SUMMONED

(c) 2007 by T. Potter

Stephen looked up from the wreckage of the machine and smiled, his blue eyes startlingly bright in his soot-stained face. He lifted a greasy rag and wiped himself, doing little more than arrange the soot and oil into a more even coverage of his face.

"Well that's torn it," he said and sat down, pondering where to start anew. It would be a useful little gadget, he thought, if he ever managed to prevent the steam regulator from seizing up. Just such a mechanical failure had caused the boiler to become dangerously over pressured and burst a valve. This had set in motion a rapid cascade of events that had led to the concussive and ultimately messy destruction of some three week's worth of tinkering. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed the quarter-hour and Stephen sighed, realising that his lunch break would be over in fifteen minutes. With a resigned expression, he turned and peered at his grimy features in the mirror above the workroom sink. This would need a decent wash, he thought, and not just a quick wipe up. Thus he made his way out of the workroom and upstairs to his small apartment and it's tiny bathroom. At least he had one of the few properties in town that had heated water, indeed one of the few properties that had a bathroom, complete with one of Mr Crapper's patented water closets.

Even so, it was a hurry for Stephen to return back downstairs and to rush along the corridor to his little shop in time to open up for the afternoon. He switched around the notice in the door window so that it proclaimed open with one hand and unbolted the door with the other.  That having been said, there was little enough need for haste, for customers were few and far between that afternoon. Perhaps it was the cloudy grey autumn sky, gravid with the possibility of rain, perhaps it was the nature of his shop- for even with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's recent publicised flirtations with the idea of fairies- this was still the nineteenth century. People knew far better than to be taken in with such unscientific things as described in the antiquarian books sold
there.

So it was that Stephen made himself busy, cataloguing a collection of old books that had been shipped to him from a supplier in Damascus.  There were some remarkable volumes there, from a serviceable copy of Occam's Summa Logicae to an ancient volume, seemingly handwritten on vellum bound in soft pig's leather. In short, Stephen lost himself in his task and it was only the need to light the gas lamps that made him aware how much time had passed. He hurriedly adjusted the lamps' mantles and went to close the shop, reflecting that business had been somewhat disappointing that day. It didn't take him too long to tidy the pile of books and, on a whim, took the ancient scroll decorated book with him upstairs to his rooms.

Leaving the book on his sofa, Stephen forgot all about it while he made himself a hearty supper of some cold beef, boiled potatoes and some steamed cabbage. So it was quite late, almost eight in the evening, when he returned to his sitting room. As he trimmed the wick of the oil lamp by the sofa, he caught sight of the book and smiled. Picking it up, he kicked off his shoes and sank to the cushions. He held the book up to the light for a moment before beginning reading.

The text was in ancient Greek and it took a while for the classroom drills of his schooldays to bear their fruit and allow him to read fluently. The text was a myth, it seemed though one he had not heard before. The characteristics of the story were familiar enough, the usual mix of fornication and retribution. Indeed, the usual suspect, Zeus, was in on the action from the beginning. He had, as was his wont, allowed his eye to go a roving. Not surprisingly, his eye lingered long on the shapely forms of many of the young women of ancient Greece. In this particular myth, the object of Zeus' amorous attentions was a young acolyte in the temple of Aphrodite.

Could this fair maiden withstand Zeus' godly charms? Of course not.  Indeed, the Lord of Olympus hadn't even needed to frame the question, "Why not? Aren't you supposed to serve the goddess of love?" For young Hermione- such was her name- went eagerly unto Zeus' embraces as soon as he began caressing her cheek. It was probably something to do with the supernatural potency of the deity's charisma that made the maiden only too willing to cavort around the temple with him.

Indeed, potency must have had a lot to do with it, for barely nine months later Hermione was delivered of a baby girl. While the priestesses of the temple were more than happy with the child's arrival, naming her Philandra, the infant demi-god's birth was not greeted with rejoicing on Mount Olympus. Zeus wanted to play down the whole thing, after all, weren't most of the inhabitants of Olympus his children anyway? Hera was, however, unmoved by this argument and
insisted that she was not going to let the issue of yet another of her husband's dalliances take a place in the pantheon of Olympus.

