The Surrender Gate: A Desire Exchange Novel

by Christopher Rice

  “Oh my God,” Emily whispers.

  “Emily? Are they hurting her?”

  “Oh my fucking God.”

  “Emily!”

  Emily is about to answer when she hears Lilliane say something. But just then, the twisting, rising cloud of gold high above the dais seems to collapse in on itself, and for a split second, Emily assumes it’s over. And then a silent, glittering shockwave of blinding light flies toward her, and it’s only in that instant that she makes out what Lilliane just said almost too quietly for anyone to hear.

  “Prepare for radiance.”

  The last time Marcus witnessed a burst of light like the one that fills the tent he was at 30,000 feet, flying over a line of thunderstorms in a passenger jet. He’s thrown one arm up to shield his eyes from what he’s sure will be a line of tent-fragments and other shrapnel. But when he blinks and opens them again, the tent is still very much intact. Its flaps billow slightly, but that’s all, and the only sound that accompanies this blinding series of flashes is a burst of static in his ear just like the one from the night before when Emily’s strange visitors first arrived at Lily Conran’s beach house.

  He’s poised on the tip of his boat, hand on his gun holster, the other pressing his earpiece deeper into his ear.

  “Emily!”

  There’s no response; there’s no sound coming through the earpiece at all.

  Dupuy sends a text to the thread they opened earlier that includes the strike team: What the hell’s this light show?

  Marcus texts back. Get audio confirm from Jonathan. Emily dark.

  K

  The light show inside the tent settles into a regular, silent rhythm, but the brilliance of it is staggering. Thirty seconds go by according to the clock on his smart phone, but it feels like he’s been forced to wait an hour when the next text from Dupuy arrives. It reads: No confirmation. Same as house entries. Some kind of interference. Only longer.

  Bring yr boat 2 my post. Strike team take Frank’s current position.

  The strike team confirms in their typical long-winded manner: Got it.

  Good idea? Dupuy texts.

  Can’t hear her Frank.

  Could clear up. Move in now might blow cover.

  I CAN’T HEAR HER

  There’s another pause that feels longer than it is. Then, finally, Dupuy says: Moving in. Go with God, buddy.

  There’s about three hundred feet between his tied off boat and the end of one of the giant tent’s walkways. If there was any sound accompanying this crazy blaze of light inside the tent, he wouldn’t think twice about driving the boat in closer, but from this close, just the noise of the propeller cutting water might be enough to alert them to his approach, so he dives headfirst into the water instead.

  24

  It has the fearsome brilliance of a miniature thermonuclear explosion, but it comes without sound, and at the very moment when Emily braces for some sort of terrible impact that could tear her apart, she finds herself griping the sides of the podium as a wave of light washes right through her, blinding her briefly but leaving her unharmed.

  Some kind of digital projector, it has to be. It’s using some crazy computer program. What’s the difference between magic and computers these days anyway?

  The dais is gone. The throne is gone. It’s as if some hole has been torn in the fabric of time and space itself, and now she’s staring through a glittering membrane into another dimension, a dimension inhabited solely by a cluttered garage like the one Alexandra Vance mentioned in her written confession. Alexandra dangles from the solid block of the light fixture attached to the track for the garage door, her wrists wrapped in a coil of rope that’s been looped over the fixture’s plastic casing. But the garage door and most of the surrounding walls are invisible, cut off in various places by the glittering membrane that seems to encompass a living, breathing piece of Alexandra’s very soul.

  The entire scene is slowly revolving, so its borders must have a substance that’s being supported by the dais, the dais she no longer sees, but that is rotating from the motion of this… Every name she tries to come up with to describe what she’s watching now seems inadequate. Dream? Visual? Movie? What? What can she possibly call this?

  Can’t be real. It’s not real. The drugs. Some kind of film projector. And where the hell is Decanter Girl? All that crazy gold light came pouring out of her orifices and then—poof! This!

  While Decanter Girl is nowhere to be seen, Emily can see glimpses of the other four podiums, standing just outside the border of this display like her own. Her fellow guests are paper-thin silhouettes.

