by John Everson
The erotic whispers and incense and dark-cowled border guard all played together to send Austin’s brain into a spin. He felt almost dizzy and leaned in as Regina’s hand slipped around his side.
“It can be intense,” she whispered in his ear. “Do you like it?”
He nodded just as a bell chimed.
The monks abruptly were silent and turned to file back out of the room the way they’d come.
The mother superior lay still on the altar, but the bishop had somehow disappeared.
Then Austin realized that all of the men around the altar had gone, leaving their robes crumpled on the floor.
The couples from the bar were all turning and starting to return to their seats, and Regina gripped his hand and pulled him to do the same.
When they reached their couch, Austin picked up his beer and drank half of it without thinking. His throat was dry, and his head strangely foggy.
“What is in that incense?” he asked Regina.
She smiled. “It helps everyone relax,” she said. “Do you want to go somewhere where we can be alone?”
He nodded, and she took his hand. They walked toward the entrance to the room, but instead of going through that door, Regina turned right and took him to a small corridor where there were a series of dark wood doors. She turned the knob on one, but it was locked. The next one opened easily.
They stepped inside. It was a closet-sized room lit only with two candles on two small tables on either side of a long chaise longue.
“Lie down here,” she instructed, and he eased his body back on the dark burgundy velvet of the sofa chair. Before he was settled, Regina had slid her body on top of his. She’d unbuttoned the top of her dress and he found himself kissing her chest and then her lips with a passion he couldn’t restrain.
“I feel so—” he began. She pressed her lips against his and stifled his words. Then she whispered, “The Cloister teaches us to act without words. Let your body do what it will.”
In moments, he was stripping off her clothes and heeding her words. The chaise became their own private altar of lust.
Chapter Thirteen
“I hope that wasn’t too much for you,” Regina said.
They were driving home through dark streets that Austin didn’t recognize. She had blindfolded him before they left the club and walked him past the doorman that way. But after a few minutes in the car, she’d reached over and pulled the cloth from his eyes again. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t read the neighborhood street signs. Until they crossed a set of railroad tracks, he had no conception of what direction they were going. He knew the tracks cut through town north to south, so that at least told him they were headed east or west. He bet east.
“I have to admit, I didn’t think places like that really existed.”
She grinned. “Oh, they are there for the finding…if you want them badly enough. People come from a hundred miles away to spend a couple hours in Equinox. Hardly anyone in Parkville even knows it exists. Nobody driving by has any idea that there’s a club at all in there. It just looks like an abandoned building from the outside. That’s the only way it could ever work.”
“I’m reasonably sure the mayor would not like to find out about it,” Austin said.
She nodded. “You can see why I had to blindfold you,” she said. “I hope I won’t have to do that in the future when we go.”
“So you’re going to take me there again?”
“Do you want me to?” she asked.
“Sure. But what do I have to do so that I don’t need the blindfold?”
“You’d have to go through an initiation,” she said. “You might have to be one of those druid people for a few ceremonies at the Cloister, or fill a role in one of the other rooms that I didn’t show you.”
“What else is there?” he asked. “The place didn’t look like it was that big from the outside.”
“There’s a lower level,” she said. “You haven’t seen half of it yet, I can tell you.”
“I can’t imagine what else they do there.”
She shook her head. “No, I bet you can’t.”
* * *
They pulled up in his driveway and Regina parked the car and walked to the front door with him. When they stepped inside, Brandy was on the couch, writing in a leather book. It looked a lot like the journal that Regina kept – he’d found her writing in it several times when he’d gotten home from work.
“How was Ceili?” he asked.
Brandy smiled and shrugged. “Just a doll, like always. How was Equinox?”
Austin was taken aback. “You know about Equinox?”
Brandy nodded. “Sure, how do you think Regina and I met?”
She stepped past him toward the door and for the first time, Austin noticed the tail of a serpent in the shape of a six peeking out from beneath the sleeve on her arm. The same tattoo that Regina had.
For a second, he had a flash of the image of her blond hair trailing over the black see-through silk of a nun’s outfit from the Cloister room and had to gulp. Holy shit, what was Regina getting him into?
The door closed, and Regina turned toward him. “Do you mind if I stay over?” she asked.
She was already unbuttoning her dress.
Austin shook his head.
She left her dress on the fourth stair. He didn’t bother to pick it up.
Chapter Fourteen
Regina stopped going home.
And Austin was happy with that. In the evenings, he returned from work wiped out from intense days of office politics and too many fast and furious projects. But the sight of Regina there waiting, rocking Ceili on her hip or sitting on the couch writing in her journal while the baby crawled on the floor, washed away all the troubles of his day. Sometimes he’d walk in and they’d both be on the second floor. The house seemed weirdly empty in those moments and he would instantly call out for her and head toward the stairs.
