BDSM Story – The Case of the Wayward Witch – Part 1

BDSM Story – The Case of the Wayward Witch – Part 1

A Dan Diamond mystery by j

When I’ve got my secretary Stella bent over my desk for a little afternoon delight, I usually lock the door between my office and the waiting room. I guess we must have been extra horny that day and in a hurry to get at it, because we both forgot to turn the key, and when I lifted my eyes for a moment from her lovely ass, this mousy little guy was standing in the doorway watching us, blinking through the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses.

“I’m in a conference right now, buddy,” I told him. “Grab a chair in the waiting room, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

His mouth moved soundlessly, as though he was trying to say something and couldn’t quite get it out, but he stepped backwards out of the room, staring at us all the way, and pulled the door closed behind himself.

Stella’s forehead had been pressed to the desk while she concentrated on the swivel of her hips as I plunged into her. She raised her head and looked back over her shoulder at me.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“Just mumbling to myself,” I told her.

“Well, pay attention to what you’re doing,” she said. “I’m almost there.”

I concentrated on getting her wherever it was that she was going, and a few minutes later, we arrived at the same time. When I was through pumping into her, I felt like lying down for an hour or two, but Stella jumped right up, snatched her panties off the floor and headed back to her desk in the outer office, with her butt twitching under her short little skirt.

“Tell the guy with the glasses that he can come in,” I said.

She stopped and stared at me, and her mouth made a big “O,” but she went on out, and I could hear her telling the fellow to walk in. As he came through the door, still blinking and looking mousier than ever, I finished zipping up my pants and motioned for him to sit down in the chair in front of my desk.

“I’m really very sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to intrude, but there was no one in the waiting room and — ” His voice trailed off, and he looked miserable.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “What can I do you for?”

He looked a little baffled by my pitiful attempt at clever repartee, but he sat down in the chair, took a deep breath and launched into his story.

“I’m Ronnie MacDonald,” he said, “and I own a bookstore in NoHo — in North Hollywood, I mean, the part where the antique stores are. My wife went out one night last week and didn’t come home. She’s been gone for five days now, and I went to the police, but they don’t seem to be very interested. I’m desperate, Mr. Diamond, and I want you to bring her back for me.”

I could see why the cops didn’t pay much attention to him. He was the kind of little nebbish who prompted wives to pack their bags and sneak away in the night. I guess more than half of my cases involve tracking down a wandering spouse, and 99 percent of the time, I have to take back a message that the unhappy partner just got fed up and split. In recent months, I’d been involved in three interesting investigations in the underground world of S&M, but it looked as if I was getting back to the same old same old with Mr. MacDonald.

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure that I know where she is,” he replied. “She’s probably at this camp up in the Sierras. But I don’t think her coven will let her come home.”

“Her coven?” I said.

“That’s right,” he answered. “My wife is a witch.”

“You’re not joking, are you?” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not at all. They call themselves the Church of the Cosmic Truth, but it’s witchcraft sure enough. It’s the old nature religion, you know? I’ve got lots of books about it in my store. That’s how Glinda got interested. Looking through those books.”

“Glinda’s your wife?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’d asked her not to go up to that camp again, but I’m sure that’s where she is. And she can’t get away.”

“You know, Mr. MacDonald,” I said, “I used to know a couple of witches — Wiccans — when I was living in Topanga Canyon, and they were really nice folks. I can’t imagine that your wife is in any real danger.”

“These Cosmic Truth people are different,” he said. “They say that they only practice white magic and the ancient religion, but they have some strange things going on. It really scares me.”

“Do you think they’d run me off if I went up there and looked around?” I asked.

“Well, you could say you were there for the nudist camp,” he said.

“What nudist camp?” I said.

“The witches go around skyclad — naked, you know,” he explained, “and they don’t want to get in trouble with the authorities, so the camp is officially the Mountain Sun Nature Colony. People who are serious nudists go there, too, but it’s mostly a front for the Church of the Cosmic Truth.”

“Do you have a photo of your wife?” I asked.