  Meanwhile, two shirtless, muscular college-aged boys are materializing on either side of Alexandra’s dangling body. A lean blond takes shape behind Alexandra as he forces a ball gag into her mouth, securing the strap behind her head with his other hand; he sucks hungrily on her neck the whole time. The other, a dark-skinned linebacker type, is placing nipple clamps on Alexandra’s breasts, giving them light tugs as he checks their security with a leering grin. Both men are gorgeous and bristling with a kind of youthful, swaggering menace that makes them irresistible and dangerous, their absurdly huge cocks beet-red and dripping pre-cum. This isn’t a flashback. It’s a projection of Alexandra’s mind, of Alexandra’s lust, only for some reason Emily is seeing all of it play out before her.

  They’re all seeing it, everyone in the tent, she’s sure. That’s why the podiums are positioned around the room the way they are. But are they seeing exactly the same thing? Could the drugs and the reading they just listened to have combined in each one of their minds to produce a different hallucination based on the same story?

  The dark-skinned linebacker type sees something in the cardboard box he likes, falls to his knees next to it, and pulls out an oily looking cat-o’-nine-tails. He grins like a jack-o’-lantern. Cackling, he shows it to his friend and they both take up a position behind their struggling captive as she jerks her wrists against the rope. They cock the whip, slapping its tails against the concrete floor with a loud whack that makes Alexandra cry out into the ball gag. Then the blond raises it over his shoulder, his pose amateurish and unskilled. He strikes.

  The cat-o’-nine-tails wraps around the light fixture. The boy curses. The whip is stuck, its tails threaded around the light fixture’s plastic casting, wound through the struts of the garage door opener. He yanks back on it too hard. The plastic casing tears free from the ceiling, followed by the light fixture itself. Alexandra drops to the floor suddenly, a small shower of debris following her. By now the scene has revolved so completely, Emily finds herself staring right at the two young men as they throw their arms over their heads and drop to the floor to shield themselves.

  Just as both boys manage to rise up onto all fours, Alexandra stands, freed from her restraints, the whip in her right hand. With her left hand, she yanks the ball gag from her mouth and tosses it to the floor.

  “Bad boys,” Alexandra says, cracking the whip beside her. To Emily, Alexandra’s voice sounds amplified, but also like it’s traveling through several feet of water before it reaches her ears. “Bad bad bad bad bad boys!”

  She cracks the whip across the blond boy and plants one foot in the small of the dark-skinned muscle boy’s back, driving him face down to the concrete. From the force of the blow, the blond arches his back like a cat, his open-mouthed groan trembling with pleasure, his cock weeping pre-cum as it bounces against his stomach. She takes her foot off the dark-skinned muscle boy and then, just as the guy tries to right himself, she brings the whip down across his back as well. The painful pleasure renders him submissive as well.

  Alexandra drapes the whip over one shoulder, grabs them both by the backs of their necks, and pulls them to their knees until they’re facing each other.

  “Is that what you boys want?”

  “Yes, Momma,” they both answer in unison.

  She pushes their heads together. At first, they resist the feel of each other’s lips, but the hard
er Alexandra presses on the backs of their heads, the more their kiss becomes a hungry war of tongues; two leering, youthful predators turned submissive and fluid by one sloppy strike with a tool they had no experience with.

  Alexandra pulls their heads apart, guides their mouths to her sex. Both of their tongues begin fighting for access to her clit. As the pleasure intensifies, Alexandra’s hand travels slowly up her chest to where the whip lies draped over her shoulder, the handle resting just inches above her left breast. Just at the moment where it seems like she might come, she pries the boys from her pussy, sends each one down on all fours again, one after the other, with a single, determined shove on the back of his neck. And then she goes to work with the whip, her own grunts of exertion vibrating with as much pleasure as the boys’ ecstatic moans.

