Bound in Moonlight Read Online Free Page A

from all that traveling because I had no need of a chaperone where I was going (she conveniently neglected to mention that Hickley would be there).
    Biddie told me that she had never been to Grotte Cachée, but that her paternal grandmother had apparently spent a week there one summer in the early part of the last century. She had never discussed the visit with anyone, but after she died, Biddie's mother was sorting through her papers and came across several letters wrapped up in a black silk cravat. Their contents had evidently shocked her deeply, given her reaction to them. Biddie saw the letters only briefly before her mother whisked them away, but she did manage to read the first line of one, which she'd never forgotten:
Did you ever think you would miss being collared and leashed and forced to submit to a perfect stranger for an entire week?
    Biddie had to explain to me that this had to do with sex, that's how ill-informed I was. The letters were written by the woman who had been her grandmother's closest confidante from the time they'd attended Miss Cox's Academy for Girls in New York—my own alma mater. Biddie said that the two of them used to laugh about the madcap exploits of their youth, and what “highfliers” they'd been (meaning sluts, essentially). Over the fireplace in Biddie's drawing room there was a portrait of her grandmother that had been painted by Ingres(!) around 1830, judging from the gown and hairstyle. She was a dainty little redhead with a mischievous smile and a certain snap to her eyes. Biddie said her friend had been a redhead, too, and that at school, they'd been known as “Miss Cox's Red Foxes.”
    Biddie's mother burned the letters and, for the rest of her life, refused to speak of them. From time to time, however, she would caution Biddie that she must never, while summering in France, accept an invitation to Grotte Cachée.
    â€œSadly,” Biddie told me, “no such invitation has ever come my way. How I envy you! You must tell me everything.”
    Now comes the part where I was warned about the demonic denizens and mysterious goings-on at Grotte Cachée. Biddie had a sort of mechanic/handyman working for her, a funny old bird named Eugène who insisted on testing my ability to handle her jaunty little lipstick-red Peugeot before he'd trust me with it. He made me motor around the local roads with him in the passenger seat while he held forth, not about driving, but about Grotte Cachée and why I should give it a wide berth.
    There were forces in the very earth, he said, in the mountains looming over the secluded little valley, in the ancient stone with which the château had been built, that exercised an
“influence diabolique”
over any human unwise enough to set foot there. He said the force was like that of a magnet, that it exercised a different amount of pull on different people, but that no one was entirely immune. And there were beings (he called them “Follets”) who made their home there and performed
“actes obscènes”
on visiting humans. They were incubi and succubi, he said, the sexually voracious demons about which the Church had been warning the faithful for centuries.
    Well, it was all I could do to keep that little car on the road. I bit the inside of my lip so hard that it was actually swollen for the rest of the day. He told me the only way to kill most demons was to burn them, which made them virtually immortal, and that the same four demons had lived in that valley for centuries. Three were the kind that violated humans, and in the most depraved ways imaginable. Of those, one was a female succubus who bewitched human men so as to drain their vital essence through sex. Another was, as you may have guessed from my last letter, a satyr. The third was a demon called a dusios who could change from male to female and back again in order to effect a
“transfert de sperme”
between specially chosen men and