Regina had completely taken over the center of his life and he found it hard to think of a day without her in it. He’d had some doubts after the bizarre visit to Equinox, but after spending a couple subsequent ‘comforting’ nights in bed with her, all of those reservations faded away. So she was kinky. He couldn’t say that he minded that.
He hadn’t mentioned her yet to his parents, but he wanted to soon. He was worried about what they would think; how long did his wife have to be gone before it was ‘acceptable’ for him to date? He’d almost slipped over the weekend, when he talked to his mom on the phone over coffee and Regina had walked into the kitchen with the baby.
“Hey baby,” he’d said, and instantly realized his mistake.
“Who’s that?” his mother had asked, and he’d covered quickly, explaining that Ceili had just made a funny face. It was going to be bad enough to admit that he already had a girlfriend, let alone one who was basically living with him.
A week after their first trip to Equinox, Austin came home to find Regina wearing a black robe and cowl. Her eyes beamed at him from beneath the lip of the hood.
“Tonight is your initiation,” she said.
He didn’t even have to question what she meant. The cowl could only mean one thing. Instead he said, “But we don’t have a sitter.”
“I’ve taken care of it,” Regina said. “Paulina is with Ceili now.”
“Who’s Paulina?” he asked.
“A friend,” Regina said. “Brandy couldn’t come tonight.”
“I can trust her?” he asked.
“Do you trust me?”
He nodded.
“Okay then,” she said. “Why don’t you go change, and then we can grab something to eat on the way.”
“What if they don’t have an initiation spot for me tonight?” he asked. Regina had not talked about going back to the club since last weekend. This all seemed very sudd
en.
“Oh, they have a spot,” she said. “Trust me, I made sure of it.”
“I don’t have a cape,” he said, thinking of all of the men he’d seen in the Cloister wearing black capes or priest garb.
Regina smiled. “You will earn your cape tonight.”
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” he said.
“You’re going to enjoy it,” she said. “Trust me.”
At that moment, a girl with short black hair and a nose ring walked into the room holding Ceili. She wore a black T-shirt with an occult symbol across the chest. A star inside a circle. There were words written on the poles, but Ceili’s body obscured what they said.
“Hi there,” she said. Her voice was high and musical. “You guys have a good time tonight and don’t worry about a thing.”
She walked to the fridge and pulled a bottle off the top shelf. Then she walked over to Austin, who took the baby from her arms and gave her a kiss. He held Ceili up in the air, and the baby giggled and drooled; her eyes lit as she recognized her father.
“You be good and I’ll be home soon, okay, baby doll?”
He gave her a hug and a pat on the back, and then handed her back to Paulina. The babysitter smiled and walked out of the room. As she turned, Austin saw the now-familiar tattoo of a serpent six on her arm.
Of course, he thought. All Regina roads lead to Equinox.
* * *
“If I pass the initiation, do I get to stop wearing this stupid blindfold?” he asked when Regina stopped the car an hour later. They’d stopped for a sandwich and then once back in the car, she’d covered his eyes again for the second half of the drive to the club.
“Eventually,” she answered. “Once you’ve earned the trust of the sisters.”
“What do I have to do?”
“We’ll find out your assignment soon enough,” she said. “But first, we have to get inside.”
She traced the Mark of Cain symbol on his head once more, and then got out of the car and came around to the passenger’s side to help him out and then guide him across the street and through the doorway.
The doorman greeted her by name. “They’re waiting for you in the Chalice Hall,” he said.
Regina pulled the silken blindfold off of Austin’s eyes and leaned up to kiss him. “I am so excited that you’re doing this,” she said. “I think you’ll find everything you’ve been looking for at Equinox.”
“I didn’t think I was looking for anything,” he said.
Regina laughed. “When I met you, you were not a happy man.”
He nodded. “Well, that’s true enough. But since I met you, things have been getting better and better.”
Regina smiled. “Just wait until you’re a full member of Club Equinox. You’ll find things here that you didn’t even know you dreamed of. But you did.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
In truth, Austin was nervous. He had no idea what would be expected of him, and honestly, he had no interest in ‘performing’ in public for some ritual. He’d joked about not having a cape but…what if they wanted him to wear one of those see-through things?
He felt an increasing burn in his stomach as he considered all of the strange things they might expect him to do tonight. Regina had said the things he had seen last time were only the tip of the iceberg of what went on here. And those had been crazy. But he also knew how important it was to Regina that he be part of this. He wanted to make her happy. He had to admit he’d enjoyed their last visit here, though it had been both shocking and more than a little weird. Something about it had called to him. The eroticism, of course. But also the secret nature of it. The taboo-ness, the dark rituals. The club represented the alternative to everything his milquetoast life had stood for up to this point.
And he had not been happy with his life in a long while.
He was open to the attraction of Equinox. He needed something very different in his life.
And Regina was giving it to him. Both in his home, and by bringing him here.
* * *
She led him through the front dance club area, where blue laser lights flickered and spun across the ceiling and the floor. Women in short leather skirts with chains across their chests and men in black shirts and spiked hair danced in jerky spasms that would have looked comic, if they had not been so serious about it.
