to numbering as the sand on the seashore. I dared to think I also understood Lina a little better. I had seen violence and reported on it, but I had never experienced it in my own life. In the episode Yanni had recounted to me and likely others he yet hadn't, Lina had surely faced and overcome challenges which I could scarcely imagine.

I looked at Yanni. "How old was Maya when this happened?" I asked.

"Fifteen."

"And she was pregnant with Jessica at the time?"

Yanni nodded, not seeming to get the point I was trying to make.

"You told me last night that Jessica is one of the Master's natural daughters," I reminded him. "And now you're telling me that it was Maya who was pregnant with Jessica. You also said that the Master recently got Jessica pregnant. So, that means that the Master had a daughter with his own daughter and now he's gotten pregnant the daughter he had with his own daughter." Some father, I thought.

Yanni nodded again. "That's right," he said simply.

I threw up my hands, momentarily exasperated with him.

A small indulgent smile appeared on Yanni's face, my outraged frustration once again amusing him. "If you're trying to get across to me that all you just described is bad or even evil," he said, "it's not working. Here, something like that is perfectly natural and beautiful, especially for someone like the Master." His face softened then, and he regarded me. "How can I get you to understand? Holy incest made the Master and Maya more than father and daughter; it made them husband and wife. And now holy incest has done the same for the Master and Jessica, his daughter/granddaughter. She's his daughter, his lover, and now, one of his wives and soon the mother of one of his children. And to her mother Maya, she's also a daughter, a lover, and now, one of her sister wives. And, just like her grandmother and mother, Jessica will someday have more of his babies."

I shook my head. "You'll never get me to understand," I insisted somewhat vehemently.

Yanni wasn't buying it. "You will," he said softly.

"Fuck you!" I spat, suddenly angry at him, fearfully wondering if his damnable intuition was telling him something I couldn't fully admit to myself. If not his instinct, I wondered about his nose, about which my damnable salacity had allowed me to be so cavalier just minutes before. Yesterday, at the end of the first leg of our journey, he had detected the scent of my spendings from the frenzy of masturbation I had indulged in the SUV. Was he picking up the scent again now, knowing my cunt was flowing, that his tales were getting me hot, that I was a hypocrite who protested far too much? For some reason I couldn't yet fathom, I wanted his respect, his admiration of a rock-solid character and will I didn't possess. I wanted him to think I was better than I was. What I didn't get, at least not then, was that all of that was so unnecessary, that he loved me for who I was, not for whom I wished I was.

In response to my curse, Yanni laughed. "Gladly," he said.

Momentarily caught off guard by his usual breezy good nature, I regarded him with an open mouth and then burst into laughter. "Sicko!" I hurled at him.

"Cunt," Yanni shot back softly with obvious genuine affection.

I took a deep breath, allowed my head to fall back and exhaled. I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling. "So, Maya was fifteen when Caesar was killed," I said in an oddly flat voice. "How old was she when Jessica was finally born?"

"Sixteen," Yanni answered. "Everybody expected the Master would get Maya pregnant as soon as she started getting her periods, and that happened when she was eleven. But the Master said he wanted to enjoy his wife, wanted to watch her grow up before he put a baby in her, so he held off."

"But now he fucks the daughter he had with his daughter," I said. "And, more than that, he's gotten his daughter/granddaughter pregnant."

"That's right," Yanni said simply, but I detected a note of defiant pride in his voice.

My head tilted forward, and I looked at Yanni. "Tell me," I said. "You're the one who was worried we'd keep the Goddesses waiting but I know you want to tell me. So, just tell me."

Yanni smiled. "If we're late, but I tell them why, the Goddesses will understand," he said, and then launched into his would-be sermon. "The Master is as close to Jessica as a father can be," he said, "just like he was with Maya when she was a girl. He licked Jessica's pussy from the time she was a baby and popped her pussy cherry when she was five." He gently shook his head in genuine wonderment. "It was something to see, something our whole family celebrated. We had a little party and then we all went into his bedroom. Maya and Jessica were covered in baby oil, and the rest of us were too. All the light in the room came from candles, candles all over, and our bodies were shining in the light. Maya had set up an altar and there were bunch of roses and a book and a chalice on it, and next to the chalice was a knife. Maya opened the book, put the knife in the chalice, and held them up while she said some words. And then she took the knife out of the chalice and gave it to Jessica, and she drank from it."

Hearing what Yanni said, my anticipation of what he was about to say rolled to a crest. "What kind of altar?" I asked a bit breathily. "What kind of words? What was in the chalice?"

Yanni shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I didn't ask questions, then or later. I just watched what went on. The altar was just a table, really, set up on a pedestal and surrounded by a black veil, and it was up against a black banner hung on the wall. The banner had a pentagram on it and the table had symbols carved into its top. The symbols surrounded the book and the chalice and the knife. The chalice was filled with a red drink. I think it was some kind of wine. The words I didn't understand at all, then or since. Later, someone told me it was Latin, and I don't understand Latin. Anyway, Jessica took a few sips from the chalice and then the ritual began."

"Don't you ever ask questions, Yanni?" I said, evincing a bit of irritation with him. "Shit, if it had been me, I would have asked a million questions."

"Well, I'm not you," Yanni replied calmly. "The faith is enough for me."

I was momentarily tempted to think Yanni's belief in this dastardly faith was like that of a child praying to the Virgin Mary or entreating guardian angels, but then I remembered that, for all of his amiability, he was no innocent, and, like him, the core of this nascent religion was the conviction of sex with children. I released a mild snort of frustration. "Okay," I said. "Can you at least describe the symbols that were on the table?"

Yanni shrugged again. "They were all circles," he said, "but they had different things in them. One had an upside-down star in it and inside the star was a goat's head. Another had diagonal lines going every which way, which made a sort of design, I guess. And the last one had four arrows, all of the arrows pointing out to the edge of the circle."

Jack fucking pot! I thought. I had stumbled not only on a pack of pedophiles, but a crew of Satanists to boot. Or at least that's what it seemed to me. Now I was certain I had a winner on my hands. Editors had hurled epithets at me and thrown me out of their offices for wanting to write about this sick shit, but I knew all of them would cream their pants if I mentioned Satanists. And pedophile Satanists? Fuck, I'd be rolling sevens and more sevens. Nowadays, people saw pedo Satanists in their soup, but they loved hearing and reading about them. The story of this crowd was bound to get them hot while also scaring their socks off. A small smile came to my face as I momentarily thought of the bidding war that would ensue when I returned to the world and began shopping my manuscript.

Returning my attention to Yanni, I couldn't resist posing the question. "Are all you sick fucks fucking devil worshippers, Yanni?" I asked.

Yanni's face scrunched and his lips pursed. "No, you stupid cunt!" he said, his voice somehow simultaneously affectionate and annoyed. "You asked me to tell you about the first time the Master fucked Jessica, and that's what I'm doing. I told you before: Maya explored a lot of other faiths to create our faith, and bits of most or all of them wound up in the way we worship. Back then, when this happened, Maya was, what, twenty or twenty-one years old, so she was still exploring, learning. As for what we worship, we worship each other and nature."

Unbelievably, I was a bit chastened. But I wasn't about to give up on what I thought I had discovered. If not from Yanni, I was determined I would get the truth from someone else, either Maya or the Master. Of course, as I sat there with Yanni, I hadn't yet met Maya, and so, beyond what he had so far said of her, had little idea of the woman I would encounter later that day. I didn't want to get into anything with Yanni, though, or derail him from the tale, so I widened my eyes in feigned surprise. "Okay, okay!" I said in dismissive surrender. "But don't call me a cunt, you kid fucker!"

Now it was Yanni's turn to be cowed, and he laughed. "Okay," he retorted. "I won't call you that -- at least not for a while, whore!"

I laughed in turn. God, I so liked him! "Go on, smartass," I said with a wave of my hand.

Yanni returned to the story with the enthusiasm of a boy describing his prowess on a ball field. "Well," he said, "then Maya pulled away the bedspread and there was this huge quilt on the bed, and the quilt had a circle on it too, and that circle had symbols too, but they were on the outside of the circle, at its corners, I guess you could say."

"And what were those symbols like?"

"I was told they were symbols for air, earth, fire and water," Yanni replied. "And then Maya got on the bed and laid down in the circle and Jessica laid on top of her, her head against her mother's breasts, just like Maya did with Parvati when the Master popped Maya's pussy cherry years before. Now the Master and Maya, father and daughter, husband and wife, were carrying on the most beautiful tradition possible in an incest family, making their own daughter into a woman. Maya kissed Jessica, whispering encouraging and soothing words in her ear, spreading the lips of her little bald pussy with her fingers, and then the Master got between their legs and eased his cock into Jessica, his own daughter/granddaughter, fucking her, making her into a woman while Maya recited a bunch of incantations. It was the most special moment a father and daughter can share, in so many ways. It really was so beautiful."

"What were the incantations?"

"I don't know," Yanni said. "It was all Latin again, so I didn't understand any of it."

"You did say before you didn't understand Latin then and also since," I observed, "so I presume you've seen this ritual more than once."

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Every child of the Master goes through this initiation ritual when they turn five. Just like with Jessica, it marks their transition from childhood to the beginning of their adult lives, when they start taking on more responsibilities, for themselves and our family."

Okay, leave that for another time, I thought, a time when Maya and I would hopefully talk alone. Still, I couldn't restrain my prurient interest about another element of the story -- as well as my skepticism. "How is it possible to fuck a five-year-old girl?" I asked. "It has to be impossible for someone with a normal dick and last night you mentioned the Master has a thick cock."