  The whip flies through the air with increasing, unnatural speed. Each new strike begins to shed threads of the same gold luminescence that snaked out of Decanter Girl’s eyes and mouth at the very start of this impossible event. The scene begins losing definition, turning into a blur of flesh-colored clouds and brilliant streaks of gold, an impressionistic riot of fading desire.

  And then there’s a scream.

  The authentic, unguarded scream of a woman in the midst of absolute abandon.

  Once again, Alexandra sits on the carved throne. Decanter Girl stands over her, their faces inches apart as Decanter Girl grips both arms of the throne, steadying herself as the raw components of the vision they all just witnessed coalesce into thick snakes of floating gold, snakes that are either emerging from Alexandra’s lips and nose, or just now entering them; Emily can’t tell which.

  Emily almost misses the pulses of light that travel up the walls of the tent. They look like tides of bioluminescent plankton. For a few seconds, they congregate at the top of the tent. Then they vanish completely as Alexandra’s breathless climax subsides.

  The woman’s first deep breath tugs at the floating snakes of gold laced through the air surrounding the dais. They jerk toward her and then vanish, as if she’s been able to take their entire, twisted lengths into her lungs with just a single breath. In the sudden silence that follows, Emily can hear gasps, even a few sobs, coming from the other guests. Jonathan is bent forward over his podium as if he thinks his vision is failing him, his mask pushed up halfway off his face, his mouth a silent O.

  Lilliane walks quietly and confidently toward the center of the tent, as if she were a drama teacher and the two women before her had just performed a brief, amusing scene from a Neil Simon play.

  Alexandra blinks, bright-eyed, a satisfied, contented smile forming on her flushed face. Gone is the fear that followed her onto the dais only moments before.

  Decanter Girl slides her mask back on and steps off the dais, allowing Lilliane to take her place. If the warmth radiating from Lilliane’s expression is a ruse, then Lilliane is an extraordinarily good actress. She takes one of Alexandra’s hands.

  “The box. Was it real? Did your ex-husband really betray you?”

  “Yes,” Alexandra answers.

  “But everything you found inside it, it aroused you, didn’t it?”

  Alexandra nods.

  “And so, because you were afraid to look deeper, you assumed this meant you had an innate desire to be submissive, when in truth, it’s dominance you crave, Alexandra. It’s freedom from submission your heart seeks, and it is hard male flesh, tied down, exposed, vulnerable to your power, that most enflames your desires.”

  “Yes,” Alexandra says, her voice brimming with a confidence she’s yet to display inside of this strange tent.

  To the guests ringing the space, Lilliane continues, “There is no truth without fantasy. But our minds can see only the shape of our fantasies, not their interior. At the first blush of arousal, we seize on the raw materials or shallow visuals that have stirred our loins, and out of fear, or sometimes just laziness, we look no further. We look no deeper. And so the full story of our desire remains shrouded in self-imposed mystery. Not here. Not tonight.”

  Lilliane tugs gently on Alexandra’s hand. The small motion is enough to lift the woman to her feet, and after Lilliane gives her a light kiss on the cheek, Alexandra returns to her podium with confident steps, despite the fact that she is still completely nude.

  A silence falls. This time, it’s Decanter Girl who delivers the leather-bound notebook to Lilliane. When Lilliane opens the pages for the second time that evening there’s a small eruption of sobs from several feet away. “No, no, no,” comes the unfamiliar male voice. “I can’t. Seriously, I just…please. I just…I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  No sooner has the tiny man stepped down off his podium than his team has surrounded him, arms curving swiftly around his back, guiding him out of the tent and down the walkway through which they entered.

  Emily studies the expression on Lilliane’s face as she watches the other guest leave. Lilliane, if that’s even her real name, gives off such a profound sense of quiet loss over this man’s sudden departure, Emily can’t help but believe the woman feels as if some essential part of her being has been rejected by his abrupt, frightened departure. This, more than anything else, convinces Emily that what she’s just witnessed has no logical, earthbound explanation.

  “No one will be forced to stay,” Lilliane says, but her previously confident voice is now shaky. “No one,” she adds in a whisper. Her wounded, wide-eyed stare is still fixed on the man’s suddenly empty podium. “Anyone else?” she asks the rest of them with a new hard edge to her tone.

