by Jeremy Reed
When the dessert was served, it comprised Crimson Tart in the form of sponge cakes with a sauce prepared from blood oranges, grated lemon rind and cream poured over them as a suitable condiment. Each tart had been pierced with a black love-heart on a stick, and there were bitter chocolates in pink foil for the girls on the cake-stand.
Donatien stood up, thanked the assembled guests from both châteaux, and gave a short reading from The 120 Days Of Sodom. In order to impress on the guests their security within the walls of the castle of La Coste, in its turn an invitation to engage in every form of sexual licence, the Marquis reminded the company of the redoubtable impregnability of the Château Silling in his infamous novel. He read out the passage about the topographical inaccessibility of the Château Silling to potential intruders.
'Having passed the village, you begin to scale a mountain almost as high as the Saint-Bernard... Five full hours are required to reach the summit, and there an accident in the form of a crevice above sixty yards wide splits the crest into northern and southern peaks, with the result that, after having climbed up the mountain, it is impossible without great skill, to go back down it. Durcet had joined these two parts, between which a precipice fell to the depth of a thousand feet and more, by a fine wooden bridge which was destroyed immediately the last of the party had arrived, and from this moment on, all possibility of communicating with the Château Milling ceased...'
The Marquis put his book down at this point, and was answered by an antiphonal explosion of champagne corks. The bottles had been assembled on the mini-stage, and now exhaled a Plume of smoke impressive as any dry ice special effects. Donatien had given the signal that for as long as the guests were at La Coste, they were free to engage in every form of sexual fantasy.
Raoul was called to the stage to perform everybody's favourite, ‘The Slave', and positioned amongst the smoking champagne bottles, he agonized his way through a histrionic rendition of the decadent lyrics. He sang the song acapella, placing emphasis on the semi-spoken parts, and concluding with a genuflecting prayer to the god of transsexuals, remained head bowed to the boards, as the applause broke over him in voluble waves.
Champagne, again from the vineyards at La Coste, was poured smokingly into glasses. Magnums were placed on the cake-stand, and the girls began the process of intoxication that would lead to erotomania. Donatien, who was notorious for his laboratory of aphrodisiacs, would later on spike the drinks with stimulants calculated to induce nymphomania and satyriasis in the company.
The guests savoured their Crimson Tart, while Donation again endeavoured to strike a note of enquiry into XZ. He realised that to decode this man's complex psychological structures would demand a mind-bending subtlety, not in any way contingent on sexual liberty. Donatien sensed XZ's predominant asexuality, and the transcendent plane to which the latter aspired. He knew that there would be no easy way to access the man's interior selves, and to hunt out the required formulae from the information highways in his brain. The man clearly existed on various levels of meta-intelligence, and was as much an adept to cyberspace as he was to the occult lodges of spiritual energies. He manifested no interest al all in the beauties in crotchless panties, whom under the influence of champagne were beginning to kick their long, nyloned legs in the air, and to stretch them vertical, as though stressing the axis on which they should be fucked. XZ's disinterest in the proceedings appeared to be tempered with a sense of supercilious remove. Donatien's only knowledge of the man was that he was at La Coste as the spiritual adviser to Leanda and Nicole. As he understood it, XZ was working at retrieving both women from a strictly perverse carnal plane, and at resituating them in a more spiritually evolved cosmos. Marciana had told him that both Leanda and Nicole had gained additional life extensions from their android guru, and had incorporated his knowledge into the deathless lives of those who inhabited the Pleasure Château.
XZ had been discussing with Raoul the concept of surgical streamlining involved in cosmetic surgery. He was telling Raoul of the body's tolerance to bioengineered skin, and how almost any biological material can be coaxed from a laboratory culture dish. Raoul, who had a pathological fear of aging, was listening to XZ's claim that living prostheses were being developed for every organ system in the body. 'There are civilizations,' he was saying, 'in which even brain cells are cloned, and bioengineered as replacements for expended cells.'