“I brought one,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket. He hesitated. “It’s a shot of her with some of the other witches, and they’re all skyclad. I’m not sure I should show it to you.” “If I go up to the camp, I’m going to see everyone naked anyway, right?” I pointed out.

“I guess,” he said, reluctantly handing me the snapshot. “Glinda is the one on the right.”

There were four people in the photo, three broads and a guy. They were skyclad alright, but they were only shown from the waist up. The guy and one of the dames were both older, and a little on the heavy side, and nudity may not have been their best fashion choice, but Glinda and the other broad were making the most of their photo op. Glinda was dark-haired and would have been pretty if she’d been smiling instead of scowling, and her boobs were round, firm and perky, staring the camera right in the face. The other girl was a big blonde. Her huge tits had a little sag in them, but they were pretty impressive. This case could be fun, I thought.

I promised MacDonald that I’d go up to the camp and look for his wife. I warned him that if she didn’t want to come back, there was no way I could make her. I figured that she was probably having a fine old time playing grabass in the woods with the other naked witches and wasn’t particularly interested in a reunion with her loving hubby.

Since I didn’t have anything else in the works, I told him that I’d drive up the next day, but first I wanted to treat myself to an hour or so at Miss D.’s place. During those three cases that got me involved in the S&M world, I’d discovered that I kind of liked it there, and I dropped by Miss D.’s or the Suncoast Health Club or even The Castle maybe once a week, maybe more often if the urge seized me. They’ve got a lot of sequoias up in the Sierra Nevada but not many bondage parlors, so I wanted to get in some fun and games while I could.

Stella knew about my bad habits — all of them — and she was always bugging me to tell her more about the B&D joints. This time, when I mentioned where I was going, she pleaded to go along. Why not? I knew that you could rent a dungeon room at The Castle for a session with a partner of your own, but I wasn’t sure whether Miss D. provided that service, so I called her. Not usually, she said, but she’d make an exception for me. I told her that I might need one of her ladies to join us, and she was up for that program, too.

When we got there, I introduced Stella to Miss D., who took us back past the enema rooms to the smaller of the two bondage rooms. She hoisted herself onto the vinyl-covered table in the center of the room, crossed her lovely legs, smiled at us and asked Stella whether she was interested in being dominant or submissive. I knew how much Stella enjoyed being spanked, so I was surprised when she glanced sideways at me and then told Miss D. that she thought she’d try dominant.

“Good choice,” said Miss D. “I think you’re going to like it. Why don’t you go out in the waiting room, Dan, and read a magazine or something while I show Stella how some of these things work?” I started out the door. “Wait a minute,” she said. “On second thought, go in the other bondage room and strip. Then you’ll be all set when we’re ready for you.”

I was a little nervous as I undressed in the room across the hall. I hadn’t expected anything like this from Stella. Obviously, our relationship over the last several years had gone way beyond the usual boss-secretary thing, but we weren’t really an item, at least as far as I knew. Of course, sometimes the guy is the last to find out. And Stella might have developed a fondness for having her bottom spanked, but she’d never once mentioned that she might want to spank mine. What the hell was this all about?

Miss D. opened the door and came in.

“Stella’s ready now,” she said, “and I see you are, too.”

She reached down and tugged on my dick. I was already erect from standing there wondering what Stella was going to do, but my penis grew even harder in Miss D.’s playful fingers.

“I’ll look in on you later on to make sure everything’s going okay,” she said, “but I think she’s going to be fine.”

When I entered the room where Stella was waiting, I thought for an instant that I’d opened the wrong door. The woman standing there was wearing a bondage hood over her head, minus the blindfold and the gag, so that her dark eyes and her lips, crimson against the black leather, were all that I could see of her face. She had a harness of leather straps around the top half of her body, and metal rings that were part of the harness circled her bare breasts. A pair of tight, high-heeled black boots reached halfway up her thighs, but she was totally naked from there to the waist. Leather is not really a big turn-on for me, but if it had been my fetish, I might have shot my wad right there.

I wondered for a moment whether Miss D. had run in a ringer. This scary broad looked like a mean, lean, ass-whipping machine, complete with a long, willowy cane she was tapping against her palm. But I was pretty certain those were Stella’s tits, and as the woman turned to motion me toward the chains hanging from the ceiling on the far side of the room, her perky little butt sure looked like the one that I’d seen poking up from my desktop during many a dictation session.