Yet young Philandra grew with a more than human vigour and even as a child seemed indefinably "larger than life". So it was that when she reached her twentieth year, the signs of her divine nature became undeniable. Not only did temple attendance treble when she was serving there, due to hordes of love struck young men hoping to catch her eye, but Philandra glowed. Indeed she took the idea of a radiant beauty and made it fact. The room really did lighten up around her.  There was no doubt about it, she was a goddess in the exact and literal sense.

Thus it was that Hera took it upon herself to ensure that the girl never made it to Olympus. Descending from on high on the very night of Philandra's twentieth birthday she appeared to Philandra and cursed her. She took the young girl and cursed her. She took away Philandra's physical form to ensure that she existed as spirit only, unable to take flesh anymore, unless a complex summoning was read out at midnight on the night of the full moon.

At this, Stephen laughed and stopped reading, for this was obviously not a lost myth, but instead a clever forgery: a literary device, a joke.  Still, he had read almost all of it and only the words of the summoning - and a short paragraph of how the curse might be finally lifted - remained. He smiled, it was almost midnight now, and wasn't it the full moon tonight? An idle, almost mischievous, thought curled around his mind. It was so intriguing that he couldn't quite bring himself to dismiss it. What harm could it do, to read the incantation? After all, it would only go to disprove the whole thing, wouldn't it?

Even as the thought skittered idly across his consciousness, the chiming of his clock made Stephen's mind up. He snatched up the book once more and stood. Perching his spectacles on the end of his nose, he began not so much as to read but to declaim the words of the incantation. Once, twice, thrice, he read it, finishing theatrically on the very stroke of midnight.

The fact that nothing happened was as much an anticlimax as a vindication, and Stephen sat down on the sofa, hard. He dropped the book onto the table, where it rested open with that final paragraph unread, and he sighed. Oh what fancies assault the senses in the midst of night when one is alone? He smiled at the thought and reached for the decanter to pour himself a snifter of brandy.

It was then that Stephen heard a soft chiming, like bells in the distance. It was not church bells, or the bell to the door of his shop; it was more like the sound of tiny bells as worn around a dancing girl's ankles.

He shook his head and cursed his imagination for playing tricks on him, but then the pages of the open book on the table fluttered and he felt a soft breeze. The scent of sandalwood filled the air and he blinked.  When he opened his eyes again, after the blink, Stephen realised that the air was still once more and he sank back into the sofa.

At that moment, a motion caught his attention and he looked up. Standing before him was a naked woman. Long golden hair cascaded down the narrow of her back and framed a flawless face. Full, sensuous lips curled into a half-hearted smile and then Stephen noticed those eyes.  They were a clear celestial blue, circled with a tiny band of dark blue.  They regarded him with a searing intensity and shone with intelligence.  Her body was unlike any mortal woman's, for it was a canvas of perfections and curves, inviting yet haunting at the same time, too perfect to be true. There was a soft glow about her creamy skin that
surely marked her as a gift from the gods themselves. When she spoke, her voice was like molten velvet, with a strange accent that reverberated like a soothing caress. Stepping forward she moved with raw predatory grace as she closed upon the sofa.

"My new Master, I presume?" She asked huskily, sliding towards him fluidly.

"By Jove," Stephen exclaimed, too bemused to consider the irony of the expression. "I say, it worked!"

"Oh yes it did, my Master," she sighed in a voice that ran through his blood like wildfire. Before Stephen could utter another word, she was upon him, her hands sliding smoothly across his chest and up, to cup his cheeks and lift his face so he was staring right into her hypnotically compelling blue eyes. He sighed as her face lowered towards his, caressing his lips with her honeyed breath before captivating his senses with an inhumanly passionate kiss.

Stephen melted into the sofa, unresisting even as she melted against him, her magnificent body pressed against his trembling one. Her fingers snaked up into his hair and he found himself engulfed in the heat of her passion and intoxicated by the scent of sandalwood that seemed to rise off her very skin. He moaned into her mouth and undulated beneath her, eager to get as much of himself as close as he could to her as possible and then she pulled away.

Stephen whimpered with a small agony of loss and then the world began to swim into focus again as she stepped back. With her further away, Stephen found that his arousal was dropping to merely human levels, He was still very much aware of her tantalising nakedness, but a touch of reality was gradually making him consider what a surreal situation this was.