Raoul's vanity appeared consoled by the notions of cosmetic streamlining, and XZ promised to send him details of the best cosmetic surgeons. Donatien decided he would address the issue of multiple civilizations, in the hope of breaking into XZ's psychic database. He wondered if there was a connection between the extraterrestrial cloning of brain cells, and XZ's apparent knowledge of deathlessness; and if one was contingent on the other.
Already, the young androgynous man who had been orchestrating a feather to the considerable delight of the redhead on the cake-stand, had clambered on to the artefact, and was giving Assiduous cunnilingus to the object of his desire. He was to be seen timing his tongue like a dessert spoon between the redhead's Invitingly open legs. After several minutes, the two contrived to achieve the backward 69 position, and the entire length of the young man's penis was soon buried in the girl's accommodating epiglottis. The amplified sounds of their mutual sucking were circulated round the hall as an excitant to arouse the guests who were still busy with the Crimson Tart and champagne.
Without any hint of warning, Donatien picked up the guffawing midget, placed him over his lap, and slapped a plate of cherry tart on his scrawny bottom. That done, he playfully collared him, and lifted him on to the cake-stand, where he was left to be the spectacle of the shriekingly amused guests. And as if to enforce his draconian authority as lord of the château, Donatien brought out it newly tuned bullwhip, and lashed the midget's tart-stained buttocks.
Again Donatien resumed his seat with the circumspect reserve of an aristocrat, and took up conversation with his immediate neighbours, commenting on the autumnal clarity of the wines, and of the immaculate Laura, related to the Sades, and illustriously immortalized in Petrarch's Sonnets.
Nicole and Leanda looked scandalized by Donatien's harsh treatment of their pet midget, but were prepared to put it down to ludic impulses inspired by the occasion. The two women had evolved to the sophisticated exploration of extreme erotic refinement, and had little time for Donatien's exhibitionist mania. It was to Marciana in her see-through dress, that they directed their attention, their eyes sitting like buttons on her purple areolas.
They engaged Marciana in reminiscences of the disco diva Dalida, who had died from an overdose of barbiturates in 1976. Nicole, who had experienced a sexual liaison with Dalida, recalled her ostentation, and her popularisation of everything from Courrèges white space-age boots to silver sequined gowns. Dalida, whose friends had included Brigitte Bardot, Charles Aznavour, François Mitterand and Johnny Hallyday, demanded her lovers bring her roses and lingerie each morning. Nicole remembered the coruscating diva sunning in nude panties on her Montmartre balcony, and actually sitting on the wrought-iron balcony railing, so that opportune passers-by and motorists would catch a glimpse of her back or front in her flesh-coloured panties. Dalida would drink champagne out of a glass prepared with rose petals, or hire a street urchin to paint her toenails green, Nicole was recollecting, or pay prostitutes by the hour to divulge the complex gamut of their dungeon experiences. Three of Dalida's lovers, Marciana divulged, had shot themselves through the head, the last of them being Richard Chanfray, the Count of St. Germain, with whom Donatien had practised various mystic rites at La Coste.
A number of guests had prematurely left their seats, and were on the cake-stand, involved in an elastic geometry of oral devotion. Torches had been lit to add ceremonial grandeur to this orgiastic prelude, although it had been made clear in the menu that fucking wasn't permitted in the banquet hall. Donatien who had not removed his gloves throughout the meal, contemplated his wine glass like a jeweller
scrutinising a ruby, Nina was fastidiously touching up his foundation, and erasing specks of cobalt mascara from the dusting powder that sparkled on his upper cheeks. The guests were due to adjourn to the theatre, where cognac and liqueurs would be served; and where liaisons could be struck up, and a harem of girls and boys be introduced as a foretaste of pleasure. But prior to this happening, Donatien decided to try once more and establish inroads into XZ's mental defences. He viewed the man's taciturn alienation with disrelish, and was determined to enter him like a computer virus.
XZ looked with disdain at the young man eating the redhead's pussy like tropical fruit. The girl was instructing the man in how to orchestrate her clitoris, and her mouth was open in a rictus of ecstatic pleasure.
