* The feasting begins * An unconscious liaison * Companions in my feasting

* A culinary tour * We all grow fatter * Some devastating news

When I awoke late that morning, it was to find the whole household in a tumult of industry. The cook-staff were calling for the footmen who were chasing the pages who were shouting for the boys who were carrying sacks of foodstuffs and herding fowl through the apartments and the temporary kitchen which adjoined the Spring Room. Though it should have been beneath them, the spirit of the moment seized my two young ladies-in-waiting and they, too had donned aprons and were assisting in the scrubbing of potatoes and the rolling of dough. The aromas emanating from the bubbling pots and cauldrons evoked memories in me of my days on the continent that summer just past, and I reflected on the seeming distance between that simple time and this.

I sat on the edge of Cambel's bed, the application of my bulk serving to compress the mattress and thereby causing my lover to gently roll towards me; his motion was only halted when his stomach came into contact with my broad and cushioned posterior, leaving him laying on his side. As my arm gently stroked his back, I felt a stirring against my soft flesh, and I realised that his manhood was stiffening and growing in size and in heat as he rested against me. After ascertaining that he remained unconscious, I nonetheless felt my own longings growing, and I lay down fully on the bed beside him, so that the soft folds of my stomach flesh surrounded his burning shaft. Sliding down further along the bed, I felt his hardness caressing its way between my overly-ripe breasts, then my neck, and then, quite shamelessly, I took him in my mouth.

A thrill went through me of delicious decadence as I felt his heat and his rigidity against my lips and my tongue, and I began to close my mouth about him, licking and sucking as if his member were the greatest delicacy I had ever consumed. His eyes remained closed but his breath began to grow heavier and deeper as I continued my erotic ministrations, until finally, with a great thrust of his slender hips, he rammed his rod deep into my suckling maw. His shaft erupted with pleasure, spewing its salty fluid into my mouth and my throat and on my lips and cheeks. I licked up every last drop of his juices, savouring its musky flavour, and drinking him dry.

As his hardness became but a memory, I became aware of that liquid making its hot way down my throat and into my stomach, where its searing fire seemed to set my appetite to boiling. Once again I began to notice the rich and exotic aromas wafting from the kitchen and I arose from my repose to find that the footmen were just then carrying in the first of the dishes obtained from the far reaches of the globe. I made my way over to the table, my hands caressing my great stomach in excited anticipation of the delights yet to come.

No sooner had I seated myself than my two young maidens appeared on either side of me, asking if they might be so bold as to ask to join me in my repast. "The wondrous flavours and tastes you have described have incited our own hungers," they told me, "and we wish, if we may, to be allowed to experience these exquisite delicacies."

"Of course you may!" I exclaimed, happy for the company, and eager to initiate these two innocents into the pleasures of epicureanism. The dish that was being served at that very moment seemed as good a place as any to begin. It was a cassoulet from Languedoc in France, a marvellous dish of beans, pork sausage and duck. So fragrant it was, and so greatly stimulated was my hunger, that I felt a soft buzzing in my head, akin to the feeling one has after drinking several glasses of wine. It was difficult to restrain myself from shovelling great quantities of the lovely dish into my waiting mouth, but I felt I must go slow that I might instruct my young charges in the flavours and the subtleties of the dish.

I described for them the slight variations in cassoulets among the different towns of the region, each of which claimed to have originated the dish, and I continued to expound on the preparations for confit d'canard, the duck cooked in its own fat which was one of the main ingredients of the preparation. They listened carefully to my lecture, then, gingerly began to taste their first forkfuls. I was terribly gratified to see smiles spread slowly across their sweet faces as the full impact of the stew began to register on their heretofore under-stimulated taste buds. We each finished our first plates quickly and were rewarded with a second great helping and then a third. I was very pleased to see my two novices were keeping up with me, their inexperience not interfering with their consumption. When finally we had eaten all there was of that entree, we each reclined in our seats, immobilised by the weight of the food in our stomachs.

There was not much of a respite, for shortly after we had finished that course, a new course arrived: a braised roast of pork with prunes, served with boiled baby potatoes. We gobbled our way through that tasty dish and a dessert of candied fruits with Devonshire cream, then found ourselves hopelessly drowsy afterwards, helping one another to the large bed to lie down for a much-needed sleep. While my bulk occupied most of the centre of the mattress, there was yet room for my two slender companions to squeeze up against my softness, one on each side, before falling into deep slumbers. As somnolence took me away, I could not help but smile at the strange bulges of their over-filled stomachs, swelling above their lithe and girl-like forms.

We awoke several hours later, remarkably hungry despite our enormous meal earlier that day. The two girls exhibited a surprising gluttony every bit as great as mine, and not half an hour after we began our feast again, they complained of their restrictive clothing. "Would it be a terrible thing if we, like you, were to shuck all of our garments and continue our feast clad in nothing but our own flesh?" Lily asked.

"Of course it would not," I replied. "For, if eating such decadently monstrous portions should be accepted here, then most anything should be within the boundaries of our own proprieties!"

They wasted no time in relieving themselves of their gowns and their petticoats and camisoles, and moments later, they stood before me, slender and naked, the rise of their small breasts barely discernible in contrast with the distended swellings of their engorged bellies, their hips nearly as narrow as those of a young boy, and the fine hair of their private parts the only true indication that these were women of child-bearing age and not mere girls.