"Are you really Philandra?" Stephen asked lamely. Even with the greater part of the magnitude of her allure diminished by distance, he was in no condition to think of anything better to say.

"I am," she replied, treating him to a smile that radiated so much raw sexual power that it was if she were back in his arms driving thought far, far away indeed, from his mind. "Am I all that you hoped for? It has been so long since I walked this Earth."

"Yes!" Stephen all but shouted, longing breaking through the reserve that society had so carefully indoctrinated into him. Philandra only smiled some more, the sheer wattage of her charisma making his senses somersault, so that he hardly noticed her slip nearer, to sit beside him and whisper alluringly in his ear, her finger tracing up his chest.

"I can give you everything and more," she said, the whisper's susurrations thrilling him almost intolerably, "Pleasure you have never known and never will again know. I am yours, yours alone, no other will see or hear me. I give myself to you that I might enjoy this human form for a brief month. I can remain
until you send me away or until the curse draws me back again, when the moon once more hangs full in the sky."

She looked at him, her azure gaze both challenging and filled with some other, contradictory emotion. It took Stephen a while to realise what it was and even then he lacked a name for it. It was not pleading, for such a regal bearing could never plead, he thought, but Philandra's expression definitely held an air of expectancy. She wanted or needed something from him.

"Will you be my Master?" Philandra's voice drew Stephen from his reverie and he looked at her in surprise.

"What?" Stephen asked, shocked. "Now listen here, I don't hold with that sort of thing you, know." Indeed, the effect she was having on him was such that Stephen wanted to serve her, rather than the other way around.

"Oh." The sound of disappointment in her voice almost made the light in the room fail. "Then the curse compels me to depart this mortal realm once more, for you do not desire me."

"But-"

"You do?" Philandra cut of Stephen's almost incoherent babble before it really began. "You will let me serve you?"

"I will if you ask it," he moaned.

"Are you saying you want me to ask you to be my Master?"  Philandra's voice held an amused tone and her delicate eyebrow arched in surprise. "Do you want me to command you to take possession of me that I might stay to gift you, and you alone, with pleasures greater than any mortal man has experienced?" She looked
at him with a mischievous curl gracing her lips. "Shall I command you to be my Master?"

"Please" Stephen groaned, hearing only the promise of pleasure that would be exclusively his, knowing only that he would do anything to get what she promised. At that, Philandra's fingers slid tantalisingly up into his hair in such a way that tingles flowed over his entire skin as every tiny hair stood erect. Her tongue traced the outline of his ear and he barely heard her sultry whisper.

"Good," she purred and then looked down. "Is this tiny thing your bed? Or do you have somewhere better to take me?"

"Yes, in the other room," Stephen replied and he felt himself lifted up, as much by Philandra's personal magnetism as she stood than by anything else.

"Then take me," she said in tones that could not be refused.  "There." Her hands slid into his shirt and dimly he heard the sound of popping buttons. However, the fire in his blood did not allow him to do anything other than pull her into the bedroom and let her ravage his senses with the pleasures that she so freely offered.

The following noon he woke still in a daze, his skin marked with seemingly thousands of tiny scratches and bites, a deep weariness filling his limbs and the sour taste of dehydration on his tongue. He still couldn't quite believe what had happened the previous night, still didn't quite believe that his body could do that in quite that way or that it would feel so good - even the tenth time. He rolled to his side and was unsurprised to find he was alone, after all, he was capable of thought at the moment, wasn't he? On the pillow, he found a single sheet of parchment, scented with sandalwood and written upon in a deep blue ink with a flowing cursive hand.


Master Stephen,

I leave you for a few hours, that you might rest and then take care of yourself. It has been my sorry experience that if I don't go for at least some time each day, my time here on this mortal earth is cut very short. Indeed, Alexander of Macedon barely lasted two days, though his physicians hushed it up and explained his untimely death as a fever. I have no wish to cause you harm, for you are the first to summon me in four centuries. Indeed, I would rather you prosper through this and I wish that I were able to stay with you beyond this too brief month we have together.

But that cannot be unless - ah it is forbidden to me to speak of how you might lift this curse from me and must instead devote myself to fulfilling your every desire for the month we shall share together.  Until I return tonight, I am sure you will"

Think of me,
Philandra