Donatien fantasised about entering the young man's behind, simultaneous with him licking the redhead's volcanic clit, but he dismissed the idea as a cliché, something he would have done three centuries ago. He had moved on from there in his ritualized sodomitical journey to Marciana's inner sanctuary, and dismissed the fantasy as juvenile.
Donatien could hear XZ talking to Nicole of the concept of a body lacking the events of death or of birth. His was a journey towards desomatization and the replacement of the physical with a form of astral virtual reality. The disinherited body would be the site of neurological implants, and the periodic replacement of dead brain cells by their cloned counterparts would establish a blueprint for eternal man.
Donatien synthesised the contents of XZ's conversation in this way, and listened to his particular terminology, which incorporated words like cyborgasm, robotopia, mutated nucleotides and infobots. The man's techno-mystical restructuring had provided him with a post-biological vocabulary. His ideas interfaced neurology with cyberspace.
‘Bodies reconstituted as information floating in data banks can have a profound impact on physical bodies in the real world,' XZ was telling Leanda, 'and are in themselves the impulsed apotheoses of cyberspace.' XZ went on to expatiate about abstract representation of the self and the body, and how greater freedom in the theatre of everyday life can be obtained once the virtual theatre is infiltrated.
Donatien held off and listened to XZ's neutrally delivered encomiums on techno-biology. He realised instinctually that XZ's android physique was dependent on much more than the accoutrements of cyberspace. There was a spirituality to his biomechanical genre which suggested an affiliation to occult orders. or all his speculations about interfacing peripheral nerve axons and integrated circuits to individual nervous systems, the man was additionally informed by the spiritual.
XZ had already sensed Donatien's intentions to break into his knowledge banks, and was clearly resolved to give nothing away. He took a dark blue capsule out of a star-shaped pill container, and swallowed it without ostentation. It was also a gesture of his separation from the progressively coked guests.
Marciana knew only too well that XZ was named after the capsule that he and his initiates had taken in order to transcend genetic death. She knew the story of the Pacific beach happening in which five men and five women had realised what appeared to be immortality of the body, through the taking of a particular chemical compound. Marciana suspected the pharmaceutical aspect of the event to be false. Either that or the capsules would prowl redundant to anybody outside XZ's exclusive cult of initiates.
Donatien sensed that it was the wrong time to engage in a discussion pertaining to the hermeneutics of life and death. He would invite XZ to the luxury of his private rooms in the castle’s subterranean interior the following day. The sexual buzz in the air suggested he go play as an aperitif to the liturgical rituals that would later accompany his taking Marciana to the master bedroom. He had arranged that the whole assembly would be lined up to view her perfect bottom as he escorted her to the permanently sealed doors of his castle sanctuary. But for now, he stood up, offered his sister his arm, and to the accompaniment of servants and slaves, was ushered to the theatre in which he had staged so many scandalous plays.
*
Part IV
The Harem
‘Did I ever tell you,' said the midget, ensconced on a cushion by the central fire, 'the story of Lavonia and her chauffeur?'
Donatien suppressed his irritation at the wizened homunculus's intention of seeking centre stage in the theatre, and left him to address a company warming themselves with cognac and the first explorative caresses that would lead to rampant sex.
The monkey, wearing a red jacket raindropped with rhinestones sat at the midget's feet lining and snorting cocaine. Instead, Donatien settled back into a burgundy coloured velvet armchair, and cradled a three centuries old crystal glass tinctured with a measure of Benedictine. He listened to the midget wheeze out a salacious narrative, and admired him for his temerity in daring to speak in such formidable company.
'There have never been bottomings like it,' said the midget, ‘and all of them with her husband listening outside the door. What's more, they never knew he was a silent voyeur, who after having fed his jealousy with sexual torment, would then go and fuck his brains out at a brothel called the Palais De Muncha. Almost every other afternoon, Lavonia and the chauffeur would get down to it in her bedroom. I had the job of sprinkling drops of Chanel No. 5 on her silk stockings and Janet Reger panties. Anyhow, her chauffeur was a right knicker fetishist, and he'd insist on scoring her panties as a reward for the pleasure he imparted to her back passage. The chauffeur would always be in a cap, and wear suspenders and stockings, largely because Lavonia liked to hear the sound of her three inch nails making ladders in his nylons. Each time she made a tear in his stockings, she would come. And each time he laddered hers, his fucking would stampede. She'd deliberately purchased an old mattress from a bordello, so that the broken springs creaked with every thrust. Her husband would be outside the door with an erection touching his stomach button. Sometimes he'd bring a whore in to suck him while he listened...'