Austin gave them credit; he would never have danced like that in public, let alone tried to be as expressive.
Luckily, Regina wasn’t calling on him to dance. Instead, she walked across the floor to an arched doorway on the far side. The door led to a narrow corridor into the secret places of the club lit only by candles in small cubbyholes in the brick walls. They walked a few steps and then Regina opened an ornate wooden door that led to a stairwell down.
As they descended, the air grew cooler. They were now below ground, and the dampness touched the bones with a chill instantly. The bricks changed to walls of rock slabs and concrete as they reached the bottom and stepped into a chapel.
Well, it was like a chapel. But no Christian would have worshipped here. There were candles everywhere – in sconces carved into the walls, in tall metal stands, in candelabras, and on small tables throughout the room; the smell of wax filled and warmed the air as they stepped away from the stairs. The glow of dozens of tiny flames lit the air and the paintings on the walls around them. In a church, these would have been stained-glass depictions of the stations of the cross. But here, they were underground and there was no place for windows.
Nevertheless, the paintings were set up to look like windows. They took the same tall arched shape as church windows, and each painting had a cascade of candles beneath it to light the unholy images depicted above.
Austin’s eyebrows rose as he realized that this was actually a Kama Sutra version of the Christian stations of the cross. To his left, a man in black robes with his hands bound in coils of rope faced a throng of nuns with his head bowed. It might have been a Christian image of some kind, except the nuns were clearly dressed in the translucent habits of the Cloister. In the Bible, Christ had never faced a tribunal of flagrantly erotic sisters.
In another painting, that same nearly naked man, now wearing a crown of thorns, appeared tied to a rack, as three nearly naked women in nun-like headdresses whipped him with long leather straps tipped with hooked barbs. There was nothing religious about the lascivious looks on their faces.
In the next image, the Christ figure dragged a wooden cross past a licentious crowd where women fellated men in the very center of the street as the men pawed the bared breasts of the women leaning beside them, reaching into their loose-hanging tunics to grope and grin.
In a fourth image, two men held the cross off of the shoulders of the Christ figure, as he knelt to appease with his mouth the erection of a fat man standing along the road.
Austin wasn’t religious, but the blasphemy of the images made him uncomfortable regardless. He felt as if he’d seen something forbidden that he shouldn’t have witnessed. Something that he would never be able to erase from his mind.
And so he looked away from the rest of the images on the wall to see that there was a group waiting at the head of the room. Presumably, waiting for him. His heart leapt.
“Welcome,” a tall woman at the center of the group said. She stood apart from the rest, with a uniform that looked slightly more…extreme. She wore the black transparent silk of the nun outfit, but beneath the hazy garb, her body was clearly wrapped in a weave of thin straps and chains. Her head, however, was crowned in the black-and-white headdress of an old-school nun. He recognized her as the mother superior he’d seen on the altar before.
“Who is that?” Austin whispered to Regina.
She smiled and said in a low voice, “The Irreverent Mother. She oversees everything that happens here.”
The woman at the center of the circle stepped forward. “We have been waiting for you to pledge your obedience to us. We trust you are ready to become a member of Equinox.”
Regina squeezed his hand, and then released it. Austin took that as a cue to step forward.
“I am,” he said.
“Regina has spoken well of you and said that you are ready to join our ways. You may not understand them all yet, but with her tutelage, we believe that you will come to the enlightenment that all of us who have gone before you have found here. When you have completed your path, you will find that you will live for Equinox. You will die for Equinox. And you will find your spirit fulfilled in Equinox.”
Austin didn’t know what to say to that exactly, so he remained silent.
“Your instruction is in the hands of your sponsor,” the woman said. “But your first lesson is ours. The lesson of obedience. All in Equinox must learn it. To earn the privilege of domination, you must first understand subjugation.”
She motioned for him to approach.
“Come forward,” she said.
He stepped toward her, and as he did, he could more clearly see the leather straps that bound her body beneath the black silk that mocked a nun’s habit. It served the opposite purpose of a habit, actually. Rather than promote modesty and hiding the enticement of the female form, it displayed all of her curves at their most provocative. Beneath her ‘habit’, the woman was adorned in barbs and chains. Three small chains led from a leather strap across her hips to disappear between her thighs. They connected to the base of a round tube. Austin realized with a shock that the majority of that tube was buried inside the Reverend Mother. She was pleasuring herself with every movement of her legs or hips.
“Kneel,” she commanded.
He dropped to his knees in front of her. His face was level with her hips, and he could see the neatly cropped runway of her pubic thatch just inches from his face. He felt himself blushing. And then she stepped forward, until her crotch was touching his nose. She gripped the back of his head with her hands and pulled him forward, forcing him to breathe in the scent of her sex. He could feel the chains and the base of her dildo toy against his nose.