“Very impressive, Stel,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She whacked me hard across one thigh with the cane and pointed silently to the chains. Okay, I thought, if she wanted to play some kinky games, that was fine with me. I went over to the chains and raised my arms over my head so that she could fasten the leather cuffs dangling from the chains onto my wrists. When she had cranked up the chains until that my toes were barely touching the floor, she popped a ball gag into my mouth and tied it tightly into place. A blindfold followed, and I was hung up and helpless. Couldn’t get away. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t speak. Was I having fun or what?

The tip of the cane began tracing patterns on my body. Up the back of my right leg to my buttocks and back and forth across them several times before probing into the cleft. On up my back and around to my chest. Pressing painfully into each of my nipples in turn and sliding down my belly to my pubic hair. Slowly moving up the underside of my erection to the end, where it stopped and bounced my penis up and down several times. Tapping lightly on the tight sac of my balls.

I heard her walking away and a click of wood on the paddle rack. I assumed that she was trading in the cane for a paddle or a whip, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. The steps came back. She trailed her fingers across my buttocks, and then there was a loud smack and a burst of pain as a broad paddle landed squarely on my bottom. Leather not wood. It wasn’t hard to tell the difference. She paddled me a dozen times without stopping — hard, noisy smacks that cracked like pistol shots. Take it easy, Stella, I thought, we’d paid for an hour, and most of our time was left. She was going to have to slow down or she’d wear out my butt.

The paddling stopped. I heard her at the rack again, already tired of the leather paddle. If I knew good ol’ Stella she was going to get the one with the fleece on one side and give my bottom a break for a while. Usually, I thought that the sensation of that soft paddle being rubbed around on my buttocks was pretty boring, but my butt was burning from the blazing swats she’d just given me, and a more playful whacking would be welcome right now.

There was a swish in the air and a line of fire was drawn across my buttocks. She’d gone back to the cane! She laid another stripe across the first one, and I screamed for her to stop. The ball gag turned me words into an incoherent garble, but she couldn’t have misunderstood what I wanted. She slashed me again, across the tender back of my thighs, just below the curve of the buttocks. That was the worst yet.

I was in a panic. What in the hell was going on? This woman in the hood couldn’t be Stella. I was being whipped by some stranger, someone who was out to get me. I thought of Spanky, whose little scheme to blackmail Joey Balls I’d uncovered in my first case involving B&D. I’d left Spanky naked and helpless in the hands of a very irate Denise and Cheri, who told me later that they had blistered her bottom until she had to eat standing up for a week. But, no, this wasn’t Spanky. Spanky had a lot more tits and ass than this slender woman in the leather mask. All I knew for sure was that I was scared shitless.

Then I felt her pressing her nearly naked body against my back. One booted leg pushed between mine. Her breasts were squashed against me until I could feel the metal rings encircling them. I heard the cane drop to the floor with a clatter. One hand came around my right side and seized my penis; the other came around the left side and cupped my balls. She began jacking me off. Like I had so many times before, I suddenly realized that my dick had been hard all the while that cane had been striping my backside. And it wasn’t just erect. It was dripping a string of pre-cum that I could feel swing back against my thigh as the woman played with my dick and rolled my balls in her fingers. She began stroking me hard, a dozen times, two dozen times — who was counting? — and then the spasms of the orgasm hit me.

She stepped back away from me. I hung there as my hips pumped and the spurts of cum shot out onto the floor, and while they were still coming, she slashed me again with the cane. Once, twice, three more times. It was pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain, and then just pain. I shouted into the gag again. The whipping stopped.

“Was that okay, boss?” Stella asked.

No shit! It was Stella after all! Little Stella taking her first shot at handing out punishment and taking it way too far from my butt’s viewpoint. Miss D. and I should probably have coached her a little better — a lot better. Stella unfastened the ball gag and popped it out of my mouth. I could feel her fingers working to untie the blindfold.

“Was it okay?” she asked again.

