by Jeremy Reed
The leather floor cushioned acoustics, but Betty heard the jab of two pairs of spiked heels cross the intervening divide, and stop at the level of her feet. She couldn't look round to see who was standing behind her, and she tensed in the uncertainty. Someone or something was licking her toes, and adrenalin shot through her circuit as she realised it might be the leopard. And if it was, the leopard might be instructed to work its way upwards to her thighs. She was still staring at a blue screen. She believed that if she projected hard enough she could travel through it. Her astral propulsion would power her like a jet. Her captors would find nothing but a hole burnt in the blue.
The asperity of a hot tongue interrogating her toes, ceased. No-one came forward. Betty lay there every nerve alert, as the silence was punctuated by the rapid breathing of an animal. Then it appeared. The leopard walked along her right side on an extended lead, and sat down in front of her head. Betty was able to observe how the cat's feet had been fitted into four high heels, the live inch stilettos that Nicole wore with her constrictive leather skirt. The consequences were those of creating a surreal monster. It also meant that although the animal was deprived of claws, the leather heels would be equally effective instruments should the creature lash out with its paws. Betty thought she was connected with a nightmare. At any moment she would wake up and consign the incident to a dream. The leopard settled down and lay on the floor, eyes lazy with potential menace. Betty felt nothing. Fear had displaced her. She wasn't here or anywhere.
And quite suddenly there were two figures standing with their backs to her, right and left of the leopard. They were dressed in identical black leather. The curve of their figures told Betty that they were women. She imagined it was Leanda and Nicole, features disguised by masks that left holes for the eyes and mouth. Neither of the two paid any attention to her. Rather, they acknowledged the torches, and stared direct at the flame. When she looked again she could see that one of the women was performing a rite with a black dildo. She was intoning a chant, and offering the mamba to the statue. She held it to the marble lips, and Betty heard the voice engaged in a liturgical imprecation. The leopard yawned, and flexed its stiletto paws. Betty had the apprehension that the dildo was being offered up prior to its entering her. She had a vision of the two women strapping it on respectively, and violating her with the fierce pretence of being men. And where were the two men? She could hardly believe they had left the château after dinner, their long wavering headlights pushing white feelers through the country dark. Were they in a relationship, the two of them hiring a penthouse overlooking the harbours, the red and green shipping lights winking on the night waters? And did the man with emerald lenses change them to violet or orange? Betty's suppositions were conjectural. She had lived for so long amongst people who were of indeterminate or exchangeable gender, that she took no-one's sex at face value. She knew only the odd and the extreme. Men who dressed up as women for sex, were to her the norm. And she had been had in the past by women who strapped on dildos with the intention of entering her as men. She knew a client who kept a cupboard full of interesting shapes, colours and sizes. Some of them were personally made for her. There were green, blue, mauve, silver and gold artificial phalli which for her extended the vocabulary of sexual possibilities. How many women or men had been made love to by a gold penis on which was drawn the eye of Horns? And for purposes of pure decoration, the woman had dildos encrusted with jewels, metallic or velvet phalli which instead of flowers she placed in a vase beside her bed. That room came back to her now. The woman pleased that she wasn't a real man, for the ritual surrounding the wearing of a dildo thrilled her. So too did the making out of instructions for the craftsman who delivered her specifications in a series of satin shoeboxes.
Having offered the mamba up as part of a weird ritual, the leather figure kissed it, and returned to her standing position facing the statue. Betty kept blanking out by closing her eyes, in order to avoid the leopard. The creature remained slack, but tensely alert, It won like a tuned guitar, waiting to be played. The two figures continued to stand with their backs to her, and then one of them, without warning, spoke.
'You will be released at dawn, and driven back to the city tomorrow tonight. You will never know this place nor will you remember where it is situated. You are a paid captive. You are expected to obey. You have been given a drug which will subliminally alter your conception of time and space for a week. Your memory of what has happened here will be erased. So too the knowledge that you have eaten flesh from the sacrificial penis.For it was penis we ate at dinner, that most subtle of homeopathic aphrodisiacs. Your priapic virtues will increaseenormously as a consequence.'