  No one says a word. Then she seems to remember herself, a process that requires her to clear her throat several times as she carefully opens the leather-bound notebook against her arm. She’s about to call out another name when they’re all disturbed by the sound of one of the boats throttling up. Emily figures they’ve dressed, blindfolded, and strapped their defector in, and now they’re returning him to his rendezvous point.

  Lilliane pretends to study the pages in front of her, but Emily can tell she’s waiting for the boat to depart. Once it starts to fade, she lifts her attention from the book, studies each one of them briefly before calling the next name.

  “Lily Conran!”

  I lied, Emily tells herself as she steps down off the podium. Her team members move to assist her but she holds up a hand to indicate she doesn’t need their support. They follow close behind her anyway. I lied. So none of this will matter. It might be insane or trippy or hallucinatory. But it won’t matter, because it won’t really be my fantasy. Not unless they’re actually able to stare into my soul. But that can’t be what’s happening here and who cares because I lied.

  Lilliane reads. “I’ve heard rumors about the doctor. My friends have told me he’s inappropriate, that he doesn't respect boundaries. Maybe he's even a bit of a lech. And he isn’t the most handsome of men either. But that’s part of what makes him appealing. The fact that he’s a little rough, the fact that he’s a little dirty. When he tells me to change into a robe, I know it’s not necessary. I’m there for headaches. Why does he need to examine me from head to toe for just a headache?”

  She’s about to take a seat on the throne when every limb in her body feels like it’s become solid, and for a few seconds, she can’t move. Her escorts are prepared for this, however. They press down gently on her shoulders until her butt meets the cushioned seat, which is still sweaty and damp from Alexandra Vance’s transformative visit to this very spot.

  “Worse, he doesn’t leave the room while I change and I can feel his eyes on me as he pretends to turn his back to me and consult his clipboard. Can feel his eyes on me as if it were his fingers. So once I have the gown on, I sit on the edge of the table and spread my legs slightly. It’s my signal. I’m telling him I know what he wants. I’m giving him permission to slide one hand under my robe, caress the inside of my thigh. He keeps talking to me as if it were a basic examination, asking me to cough even as his fingers tickle my pussy. Asking me to breathe in and out as
his first finger slips between my folds, fingertip eventually focusing on my clit, circling it. Talking to me like nothing is amiss, like I’m not going moist all over his fingers.”

  As Lilliane reads, the goblet bringer walks toward her across the floor, his hips swaying with what looks to her like a confident, predatory swagger. He’s a bit taller than he looked when she was on her podium. Now that she’s up close, she can see how finely etched his slender torso is, can see his abs flexing as he walks, his arms chorded with muscle. Broad shoulders offset his youthful, unblemished pale skin, and then her eyes find the strawberry-colored birthmark above his collarbone and her breath leaves her with such sudden force.

  And then he’s standing over her, gripping the arms of the chair just as Decanter Girl did with Alexandra Vance only moments before. And then he’s removing his mask, and suddenly she is staring up at Ryan Benoit. And somehow, Ryan Benoit is still twenty-one years old, even though Ryan Benoit has not been twenty-one years old for fourteen years.

  The sight of him comes as a greater, more thunderous shock than the living fantasy she witnessed moments before. Because no special effects machine, no hologram projector, no blaze of disorienting lights, can shave fourteen years off a man whose face she has spent days studying in detail, not at this close, intimate distance.

  Could it be the drug? That’s the only possible explanation left; that somehow the drug, which didn’t even taste like a strange chemical, has somehow, in just this moment at least, frozen Ryan exactly as he looked in all of those photographs taken prior to his disappearance.

  He mistakes her shock for fear of what’s to come. He parts the flaps of her robe with one practiced hand. His stare is seductive, welcoming, intoxicating.

  And then he sees the letter.

  The sight of his own name, written in his father’s handwriting, drains all the life from his eyes in an instant.

  “Ryan…” she whispers.