I sighed. I didn’t want to rain on the kid’s parade right now. If we did anything like this again, I’d be a little more specific in my request list.

“It was very memorable, Stel,” I told her.

The door opened and Miss D. came in. There was a gasp when she saw my welted bottom, and she came around in front of me wearing a look of dismay. She was going to say something, yell at Stella, apologize maybe, I don’t know. But I shook my head slightly, and she hesitated. Then the funny side of it must have hit her, because a smile spread across her face.

“Well, you’re probably going to feel that in the morning,” she said.

The next day, I took a pillow out to my car along with my suitcase so that I could pad the driver’s seat. My butt was still sore, and I had a long drive ahead up to the eastern side of the Sierras. I went north on the I-5 and then took the Antelope Valley Freeway up through Palmdale and Lancaster, which sprawl across that far western probe of the Mojave Desert in a depressing mix of ticky-tacky shopping malls and faceless subdivisions. Highway 14 went on north through the desert next to Edwards Air Force Base and into Mojave, a miserable little town whose location has made it a notable testing ground for experimental aircraft — if they crash up there, there’s not much for them to hit.

I would have liked to swing west on a short detour over to Tehachapi, which I enjoy visiting because of the line in my favorite Little Feat song. You know the one: “And I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah.” Tehachapi is also where the Joads wound up in “The Grapes of Wrath,” and these days, there’s this array of huge, power-generating windmills in the hills south of town. I like to sit in my car and watch ’em turning. But I was short on time, so I kept going up the 14 until it hit U.S. 395 and a straight shot up to the Owens Valley.

The Owens Valley is squeezed between the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo Mountains, and for a place with such great scenery, it’s been the scene of more than its share of outrages inflicted on one set of humans by another. First, of course, the Northern Paiutes got kicked out of their traditional hunting grounds — a familiar story. Then the ranchers and farmers who replaced them had their water appropriated by some high-class crooks — a.k.a. L.A.’s city fathers — who siphoned it off in aqueducts to irrigate the orange groves of the San Fernando Valley and line their own pockets. You saw “Chinatown,” didn’t you? Finally, hundreds of loyal Japanese-Americans were sent packing off to the notorious Manzanar internment camp there during World War II.

Somewhere around Big Pine, I turned off 395 and took a much smaller road west toward the mountains. There are a lot of small lakes in that country, and the Mountain Sun Nature Colony was apparently next to one of them. I needed only an hour or two of searching and backtracing to find it. There was a tall log arch at the entrance with a waist-high chain stretched across it, and the guy minding the gate didn’t look like the nudist type. Actually, he looked like a time-traveling Neandrethal who’d picked up a muscle T and a few gold chains when he arrived in the current century. His bushy eyebrows stretched unbroken across his forehead, and he glowered at me from under them.

“You got a reservation?” he asked.

I admitted that I didn’t.

“Then you gotta see Mr. Jones at the office,” he said, pointing to a small frame building to the left of the gate.
He watched me suspiciously as I got out of the car, walked over to the building and knocked on the door. Someone told me to come in, so I did. Even though this was a nudist camp, I was a little shocked to see a naked guy standing next to the desk that took up most of the space in the small office. It was the fellow from the photo of the skyclad witches that Ron MacDonald had shown me, and the guy looked even fatter in person. I could see why the snapshot was taken from the waist up, because Mr. Jones had definitely been shortchanged in the dick department. That little nub hiding under his sagging belly was sort of like Australia — everyone knew it was down there, but nobody cared. If I been equipped like that, the last place that I’d have turned up was a nudist colony.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Clive Jones, director of Mountain Sun. And you are?”

“Marlowe. Phil Marlowe,” I said, envisioning Raymond Chandler spinning in his grave.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.

“I just thought I’d come up and work on my tan,” I said. “Looks like a nice place to spend a few days getting back to nature.”

“We usually don’t accept single males unless they are old customers,” he said. “You can understand that we get quite a few men who just want to ogle our female guests. We normally take only couples.”

I’d never heard anyone use “ogle” in an actual conversation before, but I tried to act shocked at the idea of peeping-Tom customers.

“Of course,” I said. “You can’t be too careful about those oglers. Actually, though, my wife will probably be joining me in a day or so.”