"It's possible," Yanni insisted. "The Master's dad taught him how and the Master is expert at it. He popped the cherries of all his daughters, natural and adopted, when they turned five, and he popped their ass cherries even earlier. The Master always says all kids are different but those are usually the magic ages. The same is true for boys too. At the same age as a girl, a boy's ass can be fully fucked. The Master once fucked a girl when she was four but that was one of his half-sisters when he was fifteen and his cock wasn't as thick or as long then as it is now."

"How big is the Master's cock?"

Yanni smiled. "When he's fully hard, really showing his love, it's eight inches long and two- and three-quarter inches thick," he said proudly, as if he was speaking of a relation or friend who had accomplished something monumental in human history. "I know exactly, because I've measured him."

In spite of myself, I inwardly marveled over the dimensions of such a cock. The figures Yanni had recited meant the Master's penis had to be, when fully erect, over eight inches in circumference. I had actually had longer pricks in my cunt, the longest one having been eleven inches, but certainly never one as thick. In addition to the thickening froth within my pussy, I found my mouth watering.

"So, how does someone with a cock that big fuck a five-year-old?" I asked.

"As big and thick as a cock may be," Yanni replied, "as hard as it can get, it's still spongey, sort of squooshy on the bottom of the shaft."

He brought up his hands to describe what he meant, balling the fingers into fists as if he was squeezing the water out of two suffused sponges. He obviously warmed to his subject, and I couldn't help but think he was declaiming like a professor, instructing me, the callow and fascinated student, in the mystery of fucking very young children. An image of Yanni as a British public-school don suddenly flickered to life in my mind. I pictured him standing before a vast chalkboard, wielding a long wooden pointer to indicate intricately detailed drawn diagrams of large adult cocks approaching and entering and splaying little bald pussies, the drawings accompanied by blocks of exhaustive notes. As he delivered the lecture in my head, I pictured a mortarboard on his head and pince-nez on his nose, a long black robe surrounding his lithe body but open in the front to reveal his dangling penis.

My mental fancy nearly brought me to laughter but then my imagination conjured a picture of his audience: an array of young learners, naked boys and girls sitting in the ascending rows of a lecture hall, all of them intensely fondling their genitals amid their thorough beguilement with the disquisition. That bit of my depraved woolgathering pumped a fresh gusher of juice from my cunt, the sudden flow so sharply felt that I had to momentarily close my eyes, but Yanni, eager to transmit to me the possibilities of this perverted world, seemed not to notice.

"When a cock is in a tight place, like a young pussy," Yanni continued, "the soft part on the bottom will press up against the top of the shaft, which is harder. A cock is wider than it's higher so when it's in a tight place, it's like an oval, not a circle. You can squeeze it smaller from top to bottom but not from side to side. So, when a pussy starts to squeeze the cock, it'll swell bigger, up to ten or even twenty percent bigger. And when you start pushing that cock inside a tight pussy, the head gets bigger, which is exactly what you don't want. So, what you should do is hold your cock in your fist; hold it at the base and squeeze the blood up into the head." He raised a hand and curled its fingers to mimic the grasping of a thick pole, and, based on what he had told me of the Master's penis, I didn't for a moment think the gesture was an exaggeration. "When you do it that way, the tip of your cock expands, but in a tapered shape, and that's perfect for putting it in a little pussy, even a pussy that's as young as five -- and sometimes even four.

"But with girls that young," he added, "it's often best to lay them on their side when you fuck because that way your dick will suit her holes, both her pussy and asshole. However big or small her holes look really doesn't matter. After all, a little girl's pussy can be stretched a lot wider than it can be stretched deeper. In fact, when people think of girls that young getting fucked, the mistake they make is thinking the girls are going to get fucked deep." He raised a hand yet again and slashed it through the air. "But no, you can't go too deep; you don't want to hurt her, after all. But a pussy, even a really young pussy, can stretch wide. A pussy is expandable, and it can be fucked, fucked really good, without any pain at all. I mean, a pussy is built to someday give birth to a whole baby, and it comes that way from the beginning. A pussy is built to stretch, and to be fucked. You just have to know how do it right. You just go slow and gentle and easy at first, and, in no time at all, that pussy will be taking your cock without any trouble, and you'll be fucking it good and hard. And, by the time a girl is eight or so, if she's being fucked regularly, her pussy is going to be trained, so there's no excuse. You can just fuck her straight up, no matter how long or thick your dick happens to be."

I listened intently, fascinated in spite of myself. I had to admit, at least silently, that Yanni's discourse made a twisted sense. As a girl grew and changed, her genitals grew and changed along with her. But vaginas didn't magically transform during a girl's teens into a flexible childbirth device. No, all that baby making gear came straight from the factory. I knew from my own reading that a woman's vulva stretched to about ten times its normal size during childbirth, so it stood to reason that a girl's tight snatch could stretch to accommodate an adult cock, even one as formidable as the Master's. What monstrousness! I thought. What sort of evil could possess one to know such things -- and put them into practice? And with one's own daughters!

I looked over at Yanni. His lesson made him seem an expert. Was his diabolical knowledge something solely gleaned from the Master or also the result of his own experience? Had he too fucked girls as young as five or four? I had seen him openly and unashamedly have sex with a preteen boy, so why wouldn't he have had sex with girls in the single digits? I regarded him, this beautiful man whom I already thought of as a delightful and irrepressibly effervescent friend, and simply willed the question out of my mind. I wouldn't think about it now. I'd ask him later -- or maybe never. I couldn't know then that within a short while events would make a hash of that determination.

I brought the conversation back around, saying: "So, that special moment" -- I crooked my fingers to make air quotes -- "ultimately led to the Master impregnating Jessica, impregnating a daughter he sired with a daughter."

Yanni nodded. "I remember what happened when their first fuck was done, what they said to each other," he said, his voice imbued with a somewhat dreamy tone. "Jessica looked up at him and she asked him: Am I a woman now, daddy?' And he said: Yes, baby, you're a woman now, my woman.' And she smiled and she said to him: I'll always be your woman, daddy. My pussy will always belong to you.' And then he smiled, and he bent down and kissed her on the mouth, and he said: And my cock will always belong to you.' And then they kissed some more, and, when their kissing was done, Jessica looked up, and she smiled at Maya, her mother/sister, and they kissed too, while Maya fingered her little clit and rubbed her pussy. And then Maya scooped the Master's come out of Jessica's pussy and fed it to Jessica and they kissed again, sharing the come, sharing the liquid love the way a mother and daughter should. The Master just looked at them, smiling, enjoying the love he was seeing. All of us were smiling, our cocks hard and our pussies wet. And then the two of them got on their knees and sucked him off. Seeing them love each other had gotten his cock hard again and they licked and blew him, lapping up the cum on his head and shaft. And then, as a gift to them, his two daughters, he came again, filling their mouths with his love. So beautiful." He paused a moment. "And then they turned to the rest of us and smiled, and we all knew that was the signal for us to get on the bed as well, and we all shared love."

Coming back down to earth, Yanni shook his head a bit then and looked at me. "Anyway," he added, "Jessica was right. Her own father's cock made her a woman, just like her mother before her. She may have been only five, but she already knew her own body, all of its natural power and beauty, and so she knew her own mind. Her father was her lover. And so, in our family, in our world, it's not too remarkable that her father is also her husband, and now, the father of her child, and that she's ready to be more than his daughter and his lover, but also his wife and a mother herself. And yet, at the same time, it's so beautiful, so completely extraordinary, a miracle that happens every day. Love makes it all possible."

It was something, all right, I thought. But a miracle? Hardly. Miracle or no, though, I couldn't resist asking for more. "When did the Master get Jessica pregnant?" I queried.

"He got her pregnant during the Yule Orgy at the end of last year," Yanni replied. "She's like five or six months along now."

"How old is Jessica now?"

"Still twelve. She won't turn thirteen until later this year."

"So, the Master got her pregnant at twelve; she's five or six months along by now, you just said, which means the chances are good she'll deliver while she's still twelve."

Yanni nodded. "That's right," he said. "Just like I saw their first fuck, I saw the fuck that got Jessica pregnant because I was the one the Master asked to bring her up to his apartments from the orgy, and, since he didn't tell me to leave after I brought her up there, I just stuck around."

I was about to open my big mouth to ask for more details about that episode but didn't have to. Yanni simply told me of his own accord, recounting what was for him yet another great and moving beauty that lingered in the memory, like one might remember a day spent lying in a meadow while gazing at the passing of white fluffy clouds overhead.

Yanni's eyes lowered as he drifted into another reverie, a deeper one this time, happily looking back into the recent past, a somewhat tranquilly ruminative expression on his face. "It was so beautiful," he said. "When you enter the Master's bedchamber, you know, there's a huge carpet that covers the floor" -- he began to languidly use his hands to indicate what he was describing -- "and, in the center of the carpet, there's this big round wooden table with a big crystal bowl that's filled with fresh flowers every day. I remember that night the bowl was filled with these beautiful white roses and their aroma seemed to fill the room.

"Anyway, when I brought Jessica up to his bedchamber, he was already there, waiting for her, standing naked at the foot of his huge bed, his cock hard." Yanni's eyes rose and shifted over to regard me, but I could see, the direction of his gaze notwithstanding, he was still deep in his reminiscence. "Sometimes it's like that: the Master is present and waiting when his lovers are brought to him, especially if they're someone special to him, but sometimes he isn't. Sometimes he likes to keep his lovers waiting, just for a little while, and then he makes a bit of an entrance."