Betty listened as the female voice she took to be Leanda's continued. Not even her inurement to the most bizarre fetishes had prepared her for the idea of ingesting penis, and then being confronted by a leopard in a dungeon. The voice was informing her that she would be their unconditional slave for the night. She would be led from the dungeon to an attic. As the voice ceased, so the two oriental girls came into the dungeon, released Betty from the adhesive tabs, and placed her in soft leather handcuffs. They had changed their costumes to medieval ones cut in scarlet and black velvet. They served as officials, and Betty was led out of the dungeon into a long bluely lit corridor. There were recessed windows and heavy wooden doors concealing entry into other rooms. To Betty it was like walking into the second of the three films she had observed on the blue screen.
At a certain point in the corridor, two figures appeared in front of them. It was the midget, easily identifiable by his rhinestone encrusted coat, walking ahead of the monkey. They were carrying what looked like a black coffin, open and uninhabited, and the monkey's red jacket made a bold statement in the lugubrious shadows. The march had become a procession to the château's interior. Betty had been put in a red and black robe, and she walked silently between her guardians. The corridor seemed endless, but cut off at a right angle, and they proceeded through the open doors of a vast hall, the black and white marble floor reminding her of the lozenged tiles a client had in her swimming pool.
The hall was furnished with baroque mirrors, their tranquillizing and dead faces suggesting traps into which the observer would disappear. Opulent cobalt and dark green rugs formed a mosaic around an open hearth. The logs must have been recently lit, for orange tigers leapt up the chimney. The detailed compartmentalization of walls and ceilings suggested an attenuated accuracy towards gothic. There was a glass case in a recess, presenting what to Betty looked like human skulls. A complex vocabulary of dissolute nerves had ordered the design. Gothic mingled with a clinically minimal modernity. Glass tabletops contained books splashed across their surfaces, nothing was random, everything to the last displacement was stylised, and written into the owner's nerves. Heavy red roses, involuted and inviting the eye to meet the fold of a turban, flopped from a dark blue vase. There were mummies stood up vertical in glass cases, positioned on either side of a door that admitted the procession into another corridor. The coffin bearers continued at an undifferentiated pace, the monkey squealing at intervals in querulous chatter. Betty followed, taking in everything as a series of film stills. It was like being involved in a shoot for a perverse rock video. She was the S&M victim being forcibly marched towards sexual retribution. And the corridor continued with the same monotony as its predecessor, only the subdued ceiling lighting was set at a lower volume, making the journey one carried out in semi-darkness.
At the end of the corridor they began mounting a broad wooden staircase. There were statues placed on the landing, one of them representing a black hermaphrodite, and the other a neo-classical bacchante with an erect phallus protruding through decorative leaves. Their footsteps resounded in the passage, before they ascended a flight of spiral stairs. Betty could see from the tilted-back coffin, that it was empty. The midget and the monkey maintained a practised equibalance in climbing the stairs. The ascent was at a slower pace and the four women removed their h
eels to climb the steeper gradient. They were going up towards the attic, and despite the pathologically maintained decorum of the company, Betty found it hard to take the proceedings literally. She was a specialised hooker, and not a passive victim to be exploited by orgiastic rites. There was still a way out if she didn't panic, but her recall of how she had got here, and where she had come from, was diminishing. She grabbed at the idea the subliminal drug must have entered her chemistry. Did she know her name? What was her address and telephone number? 'Was there a past and a future? Was Nile really back in her room dreaming that she was being conducted through a labyrinth of mazes to the château's secret rooms? Betty was feeling progressively disorientated. The sadistic metaphors and politicized suggestions directed at her were permeating her unconscious.
She imagined that she was being led to her execution. They would dress her in a black cocktail dress after her death and place her in the coffin. They would bury her in the château's vaults, and like Madeleine Usher she would rise and walk through the corridors at night. There would be flame issuing from her mouth, her hands, and her feet. She would be a vampirical simulacrum, rating up people's desire with fire. Ashes would be found in the sheets in the morning. And in time the château would auto-combust from her inimical charge.
Betty plotted these things as they mounted the final flight of stairs. The top floor was brightly lit in contradistinction to the subdued light of the lower floors. Betty was shocked to see a menagerie of creatures in cages staring out at her from their various locations. There were cockatoos, a yellow eyed wolf, diamondback snakes, an albino monkey with blue eyes, an armadillo, and what she took to be a mongoose. The landing had been made into a surreal zoo, the exhibits juxtaposed to cause maximum discord.