He looked dubious.

“I’d be happy to pay for both us in advance for the whole week,” I said.

“Please sign the register right there, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “I’m sure that you and your wife will enjoy your stay here very much.”

When I was signing in, I breathed a sigh of relief to myself that the Marlowe gag hadn’t backfired. I get myself in trouble a lot when those smartass answers come popping out before I’ve had time to think about them. I was just lucky that Mr. Jones wasn’t a mystery reader. When “Phil” and his missus were signed in, Clive informed me that guests and all staff members except the gorilla guarding the front gate went au naturel at all times except on chilly evenings and during bad weather. He gave my a bag to put my clothes in and watched while I stripped down.

Then I realized that there was something else I hadn’t given enough thought. The red welts left on my bottom by Stella’s eager-beaver whipping the day before were going to be pretty obvious to anyone who saw my bare backside. I stepped aside and motioned for Mr. Jones to lead the way in taking me to my cabin. I’d keep him in front of me for a while and take that time to dream up some kind of story in case anybody asked — though I don’t think anyone would have any trouble figuring out exactly how those stripes were acquired. Maybe I should just tell the truth. I guess anyone could be a nudist, even a guy who likes having his bum beaten? On the other hand, the welts were going to make it hard to keep a low profile.

Jones and I got into my car, and he directed me down a dirt road through the camp, past a large frame building that doubled as a dining hall and meeting room. He said that they showed movies there on evenings when there was no group campfire. We went past a large grassy area with a flagpole at one end. An American flag was flapping in the breeze. Just past the field was a long row of tent cabins, with wooden walls halfway up, then screens and canvas tops. Behind the cabins were a couple of shower houses. So far this den of iniquity looked a lot like good old Camp Pa-het-si from my Boy Scout days. Mr. J. told me to stop in front of the cabin on the far left end of the row.

“Our accommodations here are very modest,” he said, “but I think you’ll be comfortable. Our emphasis is on communal, natural living. We just, you might say, let it all hang out.”

He chuckled at his own corny joke, and I smiled politely, took the bag of clothing and my single suitcase out of the back of the car and walked to the cabin. He stood by the car, watching me go, so my striped butt was in plain view. When I got to the door, he was still standing there looking, but he didn’t look particularly troubled by what he’d seen. He gave me a little wave and turned to start back down the road to his office. His own backside wasn’t welted, but it was not a very appealing sight as the jiggling fat retreated.

The inside of the cabin was a total surprise. The outside may have looked like a Boy Scout’s home away from home, but the roomy interior looked like a boy scout’s wet dream — half Turkish harem and half Barbary Coast bordello. A king-size couch-bed, heaped with pillows and flanked by short floor lamps with red, tasseled shades, stood on one side of the door, and on the other was a large leather hassock that could double as a table or as a handy place to bend over some sweet young thing. Against the back wall, an ornate Victorian wardrobe completed the bizarre clash of styles. Whoever decorated the place was either on some very heavy drugs or came from the Castro — maybe both.

I tossed my clothing into the wardrobe, got my Dopp kit out of the suitcase and headed for the shower houses. There was no sign saying which was for men and which for women, so I walked into the first one, where I could hear showers running. I guess the Mountain Sun Nature Colony’s policy was uni-sex all the way, because two girls and a guy were showering together. The half of the building devoted to the showers was big enough to hold a dozen of them, but the threesome was making do with just two and having a grand old time soaping one another down. Well, at least the guy was having a grand old time — I could tell by the erection he was sporting.

“Hope I’m not intruding?” I said.

“No, come on in,” the guy. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Always room for one more,” one of the girls giggled.

She looked familiar, and then I realized that she was the blonde in Ronnie MacDonald’s snapshot. It would have been hard to miss those boobs. I glanced at the other girl, but she didn’t look a thing like Ronnie’s wife, Glinda. I switched on a shower on the other side of the room and began soaping myself.

“If you need any help getting your back, just let us know,” the blonde said.

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“My goodness, what happened to your poor bottom?” the other girl asked.

“Somebody decided that I’d been a bad boy,” I told her.