Yanni's eyes fell again. "Anyway, that night he was waiting for Jessica, and she and I were naked too; we had just come from the orgy, after all. I remember Jessica had a blue ribbon in her hair and I think that's the only thing either of us were wearing." He thought a moment. "Oh, no! I remember better now. I had on a cock ring. But I didn't need it. I had just come from two hours of sucking and fucking at the orgy, but my cock started to get hard as soon as I saw him. He just looked so beautiful standing there, with this knowing expression he had on his face as he watched Jessica come in." He raised his left arm and spread the hand in the direction of his own face to supply an idea of what he had seen in the Master's countenance that night. "I mean, he just knew, like always, exactly what he was going to do and what the result of the night was going to be, and that got me so hot, that certainty of his, this" -- he paused a moment, considering another adjective -- "confidence he's always had, especially when it comes to him loving kids. And, like always, just the sight of him turned me on, his big chest, his hard abs, the muscles in his legs, and his beautiful hard cock. Ever since our first time together, I've loved just looking at him, especially when he's aroused and ready for love. And, at that moment, I remember wishing it was me coming to be with him, like in the old days when I was his Chief Boy Lover and we used to spend so much time together every day, his cock in me and my cock in him.

"But I shook all that off and led Jessica to stand in front of the table. I stepped back then, and nobody said a word, as if saying anything would've ruined the moment somehow. I looked at Jessica, and I could tell she knew something tremendous was going to happen, that the love she was about to share with her father was going to be even more special than usual. But I don't think she had an idea exactly what that was going to be." A bit of uncertainty crept across his face. "I don't know. I haven't asked her. But that's what I think.

"Anyway, I looked at the Master then, and I thought he was going to tell me to leave so they could be alone, but he didn't say anything to me. It was like I wasn't even there. All he did was look at Jessica, and then he smiled, and she smiled back at him, and he took a few steps toward her and took her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth, and she kissed him back, and they were tonguing while she reached over to take his cock in her hands and pump his shaft. And then he lifted her up and sort of turned her body around, and he set her down on the table, right next to the bowl of roses. She's been his lover all her life, so she knew right away what he meant to do, so she spread her legs, and he put one hand on her chest to hold on to her." He again raised his left arm to indicate how the Master's hand had snaked around the body of his twelve-year-old daughter to grasp her chest in order to hold her steady for the coming fuck. "And then he used his other hand to guide his cock into her pussy. They started fucking right there and I could tell Jessica was really into it, totally gone, because she was holding on to his arm with one hand while she was grabbing at the white tablecloth that was on the table with her other hand. She was holding onto that tablecloth so hard that the bowl of roses started shaking and started getting dragged toward her.

"Anyway, I was got super hard watching them fuck. I was pumping my cock, and it seemed like the fuck lasted for hours, but I guess it was actually only about a half hour or so, maybe a little longer. Jessica started coming, and then the Master let himself come too and he came so hard." His eyes widened at the memory. "There was so much cum! I mean, I've seen him come hard a bunch of times, like rope after rope just exploding out of his cock. But that time with Jessica was something even I had never seen before. Even before he took his cock out of Jessica's pussy, the cum was like flowing out of her" -- the backs of his hands sailed toward me as if to indicate the surge of a sudden current -- "and running down her legs and squirting down onto the table and onto the carpet even. And then, while he was still coming, just shooting it all over Jessica's body, Sunset came in carrying a tray of lubes and oils and refreshments, but he and Jessica were still so into the fuck that they didn't notice her either -- or at least they didn't seem to. So, Sunset just stood there, holding the tray in her hands." He raised his hands to imitate the grasping of a tray.

As transfixed as I was by the odious tale, I dared to interrupt him. "Who is Sunset?" I asked.

"She's one of the Master's natural daughters too," Yanni replied, "and also his night maid."

I nodded. Another daughter, I thought, another product of his dastardly loins! I would ask about her later. With a gesture, I bade Yanni continue.

Yanni paused again, though, thinking and remembering. "When the fuck was finally done," he continued, "he just picked Jessica up, and at first it looked to me like she was so blasted from the fuck that she was sleeping in his arms. Her head was on his chest." He briefly brought his hands together as if in prayer and laid the left side of his head on them to indicate someone falling into sleep. "It was an intense fuck, even for me, and all I did was watch and jack off, so you can imagine what it must have been like for them, especially for her. I guess it took a lot out of her. It was so beautiful, though. I mean, you could see how deeply they had loved each other, the way a father and daughter always should. Anyway, he had Jessica in his arms, and he got on the bed, and he laid her down, and he laid down next to her, caressing and kissing her, and I saw then she was still awake, and she was smiling up at him.

"And it was only then that he looked up at us, Sunset and me, and, without him saying a word, we just knew what he wanted us to do. Sunset set the tray down and the two of us got on the bed, and we were on either side of Jessica and we licked up all the cum that was on her. I licked up her legs while Sunset licked her clit and her pussy, and the Master just kept on caressing her and kissing her, and she was caressing his face and kissing him back. And by this time, I had licked all the cum from Jessica's legs and I had gotten up to her pussy, and me and Sunset were sharing the cum in deep kisses. I remember my tongue was in Jessica's pussy and I was scooping out all the holy jizz I could find and drinking her juices, and I saw Sunset tonguing Jessica's belly button, and then she was looking at me, waiting for me, waiting for our next cum kiss, when I heard the Master whisper to Jessica. You're more than my daughter now,' he said. Holy incest is going to make you the mother of our child, a child we're going to love the same way we've loved each other.' And then Jessica whispered to him: I love you, daddy. All I've ever wanted is to be your lover and have your babies.' And then the Master said: I love you too, Jessica, with all my heart and cock. And you're more than my lover now. You're going to be one of my wives. And you will have my babies, this one and more afterwards.'"

Yanni snapped out of his trance then, raised his eyes and looked at me. "So much cum," he said reverently, as if recounting the intercession of a saint. "Such a holy blessing between father and daughter. So, so beautiful."

I refrained from providing my assessment of what Yanni considered beautiful. "Why do you think the Master didn't ask you and Sunset to leave?" I merely asked.

Yanni shrugged mildly. "Me, I don't know," he said. "Like I said, he knew he was going to get Jessica pregnant that night. Maybe he wanted a witness to the fuck and his come. You know, all of us here do so much fucking that when someone gets pregnant, we can't always be a hundred percent sure who the father might be, at least not right away, not until a test is done. Not that that matters to any of us. Here, a new child is another citizen of Philo-Sophia who will always be loved by everybody as well as be a disciple of love. As for Sunset, well, she'd have been there anyway; she's one of the Master's personal maids, after all, in charge of his night maids. She works overnight and her twin sister Sunrise is there during the day. They're daughters of the Master too, you know, like I said. Natural daughters."

I shook my head. "No, I didn't know that," I said. "Who's their mother?"

"Tiffany," Yanni replied.

"And who is Tiffany?" I asked, actually remembering Yanni had mentioned Tiffany the night before.

Yanni didn't immediately answer, thinking a few moments while obviously considering a response. "She was one of the Master's girl lovers back in the day," he finally said.

Delivered a bit curtly, Yanni's answer instantly alerted me the subject of Tiffany was perhaps a sensitive one. I regarded him with a quizzical stare and stated: "Okay, there's more to that story."

Yanni was simultaneously amused and discomfited that I had sussed his reluctance. "Yeah," he agreed simply, "a lot more."

Now it was my turn to worry that the morning was getting on, that we were taking too long, and, as Yanni had done, I glanced up at the clock on the wall. I didn't want to fuck up with the Goddesses before even meeting them. But Yanni's admission about something to do with Tiffany had me sniffing at another mystery, especially as my vaunted memory suddenly had me recalling his mention of her the evening before.

"You promised me last night you'd tell me about Tiffany," I said. "You said there was some uncertainty about whether the Master is her father." I gestured at the clock. "We've got some time. So, tell me, sicko."

"Nosy bitch," Yanni said with a laugh. "I really don't know much."

I smiled. "Somehow, I doubt that," I said with a mock sweetness. "But tell me what you do know."

"Okay," Yanni said, lowering his voice to a wary but still somewhat mirthful whisper. "A lot of this happened long before I knew the Master, which is why I don't know much, but you gotta promise me you won't mention this to anyone. I mean, it's not really like it's a big secret but, still, no one really talks about it. I know you might write about it, which is fine, but I don't want you mentioning to anyone here we talked about it."

My eagerness to hear yet another tale of the depravity that rose from this crowd like gas from a swamp trumped, at least for the moment, any consideration of what I might do later. "I promise," I said, crossing my heart as if we were playmates conspiring in a remote corner of a schoolyard. I smiled at him again while thinking I was enjoying this too much.

"Well," Yanni began, "the Master's dad did a deal to sell these bikers guns and explosives, but they couldn't pay him all they owed right away, so they put up an eleven-year-old girl as collateral, and the Master's dad, who was a big-time pedo, went for that deal."

The tale had hardly begun, and I was already fascinated -- and aroused. Criminality! Slavery! Perversion! What more could a girl reporter want? "And that was Tiffany?" I interjected.

A slight irritation colored Yanni's voice. "No," he said. "That was Esme, Tiffany's mom. Well, everybody calls her Esme. Her full name is Esmeralda."

"Oh," I blurted. "Well, what the fuck do I know? Sorry, I'll shut up." I waved a hand at him. "Okay, go on." I raised my other hand to my mouth and turned an imaginary key. "Tick a lock."

"Well, anyway," Yanni continued, "Esme ended up living with the Master's dad. She was one of his girl lovers, so he was fucking her, and the Master -- he must have been in his early teens then, around thirteen or fourteen, I guess -- he was fucking her too. And Esme was making it with all the other lovers the Master and his dad had then. And, after she turned twelve, she got pregnant, and that baby was Tiffany. So, Tiffany's been living with the Master since she was born."