Donatien was partially amused at the story's lack of daring, and enjoyed the prospect of watching the other guests ingest substances, while he remained lucidly in control. His erotological vocabulary, he reflected, would prove indecipherable to his uninitiated guests. He would spare them a journey through the château's depths, for he had decided that they would be horrified by the spectacle they would observe. All of the Sadean menagerie of freaks were concealed in the dungeons. Some of them had been there for centuries, and comprised a gothic tableau of catatonic hybrids with a vampirical taste for blood, and an exemption from time that had them appear to be permanently awaiting release.
Donatien knew only too well the advantages to be gained by keeping his private mythology secret. It was his obsession that nobody should ever gain from his weird energy sources. His nuclear family he had decided, would remain stuffed in his vaults.
The midget had abandoned attempts to draw attention to himself and now sat drinking copious amounts of brandy. Donatien observed the unsubduable egomania that drove the Pleasure Château freak, but let his feelings of hostility go.
Marciana was excited by the angle at which Nicole had arranged her stockinged legs, the intersection of thighs occurring at a point which just edited out the gusset of her panties. The provocation was executed with a feline sultriness that had Marciana marvel at the seductive powers of femininity. Leanda too had contrived to strike a leg pose that was electrifyingly revealing. The latter would periodically take out a scarlet lipstick, and re-establish the arched flourish of her matte bow.
In a flurry of girlie gestures, the girls from the cake-stand came in to mix with the guests. Dressed in diaphanous white robes over their crotchless panties, they playfully sat on laps, and the blonde, called Claudia, was enjoying having her conical breasts tickled by a man and his girlfriend. He could be seen caressing Claudia's right breast, while his girlfriend dabbed at the left with circular pouts. The redhead had formed a definite liaison with the androgynous young man, and was lightly tracing a painted fingernail over the contours of his straining penis.
She refrained from unzipping him, and instead teased him through his black satin jeans.
There were bodybuilders attending the fire, and John and his companion with the green lenses appraised their musculature, and were evidently intent on fucking them in the ensuing orgy. One of the girls was at request sitting on a man's face, while a second one was expertly giving him head.
Donatien made a sign that the harem was to be introduced, although he continued to express disinterest in every form of provocation on show. He appeared like someone constantly looking at another time and another place. Nina was in attendance on him, and had provided second and third whips for his relish as the orgiastic imbroglio deepened. The girls kept away from Donatien as though they were skirting a fire. He had no interest in their generous breasts and round bottoms. They offered the sort of sex he had left behind as a boy in the eighteenth century. He had eyes only for Marciana, and derived pleasure in keeping her apart from the incipient orgy. His delight was in frustrating others who would have liked to gain her constrictive rosette. Donatien's eye searched only for potential flagellants, and at the sound of the approaching harem rattling their ankle chains, he expressed his first proper interest of the evening.
An exotic seraglio of rent boys posing as pashas, and Eastern girls wearing sequined G-strings and six-inch heels, entered the theatre to the heralding note of a trumpeter. Some of the boys were in handcuffs, and the girls wore ankle-chains trimmed with pink marabou. The boys had feathers arranged in their bottoms, in the form of black and purple plumes, and all were new to Donatien in the hope that he would be stimulated to whip them with resounding expertise. It was known to his staff how quickly he tired of a bottom, once he had marked it with a bullwhip, and so procuresses had been at work for weeks in the neighbouring towns selecting penitents for the château. They were to receive the highest rates of pay, but were refused any rights of complaint should Donatien work himself to a state of sexual dementia in administering discipline. The choice was theirs, and so was the possibility that he would make no selection at all from the recruited harem.