“Oh!” she said in surprise, and the other two laughed at her startled expression.

I thought they’d probably ask me some more questions, but no one said anything else, and I guess they decided they were clean enough because they switched off their showers and walked out together, with one of the guy’s arms around the blonde and a hand resting on her naked buttocks.

“See you at dinner,” she said as they left.

“I’ll be there with bells on,” I said.

“No bells,” she said. “Nothing allowed except sandals until it gets cold.”

I hadn’t thought about how it was going to be facing a dining hall filled with naked people. It wasn’t a particularly appetizing prospect. I was all for nudity, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit down to a meal surrounding by it, especially if some of the diners hadn’t been working on their abs and pecs much lately. That turned out to be not much of a problem, because of the fourteen or fifteen people who turned up for the evening meal, most were women and all were in pretty decent shape except for Clive Jones and the middle-aged lady who’d been in the photo with him and turned out to be his wife, Yvonne. The three playful folks from the shower were there, along with the thug from the front gate, who managed to look grosser in his muscle T than the others did in the altogether. There was no sign of Glinda MacDonald, and I was beginning to think that Ronnie had sent me on a wild goose chase.

Then I saw that chesty blonde filling up an extra plate and covering it with a couple of napkins. Ah hah! The investigative mind sprang into action. If she was filling up that plate, she must be planning on taking it to someone. Elementary, Watson! Sure enough, she got up from her table and headed for the door with the covered plate, passing next to where I was sitting.

“I see you left the bells at home,” she said as she went by.

“I always take advice from a beautiful lady,” I told her.

She smirked at me and went on out the door, wagging her bare butt with a little extra emphasis.

“Do you know Endora?” asked the pint-sized babe sitting next to me, whom I’d been chatting up while trying hard not to stare at her bouncy little tits.

“Not well,” I said.

“Just wait, and you’ll probably get to know her a whole lot better,” she said with a sarcastic edge in her voice. “Most guys do.”

We’d been talking about religion, a pretty unusual topic for a conversation between a couple of naked people, but she had got things going in that direction, probably trying to figure out if I was just there for the sunshine-and-health bit or whether I was a prospective candidate for the Church of the Cosmic Truth. She even brought up “the old nature religion,” and I told her about the Wiccans I’d known back in Topanga. That got her talking about “spells” and “white magic” and the usual sort of nonsense. I listened politely. If this cute little broad was a witch, you could sign me up as a warlock any day.

As people finished eating, some of them began pushing back the tables and setting up a screen and projector. I guess this was a movie night rather than a campfire, and I wanted to go see if I could find out where Endora had gone with that plate of food, so I told the little babe, whose name turned out to be Lizzie, that I wanted to turn in early and would catch her later.

“That’s a promise,” she said, “because I still want to ask you about those stripes on your bottom.”

I gave her the most mysterious smile I could manage and took off. It was getting dark outside, but there was still light enough to see around the camp, and the only person I saw was the guard walking back toward the gate. I strolled down to the row of cabins and walked past them slowly, trying to peer through the screens. Still no sign of anyone. There was no one in either of the shower houses either. Finally, I went back to my own cabin and flopped down on the bed. I’d had a long drive that day and maybe I really would make it an early night. If Glinda didn’t turn up the next day, I’d have to drive back to L.A. and tell Ron MacDonald that I’d struck out.

I fell asleep quickly, but a few hours later, I woke up with the vague notion that I’d been hearing some kind of odd noise. I listened carefully for a few minutes. Nothing but crickets or tree frogs or whatever it was making that annoying peeping. Then I heard something else, off in the distance, like singing or chanting. I got up and went outside. The sound seemed to be coming from the lake, off behind the dining hall. I started walking in that direction. The night was a little chilly, and I thought about going back and putting something on, but I didn’t know whether it was cold enough to ignore the nudity rule. No sense in risking it, I decided. If I got caught wandering around, at least I’d be correctly naked.