"And eventually the Master impregnated Tiffany and she gave birth to Sunrise and Sunset?" I asked.

"That's right," Yanni replied, nodding. "She was a girl lover of the Master since long before I knew him and I became Chief Boy Lover, but she had her daughters not too long after Rola and Diamond had their babies."

I blinked and shook my head in confusion. "Wait a minute," I said. "Who the fuck is Diamond?"

"Oh," Yanni said, his eyebrows arching in a small paroxysm of realization. "I guess I never mentioned her before. Diamond is Gem's mom. She's one of the Goddesses too."

I shook my head again, trying to keep everyone and everything straight. "Okay," I said, "one disaster at a time. How old was Tiffany when she gave birth?"

Yanni laughed. "Thirteen," he replied simply.

"And how old was the Master then?" I asked.

Yanni furrowed his brow in thought. "I guess he must've been in his late twenties," he finally replied.

"And now, I presume, the Master fucks Sunrise and Sunset, his daughters with Tiffany."

"That's right," Yanni said again. "Since they live and work at the Main House and they're with him pretty much all the time, he usually fucks both of them at least once every day."

"And how old are they?"

"Eleven," Yanni replied. "They'll turn twelve later this year."

I emitted a mild snort. "Three generations of women," I said, evincing a smidge of amazement. "Mother, daughter and granddaughters, all had by and belonging to the Master." I thought a few moments, the implications of what Yanni had revealed bubbling up in my brain.

"Why did Esme stay with the Master's dad? You said she was collateral in a business deal?"

Yanni shrugged. "The deal went bad," he replied. "The people the Master's dad sold his stuff to never paid the rest of what they owed and that led to a lot of shit going down later on. Anyway, that's why Esme stayed. Not that she minded. She's told me the bikers that owned her before didn't treat her very well. They hardly fed her, kept her naked and chained in a filthy room on a stinky mattress, and all of them would come in and fuck her whenever they felt like, even their old ladies, at all hours. But when she came to live with the Master's dad, she was, like, blown away, because she was free to come and go as she pleased; she had the run of the house, including the kitchen, and the fucking only happened if she wanted it to happen. The Master's dad owned her, but he never forced himself on her. And when the fucking did happen, it was fun. She's told me her mom was a druggie and sold her to those mean bikers and" -- he stopped then, thinking again, a jot of emotion momentarily scrunching his face -- "well, living with the Master's dad was the first time she felt loved, especially after she got to know the Master too, and started spending more time with him and his lovers."

Upon hearing that, I snorted again, but softer still, thinking that whatever beliefs about her own life Esme was hoping to express when she had shared such sentiments with Yanni, she had actually, I thought, traded one form of servitude for another, even if the newer cage was larger and more elaborately gilded. Strangely, though, at that moment, it didn't occur to me to question what Yanni had related. It simply never entered my head to think he might be lying or shading the truth. If he said that's the way Esme felt, then that's the way Esme felt. I already trusted him that much, which was decidedly surprising and a bit unsettling since I was one of the most cynical people I knew.

In the weeks to come, I was to find that trust, instinctually given, was indeed well placed. Yanni kept things from me but was always honest about doing so. He never lied to me. After talking with Yanni, there would be times when I would stumble into mistaken apprehensions but only because his own knowledge was minimal or incomplete. Certain of that trust while hardly appreciating what had grown between us, I would repose confidences in him that he never revealed, even after some of them were known to everyone else. But it was not until later that day when I realized the tad of emotion I had just briefly glimpsed sprang from experiences of his own that were similar to what Esme had suffered. And, when that happened, I dared to think I understood him better, though I was still as confused as hell. This beautiful man whom I already liked so much, this sicko kid fucker, was undeniably suffused with compassion.

"What was the shit that went down when those other bikers didn't pay?" I merely asked.

"I can't talk about that," Yanni said flatly, and, at that moment, hearing the tone of his voice, I decided to drop the subject for the time being. It was obvious to me the episode was somehow important, but I also knew that Yanni, for all his affability and undisguised affection for me, would not tell me anything more.

"Okay," I said agreeably, "but you said there's a thing that's not a big secret, but no one talks about it."

Yanni rolled his eyes in amused exasperation and regarded me as if I were a simpleton. "Some reporter," he said. "Stop and think, brainless." He smiled wickedly. "It'll get you hot."

I did stop and think for a few moments and then it came to me. "Who is Tiffany's father?" I exclaimed, my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open in anticipation. The sick fuck was right: merely asking the question and wondering about the answer got my cunt freshly dripping.

Yanni's smile reminded me of the evil contentment a housecat might feel upon succeeding in stuffing its mouth with the pet parakeet. "I knew you'd get it!" he exclaimed in turn. "And the answer to that question is no one knows for sure. The Master's dad could be Tiffany's father, in which case Tiffany is the Master's sister. Or the Master could be Tiffany's father, in which case Tiffany is his daughter. Or it could be that someone else who was around then is Tiffany's father."

I was fascinated. Imagine, I thought. Esme had come of age in a thoroughgoing miasma of corruption, gotten pregnant at twelve, and raised her daughter Tiffany in a similar welter of depravity. Tiffany had grown up an undoubted witness to the most unrestrained licentiousness and, at the age of thirteen, gotten pregnant herself, seeded by a man who was either her half-brother or father. And now, that same man was routinely having sex with Tiffany's twin daughters, two preteen girls who were either simultaneously his daughters and granddaughters or his daughters and nieces. I could barely comprehend how such perversion seemed so commonplace here -- and yet still so arousing. My pussy continued its steady trickle.

"What's the consensus?" I asked.

Yanni was confused. "Huh?" he said. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, when people do talk about this, is there any majority opinion as to Tiffany's parentage?"

"Oh," Yanni said. "Well, most people seem to think the Master is Tiffany's dad. Even if he isn't, he pretty much raised her. But they resemble each other in certain ways."

"How so?"

Yanni shrugged. "They've got similar hair," he said. "His is dark brown, and hers is lighter and curlier, but the texture is the same. Their skin is similar and" -- he shrugged again -- "I don't know, they resemble each other facially; they've got the same eyes, the same nose, the same lips." He paused a moment. "But Tiffany's got a bit of an overbite." His right index finger tapped his upper teeth. "Tiffany's sensitive about it so she tries not to smile, but everybody tells her she's crazy. I think she's beautiful and I know the Master does too, not to mention she's got a super bod."

"But no one's ever looked into it?" I asked. "Done a blood test?"

"It's never been an issue," Yanni asserted. "Esme's never made a fuss about it and neither has Tiffany. I don't know how the Master feels about it because I've never asked him."

I recalled my earlier rumination on that subject. "It seems you don't ask him about a lot," I teased. "And it seems to me he doesn't tell you a lot."

Appreciating my cheekiness, Yanni smiled. "I ask him what I need to know," he said agreeably. "And he tells me what he wants me to know. Besides, I've been with him long enough to know things even when no one talks about them. And there are things I know because I saw them happen or I was around when they happened. And that's why what I know about Tiffany is a lot, if not everything. Only a few people in the family know everything about everything." He paused a moment. "Otherwise, the Master's love and trust are enough for me."

I returned his smile. "Okay, smart guy," I said, "what do you know about Tiffany?"

"What I've already told you," Yanni replied. "She's been with the Master since the start of her life. She grew up with him, he raised her, they were and still are lovers. She's one of the Goddesses, and over the years she's helped him in a lot of important ways."

"How so?"

"She was an assistant deputy chief girl lover, and then, when Rola became Chief Girl Lover, Tiffany was her deputy, at least for a little while. And then she helped Lina found the Guardians and she was Lina's deputy for a long time."

I detected something in Yanni's voice: a certain sheepishness, which told me I was once again in sight of forbidden waters. "But not now?" I asked.

"No," Yanni simply said.

"What else is there?" I asked. "C'mon, you're hedging. Can you tell me or not?" The expression on Yanni's face and set of his shoulders made it obvious he was reluctant to say but also that what he was holding back wasn't some state secret, like the unknown events that followed Esme's sale to the Master's father. "If you can't, just say so," I added.

"No, I can tell you," Yanni began slowly. "Tiffany left the Guardians months ago, nearly a year ago now, I think. That was around the time her relationship with Lina ended."

I blinked and Yanni flinched ever so slightly upon seeing me blink. I suddenly remembered he had mentioned this the night before, but it was only registering now. I brought myself under control and, as evenly as I could, asked: "They were lovers?"

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he said softly. "For a long time."

I nodded in turn and, in that instant, decided I would ask no more about that subject, not now, not today, not with Yanni. In the space of a millisecond, a flood of thoughts coursed through my brain while a tsunami of emotions fractured the moorings of my spirit. An interrogation to which I knew all the answers rose with the swell, but my feigned indifference broke the back of the wave and, like the gale from Poseidon's nostrils that wrecked Agamemnon's fleet, the insistent questions were drowned in the depths. Why was he reluctant to tell me that? I wondered. What the fuck is wrong with me? For the briefest moment, I admitted to myself none of this was any kind of mystery to me and cursed myself for being a gutless coward.

"Where does Tiffany live now?" I asked.

Yanni seemed a bit surprised by that question, but his face quickly returned to its usually pleasing mien. "She lives in the Main House," he replied, "in the Holy Family apartments, with her mom."

In light of where I was and all I had already learned, the next question seemed a logical one. "Are Esme and Tiffany lovers?"