We gorged our way across the continent that day and the next and the next. We consumed whole henhouses of Eggs d'Seville; buckets of risotto con funghi secchi; feedlots worth of bockwurst and weisswurst and blutwurst and bratwurst, all on acres of sauerkraut and doused in gallons of mustards; barrels and barrels of the Polish dish, Bigos with its pork and sauerkraut in a creamy sauce; a pasture's worth of the Swedish dish Farsrulader, with it's tender little leek-stuffed cuts of veal; oceans of Waterzooi, a fish stew from Belgium, and smoked salmon mousse; entire crops of noodles such as vareniki from Russia, hovshki from Slovakia, gnocchi from Rome and galuska with the Hungarian goulash.

Their good-natured competitiveness spurred my own appetites, and we each often found ourselves eager to consume more of the marvellous foods than did our companions. Due to the unsurpassed growth in our appetites and our stomachs, the kitchen could not at times keep pace with our rapid consumption; so we often had time to compare the obvious growth of our bodies, or to massage fragrant oils into one another's thirsty skins. There was no end to the pleasure we both gave and received during those moments when our hands roamed over soft and pliant flesh, sinking into the cushiony evidence of our excesses. For, with such surrender to the call of gluttony, it was inevitable that my two companions should begin to grow with a speed equalling my own expansion. Before the fifth week of my feasting had ended, the two young women had become as plump as had I been when first I arrived at the castle Scudamore, and they showed no signs of abandoning their endeavours to grow even fatter. Indeed, they seemed at times disappointed that they were not growing at an even faster rate, and were almost envious of my twenty-one stone.

Yet their envy bore no malice and they each took as a personal triumph the continual increase in my girth. With each millimetre I grew, they became more excited at the prospect of our eventual freedom. During one of our late night journeys to test my bulk against the door, bloated with the day's gluttony and leaning on each other for support, I had a sudden flash of inspiration and suggested that the two newly plump girls might, together, be wide enough to activate the mechanism. My surmise about their obesity was correct, for they did indeed prove to be almost too wide for the chamber when standing, crushed together and side-by-side. Reaching over their shoulders with my mountainous stomach pressed tightly against their padded backs, I was able to turn the two handles which they could not touch, but there was no part of our three fleshy forms which we could make to engage the final catch. Neither knee nor palm nor sole would cause the plate to slide along its track, and we came away from there certain that its design permitted only one enormously rotund person to activate all five latches.

So challenged, we set about the next day to redoubling our efforts at fattening me. I was not allowed to rest at all, the two plump girls goading me to consume ever more. The kitchen staff, meanwhile, had ranged even farther afield than did my father and I, regaling us with dishes from the mysterious Orient, darkest Africa and even America. One afternoon we were presented with a table covered in bright red lobsters, still in their shells, and we spent the best part of that day in noisily cracking shells and prising every last morsel of sweet flesh from the confines of those carapaces, before dousing them in butter and feeding them to our waiting mouths.

That night, I was incapable of making the trek to the door, and incapable, too, of even covering the short distance to my bed, falling asleep in my chair, surrounded by the towering piles of broken shells which served as testament to my status as a full-fledged trencherman.

When I awoke the next morning, breakfast was being served at the cleaned table. I struggled to sit upright against the inflated bulge of my distended stomach, finally realising that I was not capable that day of even so simple a manoeuvre, and accepting the assistance of the two footmen who struggled valiantly to shift my bulk without injuring me. Finally, between the three of us, I was able to survey the day's feast which awaited me. This morning, it was an American pancake breakfast of the type popular amongst the burly logging-men of the New England forests. The light and fluffy pancakes were served doused in butter and drenched in a wonderfully thick and complex syrup from the maple tree which was native to those woods. In addition, there were great rashers of fatty bacon and piles of "scrambled" eggs.

The two girls came to the table then, drawn by the scrumptious aromas and rubbing the deep sleep from their eyes. I was pleased to notice their continuing growth and the way their stomachs had begun to fold over themselves, the way their breasts had filled out and become plump and round, the way their hips had grown fleshy and their thighs grown thick, lending a slight waddle to their gaits. Wordlessly, we began to lose ourselves in the sensual delights of such simple food, glorying in the smells and the flavours and the feel of the sticky liquids on our tongues and the mounting pressure of the dozens of pancakes as they filled our already distended stomachs.

After we had consumed all there was of that course, I noticed that in our single-minded gluttony, none of us had seen the doctor make his entrance for his regular inspection of Cambel's health. My love had not been faring well these past weeks, growing ever more emaciated even as I grew in the opposite fashion. His complexion became more ashen with each morning, and it was this continuing deterioration of his condition, more so than the variety and quantity of food, which inspired me afresh each day to continue the task of growing ever fatter. The doctor's expression seemed to indicate that, serious as they may have been until now, the Count's health had taken an even graver turn. With great effort, I forced myself to stand from the table and make my way to the sickbed, supporting the massive globe of my food-laden stomach with both of my hands, and swinging my elephantine thighs past one another with as much speed as my gorged body could muster.

"What is wrong?" I asked the doctor, taking note of the fashion in which my new-found weight had even affected the pitch of my voice, deepening it and rounding out the sharp tones.

"Nothing is new," he replied, "and that is what is wrong. His dark sleep deepens and his body continues to waste away. His heart beats so weakly that I am hard-pressed to hear it at moments. The spring equinox arrives this next week and I am quite certain that if he does not see the sunlight before that day is done, he will never wake again!"

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