A path led through the trees toward the lake, and as I got closer to the water, I could see that a large bonfire was burning in a clearing along the shore. I could see black shapes around the fire, people dancing or marching around the flames in a circle. I left the path and made my way closer to the fire under cover of the surrounding pines. When I was only five or six feet from the edge of the clearing, I stopped. The dancers had stopped, too, and were standing around the fire waiting for something or someone. That someone turned out to be a struggling girl, who was dragged out of the darkness on the other side of the clearing by two burly men. Like everyone else, she was naked. She wasn’t bound in any way, but some kind of elaborate wooden gag had been forced into her mouth. Despite the gag and the poor light, I recognized her from Ron MacDonald’s snapshot. The little guy hadn’t been wrong about his wife being in some kind of trouble. The girl was Glinda.

A large, squarish rock stood between the lake and the bonfire, and the two men forced Glinda to lie across it on her belly. Two more of the witches — I guess they were witches — grabbed her feet and helped stretch her tightly across the rock. The scene was getting a little too intense for me. I kept thinking about Aztec sacrifices. Then I really freaked out as a tall, very beefy man stepped out of the shadows and approached the rock. He had the head of a deer.

It was a mask, of course, complete with a huge set of antlers. I knew enough from listening to my Wiccan friends to realize that this guy was supposed to be the Horned God, not really Satan for the true believers in the ancient religion, but no dude to mess around with. Almost as startling as the antlers was the huge phallus protruding from between his legs. I figured it was a fake one, not the real thing, though since meeting Darrell at Mrs. Stern’s bondage mansion, I knew that anything was possible in that department.

Mr. Antlers raised his arms to greet the other witches and said some strange word in a loud voice, and the worshippers around the circle shouted something else in response. I didn’t have a clue what they were saying, but it was pretty clear what was going on, because the Horny God — excuse me, the Horned God — approached Glinda’s bottom, hanging invitingly over the edge of the rock, and thrust the phallus into her. I wasn’t sure what to do. If they’d actually been doing the Aztec bit, and he’d had a knife instead of that king-size prick, I’d have been out the trees in a New York minute and trying to save the kid. But you had to figure that if Glinda liked to hang out with witches and play skyclad games out in the boonies, she’d already had a ceremonial dick or two stuffed up the old wazoo. I decided to wait and see what happened next.

What happened was completely unexpected. Everyone suddenly looked up, and you could hear the sound of an airplane’s engine coming closer. In a minute, the plane itself arrived, dropping down for a pontoon landing about a hundred feet offshore. The Horned God pulled his phallus out from between Glinda’s buttocks and signaled to the men holding her arms. They lifted her off the rock and began marching her down the path back to the camp. Most of the others around the fire filed after them, but Mr. Antlers and a couple of other men went down to the shore and watched as the plane taxied across the lake toward them.

When it was about thirty feet from the bank, the men waded into the water. They were waist-deep by the time they reached the plane. A door opened in its side, and someone began lifting out boxes and handing them to the waiting men, who carried them back to shore, carefully holding them above the lake’s surface. No one had to draw me a map for me to realize what was going on. The Mountain Sun Nature Colony might be a cover for the Church of the Cosmic Truth, but the Church of the Cosmic Truth was itself a cover for something else. Anybody want to bet on drugs?

I was so absorbed by what was going on that I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me until it was too late. I turned around, and before the beam from his flashlight blinded me, I saw that it was Clive Jones. I also saw that he was holding a very large gun, and it was pointed at me.

“I’m afraid that you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, Mr. Marlowe,” he said.

“Just out for a late-night stroll,” I said. “Helps the digestion.”

Mr. Antlers and the other men left the boxes sitting on the shore and gathered around us. The hulking figure of the horned man looked bigger than ever.

“This is Mr. Marlowe, and he seems to have a habit of sticking his nose into the wrong place,” Jones told them.

“I don’t know about his nose, but his name ain’t Marlowe,” Mr. Antlers said. “This guy’s name is Diamond, and he’s a private dick.”

He pulled off the mask. There had been a lot of big surprises so far that evening, but none that came close to this. I thought I was hallucinating for a minute, and then I thought that I must be the unluckiest guy alive. I couldn’t go anywhere without this creep turning up.

The guy in the antlers was Joey Balls.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

NEXT: Wiseguys, Witches and Girl Scouts.

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