Yanni nodded.

I again nodded in return. Well, I suppose that's to be expected, I thought. Who else does one run to but mommy? And, in this place, why wouldn't a mother and daughter live together as lovers? I decided to change the subject -- at least a little. "Does this question of Tiffany's unresolved parentage cause any problems in the Holy Family?" I asked. "I mean, if Tiffany is one of the Master's daughters but is unacknowledged as such, aren't their resentments, jealousies, maybe even rivalries?"

"I see where you're going, but you're off base," Yanni replied. "No one in the Holy Family is on a power trip. Besides, like I told you, Tiffany's already had children with the Master and occupied important positions. She left the Guardians because she was burned out, not because her relationship with Lina ended, though I'll admit one probably had something to do with the other. I mean, she was Lina's deputy for around thirteen years and keeping up with Lina is never easy. She'll run you into the ground if you let her, in a lot of ways, and that's what happened with Tiffany. In a way, though, things worked out because Tiffany and Esme got together."

"Weren't they together before?" I asked, again crooking my fingers to make air quotes. "You've told me incest is highly prized here, so I assume Esme and Tiffany were having sex with each other even while Tiffany was Lina's lover."

Yanni nodded. "Yeah, that's true," he said. "Esme's been sharing love with Tiffany all her life, just like a good mother should. And Lina and Tiffany still share love from time to time, usually at the Holy Family orgies. But there's a difference between sharing love and being lovers, especially when your lover, the person that's most special to you, is someone related to you. The fact that Esme and Tiffany are mother and daughter makes their relationship so much more intense."

For once, I thought Yanni was being naïve. By now, I understood the depth of his devotion to the Master and his obvious affection for everyone in the so-called Holy Family. My cynical self couldn't help but be certain, though, that there had to be maneuverings in the group that surrounded the pedophile god. Wherever sharks swam, there had to be remora. I pressed my query. "And Gem? How does she figure in all of this?"

"Everybody loves Gem," Yanni declared. "The bond between her and the Master is really special, for sure, but that was true from the start of her life. They've always been more than father and daughter, and everyone always accepted that. Even now, as busy as she is being Chief Girl Lover, she and her father find the time to fuck every day, even several times a day. I mean, I've seen them just exchange glances at any given moment and, it's like they're reading each other's minds because, without either of them saying a word, they just know they want to fuck -- heck, that they have to fuck. She'll drop her bikini bottoms and climb into his arms, and he'll fuck her right then and there, no matter what else is happening or who else happens to be around. I mean, you should see it -- and I guess you will eventually. Such intense fucks. And when they're done, he sets her down and they both go on as if nothing happened even though what has happened is everything that can happen and should happen between a father and a daughter. So sexy."

Yanni paused a moment, then added: "But, despite all that, no one doubts Gem earned her position. So, I don't think Gem or Tiffany or Maya or anyone else cares about whether Tiffany is truly one of the Master's daughters or not -- at least not much. Tiffany is a member of the Holy Family, and that's that. Even if she's the Master's sister and not his daughter, she was raised as his daughter, and that's what matters." He paused again. "But I don't know. I could be wrong. I'll admit this is something I've never talked about with Tiffany or Esme or anyone else. But everyone knows Gem is the future of Philo-Sophia. Someday, she'll have the Master's babies, just like Maya did, just like Tiffany did, and she and her brother Chad will succeed the Master. The two of them will take us into the future."

I took in that revelation, wondering about the contours of the future foreseen by Yanni and the others in the Holy Family, not to mention the other denizens of Philo-Sophia. Like a dog with a bone, though, I clung to my supposition. "Won't Maya have something to say about that?" I asked. "You did say she's the Master's Chief Wife, the High Priestess, and we just talked about how the Master impregnated her daughter Jessica. I presume the Master and Maya probably have plans to have more children, as many as possible, unless I miss my guess. Might not those children be in the line of succession?"

"Yeah, actually," Yanni replied. "I mean, the Master and Maya have always really wanted to have more kids with each other, and my guess is that'll probably happen very soon. I've heard Maya say a bunch of times she wants to have sons so she can feel their cocks in her pussy, and she wants to give the Master more daughters to fuck. But they've just been so busy the last few years, putting all this together, so they haven't had the time to get pregnant."

Yanni thought a bit before supplying the next part of his answer and, when he spoke, did so slowly, carefully, as if feeling a duty for me to understand every aspect and implication of his explanation, "As for Gem," he began, "well, right now Maya is the High Priestess, that's true, but she also runs Philo-Sophia on a day-to-day basis. But, like I already told you, Maya and Gem are very close. Maya's been like a second mother to her. But she knows someday Gem will run things, so she spends a lot of time teaching her about everything she does and everything she knows. When Gem takes over, Maya will still be around and still be important: to Gem, to the rest of us in the family, and to everyone else here. Maya will advise Gem, especially on spiritual matters, just like she does now with the Master, because she'll still be High Priestess. Building our faith is the most important thing to Maya."

I could tell Yanni wholeheartedly believed what he said but still wondered how closely his charitable view hewed to the truth. It's useless to press him further, I suddenly thought. Nothing I might ask or say would lead him to even consider the other members of his brood had anything but the purest motives, and so anything else he might share on the subject would likely not provide much insight, at least not to my instinctively cynical view of the situation. I couldn't help but consider, though, what sort of women Esme, Tiffany and particularly Maya must be. Were they just completely wacked out, which I doubted, or did they all possess some unsettling clarity, some strength of will that was beyond me? These ruminations notwithstanding, I decided to shift the topic a bit.

Shaking my head to deliver the not altogether inaccurate impression I continued to marvel over all I was learning, I said: "From what you're telling me, I'm guessing the Master has made a long habit of fucking everything that moves, everyone around him."

A small but decidedly wicked smile rose to Yanni's face. "Yeah," he confirmed. "That's been true since he was a kid and a teenager, and since he was a young man, what he calls his bad good old days." He shook his head in obvious wonder. "And it's true now. I mean, I've never seen anyone like him, someone who was so into sex, so into sucking and fucking, so into love, and is so good at it -- and I've hung around with some of the biggest freaks ever, including me." He laughed and I couldn't resist a chuckle of my own. "From one minute to the next, he can just start balling. I mean, his cock will get hard and everybody who's around will know he wants to be inside a pussy or an ass. One minute he'll be talking to you and the next he'll be licking, sucking or fucking. And when he's really into it, like when he's with kids, he can go for hours. He loves whenever he's in the mood, and that's pretty much all the time."

Yanni paused a moment. "Back in the old days," he went on, "he was busy with his businesses and other stuff, building up everything, but he always set aside at least a portion of each day or sometimes whole days out of the week for sex, especially when it came to meeting new kids. He was always on the lookout for kids to seduce and he was always on the lookout for moms with kids too. And he knew just how to spot them and pick them and move in on them, the kids and the moms. More often, he seduced kids but, when he was got with a mom, he'd seduce her first and then her kids, and, as far as I know, it always worked for him. At least I never heard he ever failed. He'd end up fucking the kids or the moms and their kids, and he'd share so much love with them, teach them so much, and, with the moms, he'd teach about the way mothers and their kids can share love, and should share love. He told me a bunch of times he loved seducing kids almost as much as he loved fucking them, but seducing the moms, seeing if he could bring them around to his way of thinking and living, like he had done with their kids, well, that turned him on something fierce."

Yanni's eyes glittered as he elaborated on those foul exploits. "I mean, it was so cool!" he exclaimed. "Once he was fucking them all, a mom and her kids, he'd deliberately set things up to have her catch him having sex with her kids, and that moment, the moment when she walked in on him naked and balling with her kids, always got him so hot. And then he'd go to work on the mom, convincing her to join the love, and, more often than not, she would. Even when a mom wouldn't go for it, and that didn't happen too often, she'd stay with him, and she'd let him keep on fucking her kids."

Yanni paused again, thinking. "And just like it worked out for him, at least most of the time," he added, "it worked out for the rest of us too, because some of those kids became part of our family and our still with us today." He pursed his lips, thinking some more. "And now, even though so much has happened, he hasn't changed." He suddenly seemed a bit wistful. "So many changes, big and small, but he's still the same. He sucks and fucks. He gives his love, every hour of every day."

"He hasn't changed at all?" I asked. "I mean, he was a hood but now he's a god."

A slightly blank expression on his face, Yanni regarded me and allowed a small nod. "Yeah, I guess," he agreed, and then he laughed. "In the old days, he used to wear clothes, at least whenever he left the compound. But now he's naked all the time. He doesn't wear anything, except for the rituals, and even then, he doesn't wear much." His momentary mirth faded, and he added: "He's responsible for so many, even more than before, and responsible for so much, everything we want to make happen."

I ignored Yanni's concern for all the Master's burdens. What a bold bastard! I thought. Those bygone episodes of dastardly manipulation were obviously fond memories for Yanni and, as he spoke of them, the twinkles in his eyes and small smiles that bowed his lips made plain his admiration for the Master's tactics and accomplishments. I regarded him, and then, my lips tightly pursed, lowered my gaze to the table, my mind, as usual, filled with questions. I decided to lay off for once, though. No doubt he would tell me to pose any more demanding questions to the subjects of those queries and my head was roiling with consideration of a man, Yanni's beloved Master, so amoral that he could bring himself to seduce not one but a series of vulnerable mothers and their children.

"So, I'll be talking with Esme and Tiffany as well?" I asked simply.

Yanni shook his head. "Probably not today," he replied. "They're at work."

"Where is that?"

"Here. They both work at the Studio, where Anna and Diamond work as well. Esme's in charge of hairstyling and Tiffany's in charge of make-up."

