Dark Matter (Modern Erotic Classics)

by Michael Perkins

  She was walking past a large, ugly Evangelist Church with a skin of rough concrete and a tall skirt of wooden fencing, past posters announcing revival weekends and visiting ministers, when she saw a series of posters that frightened her. It was her father and his eyes seemed to be following her. There was to be a Crusade. He was coming to San Francisco.

  She hurried past, not wishing to read any further. Gloom spread through her body, slowing her footsteps. She came at last to a loft building in a street named Saint, north of Market, and climbed the high stone steps to the first floor. There were buzzers in a row and the third one said ‘Society of Spectacles’.

  She pressed it and was buzzed in, stepped inside and looked up at a steep flight of stairs. Waiting at the top was a tall man who beckoned her to ascend. He watched as she climbed, and she didn’t take her eyes from him. He had a broad red-lip-sticked smile, a silver bone in his nose and silver chains running from his nose to earrings in his left ear. A large white feather hung from his other ear. He wore blue eye shadow and a black silk scarf around his shaved, tattooed head. His pierced nipples poked through openings in the studded black leather vest he wore. When she lowered her gaze she saw that fishnet panties cupped his bulging basket. He wore dark stockings, black vinyl boots with stiletto heels — and he carried off this improbable costume with insouciance. It was the way he stood, the fun in his eyes.

  Robin thought he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. He was erect and muscular, and lines of energy streamed from his green eyes. He obviously knew who he was. Robin recalled a Zen Buddhist description: ‘He had attained his skin’. And tattoos covered most of it, she noticed as he loomed over her.

  She was three steps from the landing where he stood when he extended his hand and took hers, pulling her up faster than she expected, towards the light in his eyes.

  “Robin?”

  She lifted a puzzled eyebrow. “Yes.”

  “Laura told me about you. You met at the Spiral Dance.”

  There was a rustle of leather behind them and then Laura Aurora was holding out her long-nailed hands to Robin, pulling her close, smiling, her sharpened fangs glinting in the artificial light. Robin liked her musky smell and the pressure of Laura’s small hard belly against her own flat abdomen, the older woman’s bare breasts soft against her smaller buds. She wore leather and there was a riding crop stuck in her belt. A black motorcycle cap sat like a crown on her long blonde hair. Robin thought she had the incredible beauty that came from a life lived on its own terms.

  “You’ve learned something,” Laura Aurora said, peering into Robin’s eyes, hands on her shoulders.

  “I got a new tattoo,” Robin shrugged.

  “Something more.”

  “I...” She looked up at the man with the silver bone in his nose, who smiled reassuringly.

  “This is Baron. You will be great friends but nothing more than that for a while. Baron is my husband.”

  “I didn’t know man born of woman could look so interesting.”

  “Baron is the entertainment at this party. He’s the star of our ritual. You’ll see. Come.”

  Laura and Baron ushered Robin into a large room that was massive and mysterious to her. The wide board floors were dark and rough from a century of holding machinery. Chains, leather harnesses, dried herbs, mistletoe and ropes hung from heavy exposed beams. Long black curtains covered the wall at the far end, framing the space. Tall candles provided illumination. Incense was burning. She heard the light tap of drumming behind the low hum of conversation. Two dozen people — women, men and the shades of genderfuck between those illusory poles — stood in clumps talking. There were no chairs. Leather, rubber and PVC in subtle fantasies of black predominated, setting off bare arms, breasts, and thighs like jewellery. Beauty joined with outrage to reclaim the primitive — although Baron seemed, to Robin, to have set the standard for presentation of self.

  She stood alone, wrapped in her cape, watching Laura Aurora greet newcomers with ebullient charm, thinking, she is not protected like me, she can be this way because she knows who she is. She thought this without envy, and with growing admiration.

  Baron walked about the large room with the grace and presence of a gladiator about to enter a contest on another planet — say, Venus. His expression was amiable and benign with old friends, lovers and strangers alike, but his large liquid eyes mirrored other realities.

  When what sounded like New Century chant was played on the sound system, Robin had the sinking feeling that something religious was going to happen and that she would not be able to escape. This desperate feeling, based on so much doleful early experience, was nearly always reliable. It was quickly followed by a sense of acute embarrassment for the people around her, who were about to make fools of themselves.

  In the minimalist kitchen area she found soft drinks and fruit. She sipped pear juice and stood listening to the people around her, trying to imagine what roles they played outside the walls of this temple. In her father’s house only he celebrated God. Here, everyone was a celebrant.

  The talk, as it usually did, turned to certain themes of common interest: sex change operations, vampires, AIDS and its victims, the helpful attributes of various gods and goddesses. Robin had mastered the art of listening, and she also heard what was being said in a whispered antiphon by the same voices. They said nature was angry and people were going crazy, that something big was coming, that this was because there was no recognition of the sacred.

  Conversations trailed off. An anticipatory hush fell. People were gathering around Baron, who hung from a rough wooden cross, wrists and ankles strapped to it with leather thongs. Steel needles pierced his scalp in a crown of thorns, and blood streaked down his face, which offered a look at transcendent peace.

  Robin stepped back, stunned. In her confusion she was torn between feelings of awe and terror at the blasphemy. Her mind, so clouded by conditioning, was split by a lightning bolt of recognition. She stood mesmerised as she watched Laura conduct the ceremony of transformation, barely able to breathe.

  Laura Aurora caught the blood that dripped from Baron’s forehead in a silver chalice. She rubbed her naked breasts against his feet and legs. Taking a knife from her waist, she cut his panties from him and exposed his heavy penis. It was thick and veiny with a head like a ripe plum set in wiry black pubic hair.