Betty kept wondering if she wasn't on a hallucinogenic drug cocktail. An acid compound spiked with morphine. She was led into a bedroom that had been prepared in advance. A four poster bed draped with black silks stood central to the room. A mirrored ceiling reflected a mirrored floor. There were three nooses suspended from different planes of the ceiling. A metaphysic existed between the elaborately decorative and the incorporation of brothel fetish. Betty was led to the coffin which had been placed open on the bed, and told to lie face down inside it. She obeyed with a compliancy that shocked her only into an awareness of how little control she had over her actions. The red and black tunic removed, she lay naked on the silk lining. It hardly surprised her that the black coffin should be lined with indigo silk. She had no conception of how many people were in the room, nor if the midget and his red coated monkey assistant had retired back to the château's ground floor.
The drug was causing her to relax and accept her vulnerability. She was left alone, but she could hear the regular cut of a whip laying into soft buttocks. It was a dull monotonous sound that lacked human punctuation. By averting her head slightly she could see that it was the monkey who was mechanically bullwhipping what looked like the man who had worn emerald lenses at table. He was wearing leather trousers with the back cut out, and the monkey indifferently lacerated the area of flesh presented by this exposure. The punishment was too disconnected from the monkey's own sense of sexual stimulus to indicate any mutual arousal. The severity of the blows were neither modified nor increased.
Betty heard rituals being conducted in Latin, a liturgical incantation delivered antiphonally by male and female voices. She understood that some rite of sexual magic was taking place. An offering was being presented to a phallic altar by a man whose skin was coloured by bright red make-up, an impasto foundation which was toned to resemble a Matisse red. His eyebrows were two black brushstrokes. Betty thought she heard the resonating vibration of gongs operating at a frequency just recognisable to normal audile receptivity. She went in and out of consciousness. Betty could hear the macrocosmic and microcosmic terminals being invoked, and the words power-zone and scarlet woman. Offerings were being made on a psychosexual plane. A sacrifice was being prepared.
At some stage Betty was commanded to stand. She stood up in the coffin and felt hands on her shoulders turning her round. It was a masked stranger she faced, two eye-slits and a gash of red lipstick showing through the mask. The woman manoeuvred her so that she followed her into the coffin, her legs going up over Betty's shoulders, and there really wasn't space, and she was awkward with her hands constricted, backing off so as to bring a division between their bodies, and then sensing the woman's urgency, bringing her tongue into contact with her clit, stepping up its sensitivity as though she was entering the door of a cave to an interior forest. There was a woman inside the entrance with violet hair and leopard spot skin. She was setting fire to trees and the animals were running. They were bolting for shelter, or swimming across great lakes. The woman inside was distraught with frustration. She wanted to be forced back by the intrusive thrusts of a giant phallus. She was hoping for stars to explode in her veins.
Betty felt herself being entered from behind. She knew she was being taken by a woman wearing a dildo, for the insertion was cold, and the rigidity of the object inflexible. Betty settled to the pain of tight entry, and the liturgical imprecations grew in their intensity as the lights dropped and were replaced by black torches. From the rhythmic pressure asserted, Betty could tell that the woman mechanically pumping her was herself being possessed from behind. An orgiastic chain was giving physical expression to the ceremonial chant. But the drug was again in evidence and Betty found herself taken on intimate biochemical journeys. In her mind she was swimming underwater, her body brushing against dolphins, the blue panes of water opening fluently as she accompanied the fish to a submerged ruin, Betty was open to the sound-waves transmitted by the dolphin's nasal passages, and her correspondingly alerted sense perceptions had her body glow. She had followed the school to a barnacle-encrusted hulk. There were ten dolphins that formed an exact circle round two drowned bodies that continued to copulate despite their being dead. And once, when the man temporarily withdrew him penis from the woman, she could see that it was gold. Then he swung his head back and stared at her, and his eyes were gold. She wanted to ask the couple why none of them needed to breathe, but the dolphins created an impenetrable vibrational wall, and she had to remain a detached spectator to events. It was when she realised she wasn't breathing, that the scene changed, and she spiralled back direct to the surface.
Betty wasn't being spared by her partner, and while she drifted a man had thrust himself into her lips. His penis tasted of lipstick.