I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes. A hairdresser and make-up artist at a studio devoted to the making of kiddy porn? I marveled. A hairdresser who's spent her life as the property of bikers and a make-up artist who from her youth was trained as a hard-bodied killer! Now I've heard everything. I again decided to have the subject undergo a slight retreat. There was plenty of time to learn more about Esme and her daughter Tiffany, and Tiffany's daughters Sunrise and Sunset -- or so I hoped.

"How did the Master know that that fuck with Jessica was the one that was going to get her pregnant?" I asked. "I mean, based on what I already know, the two of them must fuck rather frequently."

Yanni nodded. "True," he said. "But the Master is expert at controlling his own body, especially when he comes. He's been studying and practicing Tantra for years. When we were kids -- me, Lina and Rola -- he used to come all the time -- and come hard. And the Master's always had the ability to just fuck and fuck and fuck. He can fuck -- and come hard -- and then be ready to fuck some more just a little while later. I mean, when we were kids and teens, he would shower us in cum. A lot of times there was so much of his jizz on our bodies that our tongues couldn't get to it all, and, if we didn't take a bath or shower right after, it would just dry, and we'd peel it off each other later." He paused a moment, smiling at the memory.

"But after he got into Tantra," Yanni continued, "he learned to control his comes so his orgasms could become much more intense. Now, he comes only when he wants to. He's gotten so skilled that I've actually seen him suck up liquid with his cock. So, when he does allow himself to come, he does it to give his blessing to a lover or because he intends to get somebody pregnant, like he did with Jessica, and like he did with Ashley a little while after, and then his come is like an explosion, just ropes and ropes of his holy cream." He paused again, considering the Master's ejaculatory virtues. "After a really good fuck or when he's just ready to give a blessing, I've seen him come, like, three or four or more times -- boom, boom, boom, one after the other -- and each come is like an eruption, his spunk shooting everywhere -- and shooting so hard. I mean, I've seen his cum fly across the length of a room.

"But as special as it is to see it, to feel it, to have him come like that inside you or even on you, is even more amazing. So many of his lovers, boys and girls, have told me he takes them places they never dreamed possible when he shoots inside them or when he covers them with his hot sticky and they feel it on their bodies, like it's burning, and they taste him, and they have the most special part of him inside them. They just lose their minds, and their bodies go all limp, and they see heaven, you know, and, in that moment, when they're one with him and all the universe, they know he's a god. And I know they're telling the truth, at least the truth as they've experienced it, because I've felt it too, from when I was a kid myself and up to now, all those times he's fucked my ass and shot inside me."

As fascinated as I was, I decided to yet again slightly change tack, reasoning I could hear more about the Master's extraordinary abilities later, and more about the impregnation episode when I spoke to Maya -- and maybe also her daughter Jessica. In that moment, I had to admit, if only to myself amid the clawing of unbidden memories, that I found the prospect of meeting Maya, a woman wed to her own father, who had borne her own father's baby, highly arousing. More than that, I anticipated with a barely contained eagerness our eventual discussion of how she had willingly given that very daughter to that same father, for him to fuck at five and impregnate at twelve.

"So, you said Maya runs Philo-Sophia on a daily basis?" I asked. "So, she's not only the spiritual arbiter of this place, but also its secular head -- at least for now."

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he said. "After college, she went to business school and got an M.B.A. She runs everything here and oversees everything we've got going on the outside. She's sharp. She keeps a lot in her head, and nothing gets by her."

Now there was someone who truly had it all, I thought flippantly. A daughter and wife, a career woman and mother, an empress and goddess. Amid the depraved life she had so far led and the iniquitous faith she had gradually cultivated, how had she juggled it all, and how did she manage now? I had needed hillocks of blow and cartons of nicotine to keep my life (such as it was) and work going. So, how did the godmother of a criminal empire and queen of a realm do it? I kicked myself at that moment, realizing that, based on the little I knew, I was beginning to harbor an admiration for Maya, that I was marveling at her undeniable abilities, thinking of her as some sort of feminist heroine I might find in a book by Gail Sheehy rather than the corrupted and immoral despot she truly was.

"Maya went to school too?" I asked, remembering what Yanni had told me the night before about Francesca being a doctor.

Yanni nodded. "Oh, yeah," he said. "She went to the same college as Francesca, but they didn't know each other there because they were studying different stuff. They didn't know each other until Francesca started coming to our place and living with us and became a member of our family. But they both graduated at the same time, and then Francesca went to medical school and Maya went to business school."

I took a deep breath, exhaled and nodded. "Okay," I agreed.

I had been amazed to learn Francesca was a doctor and was now equally amazed to learn Maya was educated as well, which meant both had to have left paper trails: school records, membership in student organizations, awards and honors and sheepskins. Francesca had to be licensed somewhere. All were avenues that definitely merited exploration when I returned to the world. Indeed, I supposed I was still bowled over to know I wasn't visiting a pack of ravening kiddie fucker criminals. Things would've been easier to understand and explain if that had been the case. No, this was a community of seemingly ordinary people, many of them educated professionals, who had given over their lives and destinies to a pedophile god and his and now their warped religion. Well, not ordinary people, to be sure, but few of them, judged from the filmy surface, would have appeared untoward to the most casual of casual observers.

I had read that, during the bad old days of the Cold War, the Soviets had built American-style towns in their hinterland -- as red, white and blue as any burg in the heartland -- in order to train deep-cover agents on how to be as American as the Thom McAns on their feet and Sears steel-belted radials on their cars; baseball, mom and apple pie underlain by the international Communist conspiracy. And now, here I was, in some remote corner of the planet, in a simulacrum beyond the imaginings of even the long-dead spymasters of Moscow Center. I was sitting in the dining room of a cottage that would have looked perfectly natural if it had been placed on a New England seashore, amid a cluster of houses and streets and parks and shops that could have doubled for any small town back home; a cup of coffee and newspapers at hand while having an amiable conversation with a pedophile, one among who knew how many thousands of pedophiles who lived and went about their everyday hum-drum business here while fucking kids as easily as plopping down onto a sofa to watch the latest big game on television. Or rather than staring into the abyss, was I actually staring out? Was this place the world as it should be? In what I still believed was and clung to as the real world, how many of those that surrounded me were closet pedophiles themselves, forced by convention to wear acceptable clothing and lead lives of hardly realized but sometimes not-so-quiet desperation?

If that was the truth, was I being ungenerous to the denizens of this place? Was their pedophilia not merely some licentious whim, but actually something deeply felt, something that was as integral to them as the need to breathe and desire to procreate? Was every lick and suck and fuck a realization of their creed, an affirmation of their belief of the truth of their way of life and love? Was every congress of bodies, adults and children alike, the movingly reverent worship they offered to nature, to the empty skies above and the dark universe beyond? Were they the brave ones, their seemingly ordinary existences colored by something far greater than mere consumption, something that had actual meaning, and was loving and true and holy?

I remembered something Yanni had said earlier. "Who are the Acolytes?" I asked.

"They're the Children of the Great Altar," Yanni replied. "That's what we call them anyway. They're the boys and girls who help Maya and the other Priestesses with the holy rituals and the sacred orgies. Some of them have double duty; they're members of the Master and Maya's household staffs as well as helping out with the practicing of the faith, like the Master's Lovers or the Angels."

My mind reeled from the intricacy of this world into which I'd been dropped. One question always led to a slew of others. "And the Angels?" I asked.

"Those are the handmaidens of the Master and Maya," Yanni explained. "They're called Angels because, when it's been decided who'll be the lover or lovers for the Master and Maya during the afternoon or on a particular night, they're the ones who go out and find those kids to deliver the good news and to bring them back to the Main House to prepare them for the sharing of love."

"You said Maya was the Master's Chief Wife," I asked. "How many wives does he have?"

Yanni silently recited names while counting on his fingers and then looked up at me. "Right now, eighteen," he said.

My eyes widened. Holy fucking shit! I thought. I quickly regained my presence of mind. "Why do you say, `right now'?" I asked.

"Well, that number includes Parvati and some of his other daughters," Yanni replied, "but doesn't include people everybody knows he'll marry eventually. For example, my sister Rola is one of his wives, even though she's also married now to her son Chad. Tiffany is one of his wives too, even though she's married to her mother Esme. But Jessica and Ashley aren't officially his wives yet, even though they're having his babies. My guess is he'll marry them later this year, after their kids are born. And then there's Gem. Everybody knows he's going to marry Gem someday. But that probably won't happen for a few years. She's really busy right now, being Chief Girl Lover and all, and learning from Maya how everything is run, and I know the Master wants to enjoy her, just her, before she has his kids, just like he did with Maya."

I loosed a deep breath. "Still, that's one hell of a harem," I said.

"Maya's his Chief Wife, yeah," Yanni suddenly rushed to add, "but all of them are precious to him. His wives are the ones who have been with him the longest or are the most special to him. He took vows with all of them, all at the same time, here at Philo-Sophia, and then they all had a big orgy. We call them his consorts, but they're all considered his wives."

Yanni's obvious need to make me understand the Master's domestic situation led me to think even the thought of somehow diminishing the other women was painful to him. His devotion to all of them, the mainstays of his family, was palpable and I smiled inwardly, once again realizing how unshakable his loyalty was once given. "Vows?" I asked. "What kind of vows?"

I was surprised to see Yanni's eyes widen and his body recoil slightly, as if, for the first time since I had known him, he was frightened of something. "I can't talk about that," he said simply while shaking his head. "Not only because I shouldn't, but also because I really don't know anything. There's a ceremony, a secret ritual, but that's all I know. It's something Maya and the Priestesses invented but I've never seen it." He looked at me, crossed his heart and held up his right hand as if taking a boy scout oath.

Understanding his position, I regarded him with a tender expression and nodded. "Okay," I said simply. But now my curiosity was afire to discover the details of the secret ritual, obviously one of the whispered mysteries of this nascent pedophiliac religion. I believed Yanni when he said he knew nothing or little about it but what of the Master's women? Maya was the originator of the faith, its central cog, but who else might know? Having undergone the ritual, all of the Master's so-called consorts, of course. But who else? Were there witnesses? Yanni had mentioned the Acolytes, the Children of the Great Altar, how they helped Maya and the Priestesses with the propagation of their insidious faith. Were they in attendance when those dark vows were taken? I had to find out. Even if I did, though, would anyone of them tell me what more I wanted to know? If any other girls or women were in line to become brides to the Master, would I somehow be allowed to see the ritual for myself? Or was it a mystery so deeply held, so thoroughly concealed among a small and select few that to even attempt to penetrate its secrets held pains that were too horrible to endure?

"So, this marriage ritual is something all the consorts have undergone?" I asked. "Are the consorts and the Priestesses or are there some consorts who are not Priestesses or vice versa?"

Yanni was decidedly uncomfortable now, as if fearing an unintended blasphemy would forever consign him to whatever passed for damnation in this world. "Look," he said a bit plaintively, "let's not talk about this, okay? Whatever you want to know about this, you should ask Maya or any of the other Goddesses, though my guess is they won't tell you a thing." He fell silent a few moments and then, as if to mollify me, sighed and added: "All I can tell you is that if somebody is one of the Master's Goddesses, she's one of his consorts, and, if she's one of his consorts, she's a Priestess too."

I sighed myself and nodded. That last was a bit of insight, a piece of information that was to prove more valuable than I realized at the time. "Okay," I said again.

I marveled yet again. Eighteen wives! And likely more to come! That was a number bound to excite the envy -- or pity -- of any Arab potentate or Mormon fundamentalist. It was hard enough for one man and one woman to make a go of conventional, life-long monogamy, a terror I had never come close to experiencing. How could one man manage such a troop of mates? I voiced my doubts. "How does the Master handle so many wives?" I asked.

As unsettled as Yanni had been just a few moments before, he now evinced a bit of irritation. "He doesn't handle them," he replied a bit testily. "He loves them, and they love him. Like I said, they're the women who have been with him the longest or are the most special to him, so they know him; they know his love and how limitless it is, and they all share in it. They understand him and they help him, just like they've always done. The comfort him and return his love. They've proved over and over again they would do anything for him, and that's love. They're free to share love with anyone they like, to have as many cocks in their pussies as they want, but it's his holy cock to which they always return, and that's love too. He's their god and they're his goddesses, which is why I've always called them that, and now why other people call them that too." He paused a moment, remembering. "When the faith began taking shape and especially after we all came here, he wanted a way to honor them, his women, to have everybody realize how each of them had been so important to the creation of our world, to show everybody what they meant to him, so, like I said, he married them all, all at the same time, and called them his consorts, and now everybody honors them."

Yanni fell silent again, thinking. "But the old days are over now," he finally said, wistful again. "The Master won't take too many more consorts, I think. And only one more chief wife."

My ears pricked up. "That'll be Gem, I'm guessing," I said.

Yanni nodded. "That's right," he said simply.

"So, the Master will take another daughter as a wife," I observed.

Yanni nodded. "In a few years, sure, like I told you," he replied. "Right now, she's his Chief Girl Lover, but everybody's always known they're going to get married and have babies of their own one day. In fact, getting picked to be Chief Girl Lover was sort of bittersweet for Gem -- and for the Master. She really wanted the job, and everybody knew she was going to get it because, like I told you yesterday, she was the best qualified. She was an assistant girl lover from the time she was seven, after all, and she became deputy chief girl lover when she was only eight, the youngest deputy chief girl lover ever." He emphasized the last, proudly detailing Gem's accomplishments like a proud uncle boasting of his niece's gold stars in class or goals scored on a soccer field. "It was ultimately the Master's choice, but when it came time for Chloe, the Chief Girl Lover before Gem, to give up the job, she and all the other girl lovers voted unanimously for Gem. If she hadn't been named Chief Girl Lover, I know she and the Master would already be married and she'd be pregnant right now."

Yanni paused a moment, once again reminiscing. "I was around when Gem was born and I've watched her grow up," he said. "And, like I said, the Master's always loved her like a father, sure, but he was also in love with her from the moment she came into the world. You could just see it on his face. And she feels the same way about him. They've always been more than father and daughter; they've always been lovers, and the love they share has always meant that one day they were going to marry and have babies, and those babies will be the future."

Yanni's recitation of yet another iteration of the decidedly outrageous family dynamic led me to pose earlier questions in a slightly different fashion to see if I might elicit different answers. "Okay, you gotta tell me," I said. "How does Maya feel about that? I mean, she's the Master's wife, his oldest daughter and his first wife, you said. But now you're telling me he intends to take another daughter as his second wife, one who's his own daughter but not hers. I presume whatever laws you have here have to be lax or nonexistent when it comes to incest, but there has to be some sort of emotional reaction on the part of those involved."

Yanni shook his head. "I don't know how many times you want me to tell you," he said. "Maya and Gem are very close. Maya's known Gem since she was little, and she's been like a second mother to her. She appreciates the meaning of the love the Master and Gem share, just like everybody else here, and she understands it better than most because she's shared that same sort of love with him too. So, she's got no problem with them marrying and having babies. When that happens, when the Master and Gem marry, Maya and Gem will become sister wives and Gem will help Maya run Philo-Sophia. And then, some day, when Gem is ready, she'll take over. But she'll always have her father and Maya and the rest of us to help her. We're a family and we'll always be a family."

Well, that was that. Yanni was sticking to his story. But, again, so many fucking questions. I was flabbergasted, but I shook it off. "Okay," I said, shaking my head and waving a hand. "Never mind that for now. Let's not get sidetracked. Who are the other Goddesses?"

"Well, I mentioned Diamond," Yanni said. "She's Gem's mother. There's my sisters Lina and Rola. There's Peaches and Dawn and Dakota. There's Francesca, but I don't think she'll be there because, like I told you, she runs the hospital, and she's usually there pretty early every day. There's Anna, but I know she won't be there because she runs the Studio, so she's always there this time of day, and the Master is usually with her."

Yanni was about to open his mouth again when I interrupted him. "Will Lina be there?" I asked in a bit of a rush that immediately had me kicking myself.

Yanni shook his head. "She's one of the Goddesses, but she won't be there," he replied. "She never takes her meals in the family dining room because she's always on the run, so she has little snacks on the go during the day." He brightened and added: "Except on White. She always has her breakfast with us on White because she knows the Master wants her there with us at least one day out of the week."

"Oh," I said, my disappointment a bit too visible.

"Don't worry," Yanni said gently. "You'll see Lina again, no matter what she said."

I affected an air of indifference. "I was just curious," I said. "She's the one who said we wouldn't see much of each other. I mean, I'd like to interview her, even though I know she'd be a tough nut to crack." I could tell my act wasn't fooling Yanni and I suddenly felt like an idiot junior high schooler, denying a crush that was painfully obvious to everyone else.

Yanni kindly played along. "Okay," he said simply.

"Okay, well, let's get going," I declared, attempting yet again to shift the subject.

I stood and pulled the towel off my head, a few vigorous shakes of which shook loose my curly black tresses, now nearly dry. In an instant, I had concluded there was no reason for any silly modesty between Yanni and I. I had seen him naked, after all. Hardly any part of his lovely body was a mystery to me. Hell, I had seen him have sex with a young boy. And he had seen me naked, seen my pussy soaked from the spendings of several powerful orgasms. So, what was the point of being bashful with him? By this time, anyway, I had, however much I told myself he was just a subject of a future article or book, finally come to think of him as a friend, not that I'd had that many friends in my life and hardly knew what having a true friend was like.

Besides, I was actually the farthest thing from a prude. I had long ago come to terms with my bisexuality, and I had female and male sex buddies back in the world. I had indulged in group sex since my early teens and been in a variety of threesomes and foursomes as well as participated in orgies. Since my freshman year in high school, I had frequented the swinging scene, often visited sex clubs and resorts, once even traveling to a swingers convention in Las Vegas. I was even, in rare moments of complete honesty, not an opponent of incest and bestiality. But being freaky was a far cry from having sex with children. Or so I told myself. In any event, without a moment's hesitation, I slipped out of the bathrobe, draping it over the damp towel left on the back of the dining room chair.

Yanni's eyes brightened as I stood naked before him, and I could see his cock hardening within the bikini bottoms, causing the garment to further detach from his body as it rose to a sharp peak. I found the determination to ignore his waxing erection and said: "I suppose I'll find something to wear in the bedroom."

Yanni nodded. "Yeah," he replied. "Look in the dresser. You'll find a big selection of swimsuits for every day of the week."

I turned and headed to the bedroom, feeling Yanni's eyes on my ass as I walked away from him, which filled me with a reassuring warmth since I had no doubts whatsoever about the excellence of my bottom. He rose and followed me, stopping in the doorway while I opened a drawer of the wide dresser and rummaged through a considerable number of swimsuits. His eyes fell on the big bed, its counterpane thrown back, the large dark stain on the bottom sheet left by that morning's violent orgasm plainly visible. Seeing the evidence of my masturbation, he smiled.

"It looks like you woke up the right way," Yanni remarked.

I looked at him, returning his smile. "I'm glad you approve," I replied not altogether sarcastically as I selected a yellow micro-bikini bottom and moved to stand in front of a full-length mirror set in the door leading to the bathroom.

I slipped on the bikini bottom and regarded myself in the mirror. Though a different color, the skimpy garment was similar to what I had worn the night before during the trip from the outside world. The little lemony triangle at the front barely covered my pudendum but, while staying in the swanky hotel waiting for the call from the Master's people, I had gone down to the spa and had my pussy and asshole waxed, so there was essentially no hint of hair to see beneath the sheer yellow material. I suppose a bare snatch will make me a hit in this place, I thought lewdly.

Yet gazing at myself in the mirror, I couldn't help but remember that the day before I had, at least for a few moments, been worried about wearing something so revealing, but now, almost without thinking, such a garment was my first choice. This place must already be getting to me, I thought. I spun on the balls of my bare feet and assessed the back, which was merely a flat golden string that disappeared into the crack of my ass and emerged to join two other strings just above the dimples at the top of my bottom. If I bent over, I was sure, my asshole would be visible for all to see. I wasn't at all displeased or concerned, though, and allowed myself a little smile. My ass was as perfect as exercise and my errant diet could make it. I'd do me, I thought.

I turned to see Yanni brazenly regarding me while rubbing his penis through the material of his own bikini bottoms. Not at all perturbed, but actually a bit flattered, I smiled at him again and moved to the bed, sitting on its edge to look for the sandals I had slipped off the night before.

"How many times did you come?" Yanni asked, still rubbing his cock.

I laughed. "At least once," I said lightly.

"I ask because the Master says that every day should begin with love," Yanni said. "You began your day by loving yourself and that's always a good thing."

"Oh, I see," I said as I bent over, reaching for the sandals lying next to the night table and then slipping them on. "Did you begin the day with love?" I asked.

Yanni laughed. "If you're asking if I shared love with Sweet," he said, "the answer is yes. I fucked him and he fucked me. Then we sucked each other off in the shower before he took off."

"Only Sweet?" I asked as I fastened the sandals. "What about Pop?"

"I told you. Pop is appearing in that video, so he had to leave really early to be at the Studio by six. Sweet and I were still sleeping when he left."

"Oh, okay," I said equably. "And where did Sweet go? Is he in a video too?"

"Not today. He went to breakfast and then to school."

I looked up at Yanni while setting my feet on the floor, smiled wryly and shook my head. "School," I muttered, still hardly believing there was a proper school in this place. The Master, great pedophile that he was, was also an educator -- in more ways than one. Fucking wild.

Yanni smiled then, lifting his head, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath though his nose. "Wow," he declared. "Your juices smell so good, as good as they did yesterday."

I was amazed at the acuity of his nostrils. I was the one who had come all over the bed but the scent of my spendings had faded from my senses. Yet they were as obviously tangible to Yanni as if he was witnessing me jerk off at that very moment.

"What were you thinking about when you were coming?" Yanni asked.

I was momentarily taken aback by Yanni's question and was about to hurl a sharp retort about that being none of his business, but I saw such a question was, for him, as natural as discussing the weather. Maybe that's the way it is with everyone here, I thought. "I'll keep that to myself," I replied with a slightly indulgent smile as I rose from the bed, signaling I was ready to go.

Yanni looked at me, obviously a bit surprised. "Aren't you going to wear a top?" he asked.

"I thought about it," I admitted. "But every other person here, no matter what their age, seems to have no problem being sexy or naked, as you put it. Hell, I saw two girls pass by this cottage this morning and they were wearing jackets, but they were topless underneath. So, I figure going topless is the least I can do to try to fit in. I mean, I don't want to stand out too much. Besides, when in Rome, you know."

And all of that was true. As proud as I was of my ass, I had always been a bit sensitive about my breasts. A part of me knew they were nothing to be ashamed of, that they were even spectacular, as many men and women had told me, but everyone, I suppose, finds fault with at least one component of the body that takes them through life. They were 36Ds, sloping down and then jutting out, capped by large areolas that seemed to actually expand and inflate whenever I was aroused, rising from my flesh like the crowns of expanding balloons. The nipples were not too large, but were extraordinarily sensitive, and, since I had been a teenager, the merest brush of a bra or t-shirt against my breasts was sometimes enough to get me to soak my panties. They had exploded onto my chest when I was thirteen, and I had seen how the boys (and the girls) had looked at me differently then, and, in the time since, the many compliments I had gotten, the many hands that had eagerly fondled them, and the many mouths that had licked and suckled them, hadn't been enough to ease my misplaced disquiet. But now, in this place, I reasoned that openly displaying them was as natural and common as it had been at the many nude beaches I had visited, and that, for the sake of my mien of professionalism, not wearing a bikini top, however skimpy, might spare me any unbidden explosions from my cunt.

Yanni seemed to sense my mood and perhaps even what I was thinking. "Well, I think you're sexy," he said with a smile.

"Thank you," I replied, once again actually a bit flattered.

Yanni suddenly reached down, lowered the front of his bikini bottoms and hauled out his very alluring penis. A few strokes of the shaft hardened the organ within a few moments, its veiny and slightly curved length pointing out and up, its purplish bulbous glans visibly pulsing. "We could be sexy together," he offered, his eyes indicating his cock as he looked over at me. "You see, I'm showing you my love."

Enjoying the sight of his penis in spite of myself, I smiled at him. "How can you be in love with me?" I asked. "We met just yesterday."

"I didn't say I was in love with you," Yanni replied. "But I do love you. You and I are friends, even if you don't want to admit that yet. And friends should share love, at least once in a while."

"Oh, I misunderstood," I said. "But we have an appointment to keep. Just a few minutes ago, you were the one worrying that we might run late."

"The ladies won't mind if we run late, especially when we tell them we shared love. Here, love comes first, especially the sharing of it. Love is more important than anything else, and I would love to be inside you, have you feel my love, make it real for both of us, and feel your pussy, your love, all around my cock, while you feel all my love deep inside you."

In the outside world, this conversation would have constituted sexual harassment of the worst sort but in this decidedly surreal hypogeal realm Yanni's display and proposal was merely a sincere offer of his love -- or at least how love was regarded here. Had I been a denizen of this world, I suppose I would have been flattered and not hesitated to share my body with him. And I was tempted. I found him very attractive. He had a very pretty face, a lovely athletic body and alluring cock, and I had often commended myself -- perhaps too assuredly, in light of where I now was -- for being more sexual than most. Moreover, since Yanni was a grown man, I had no qualms about having sex with him. (Well, no qualms other than his being a pedophile, though, if I was completely honest, that predilection of his did get me hot.) But, as it was, the carapace of my civilization asserted itself, and I demurred.

"Okay, I'll admit it," I said. "You and I are friends, and you don't know how much just that fact has thrown me for a loop. I like you. I do. But we won't be sharing love, at least not the way you mean it."

Yanni smiled at me, good-naturedly nodded and tucked his cock back into his bikini bottoms, the long, stiffened shaft of his prick very visible through the snug fabric. "Well," he said, a clear note of regret in his voice, "if you change your mind, please don't hesitate to share your love with me. I know our sharing love would be fantastic and bring us so much closer together."

The man was irrepressible and, filled with affection for him, I laughed. "You're impossible," I accused. "Just yesterday you were trying to fix me up with the Master."

Yanni laughed in turn. "Oh, but that's going to happen," he said. "You and the Master will share love. But I was hoping you and I would share love before you got with him. In a way, me sharing love with you would sort of be like the old days."

"The old days?" I asked. "How do you mean?"

"When I was his Chief Boy Lover," Yanni explained, "one of my jobs was recruiting new boys to come meet him so they could become new lovers and models, which meant I often had sex with them before he did." He was suddenly visibly wistful. "I miss those days. Everything was simpler then, especially during the summers when school was out. We'd wake up naked and share love, me and the Master, or me and other kids, like my sisters. All of us would spend our days naked, or sexy, and share love for hours and hours, all over the place, in every room of the house, and outside too. And when the Master came home, we'd share even more love, sometimes late into the night, and then it would all begin again the following morning."

"In that respect, how is now different from then?" I asked. "It seems to me the life you live now hasn't changed much from the way you lived then."

Yanni pursed his lips and shrugged. "I guess you're right," he admitted but then quickly changed his mind. "No, on second thought, it was different. There weren't as many worries; things weren't so" -- he momentarily considered an adjective -- "complicated."

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, you're crazy," I said lightly. "You're not going to be using me to stroll down memory lane, and I'm not going to argue with you." I moved toward my luggage, still where Sweet had left it, on a rack near the dresser. I dug out a black leather musette, draped it over my shoulder, its strap nestled between my breasts, and placed some notepads, trusty pens and a couple of pairs of reading glasses within, and then turned to look at Yanni. "Let's get going."

Smiling again, Yanni nodded, leading the way as we headed out. As we stepped outside, I instinctively fiddled with the knob of the front door in order to lock it before remembering I didn't have any keys. I looked at Yanni in slight confusion and, as usual, he knew just what I was thinking.

"There's no reason to lock the door," Yanni said. "Trust me when I say nobody's going to be breaking in."

I did trust what he said. In that instant, I simply knew, after so far seeing only a tiny corner of this realm, that no one here had any interest in criminality, at least not of the mundane sort. Had this pack of pedophiles succeeded in creating a world that, at last, trumped the need for petty thievery and other penny ante sins? I wondered. Could it be true, was it true that a civilization with shameless sex at its core was the solution to humanity's ills, and was that, among so many other things, what I was searching for?