  On his lower belly was the face of a Japanese demon with open mouth, from which protruded... Baron’s penis, the demon’s tongue.

  Laura moved around the cross in a subtle dance, shaking her breasts and looking up at her crucified husband as he came erect. She rolled his heavy balls in her hands and suddenly squeezed down hard, so that he gasped. Robin looked for a hint of pain on his face and saw only pleasure. Acceptance.

  Laura licked Baron’s balls and took each one of them in her mouth, leaving bright spittle in his pubic hair. He was hard by then, fully and triumphantly erect. Laura slapped his penis with her open hand and only flickering tension in his neck betrayed his pain.

  Robin had moved closer, so that she was standing about three feet from Laura and she could smell their perspiration and sex odours. She felt the urge to rub her own crotch against a pole.... Her breasts felt heavy under the vinyl.

  Laura held Baron’s erection in her hand like a trophy. It was fully eight inches long and so thick Laura’s hand barely fit around it. It was being offered to the celebrants: eat and drink of my body. No one stepped forward.

  Laura licked the underside of Baron’s shaft and then closed her lips around his heavy meat, her cheeks swollen with the effort to swallow as much of it as she could. She moved her head back and forth exciting him so that he gasped. Hearing this she stepped back from him and turned unexpectedly to Robin.

  “Join us,” she said, kissing her hard upon the lips. As if in a trance, Robin stepped forward and kissed the bulbous plum that crowned Baron’s penis. Her wide mouth opened to admit this plum, while her tongue pierced the slit and she tasted his s
alty-sweet pre-cum. She pulled away only when Laura said, “Don’t make him come, please. That’s for me.”

  Robin stepped back, not daring to look at those who had watched her sucking Baron’s cock. She knew she had crossed some boundary line and would be different henceforth. Bolder.

  Laura put her husband’s penis between her breasts, pressing the soft flesh around it, and he began to ejaculate into the air. She caught most of his emission in the silver chalice she had previously filled with his blood — gout after gout of sperm — while he screamed his ecstasy into the still temple. No one moved.

  Laura, drops of semen on her face and breasts, held the chalice in the air and put it to her lips. Robin watched intently, now envious of her new friend, as she drank the mixture down without removing the chalice from her lips. When she lowered it, her lips were dark with blood and semen. She smiled.

  She was magnificent, a high priestess of redemptive lust.

  A low cheer went up and Robin watched the faces around her. They looked as if they had been struck by an experience of overwhelming power, a look Robin had seen on the faces of snake handlers and people so possessed they babbled in tongues.

  She felt weak. The ritual was both beautiful and barbaric, transgressive and redemptive, and it had touched something inside her that the Christ story had never reached. She had no idea what it meant, but it was powerful, both in its initial impact and its resonance in her being. It was a feeling like seduction. She went to look for a bathroom, hoping to recover herself in private before having to talk with anyone. But there was no bathroom, only a restroom of the kind you find in schools and churches. There were four stalls separated by metal partitions and four gleaming white urinals. Above the urinals, signs had been placed: piss, blood, come, go.

  Someone was in one of the stalls. Robin went down the line, but the only one that seemed clean was next to the occupied stall. She went in and sat on the toilet, hiking her skirt to her soft narrow waist. She never wore panties unless requested to for play purposes, so her bare buttocks felt the chill of the heavy white wooden seat. She felt flushed, and her clitoris was throbbing. Reaching between her legs, she wet two fingers with cold toilet water and brought them up to touch her sex. What she had witnessed released something in her, opened a door she had kept closed since leaving her father’s church. It freed her, and it frightened her.

  Her fingers probed into her sticky vagina and she sighed deeply. She was safe here in this cubicle. She could pray.

  This is my prayer to the goddess, she thought defiantly. This is who I will be from now on.

  Then came the old question: but who was she?

  I am an animal. My sexuality is ravenous. My anger is enormous. I am she who masturbates in a strange toilet.

  Her fingers moved faster, darting in and out of her vagina, rolling her clitoris between her nails, one finger exploring her anus, her left hand caressing her breasts.

  There were noises in the next stall, so surprising Robin that she released a stream of warm urine, filling her hand and trickling hotly from her vagina and splashing into the toilet. Her nipples tightened.

  There was a soft rap on the door of her partition. She didn’t breathe. The door was pushed against and rattled.

  “Robin? I think that’s you in there. You smell like nobody else but you. Power pheromones. Open the door, okay?”

  Robin numbly pushed the lock free.

  Laura Aurora stepped in and pushed the door closed behind her. “You’re doing the same thing I was doing. That scene turned up my thermostat.“

  Laura’s usual benign smile was now a leer. Her fingers touched Robin’s face, explored her lips and then her neck as if looking inside her skin for something lost. Robin trembled: this woman was a witch.

  “I’m wet,” Robin said weakly, “I’m hot.” Words were inadequate.

  “What did you think? I was nervous that I might do something wrong, but I think it worked out very well for the first time.”

  “It was breath-taking.” Robin took her wet hand from between her legs and put it on Laura Aurora’s thigh, moving it in wet circles up to the soft flesh of her inner thigh closest to her crotch. Her skin was soft over tight flesh. Laura’s hands stroked Robin’s short hair, snaking down her front to hold Robin’s breasts as if they were doves fluttering to be released.

  “It took your breath, my little darling? I’m glad. But did you feel anything?” Laura’s voice was a hoarse whisper that trailed off.

  “Passion,” Robin said. “I felt passion. He was burning up and you were burning up.”

  “Kiss me, Robin.” Laura bent over her and pressed her mouth against Robin’s, who opened her lips to drink from the older woman’s mouth. Taste of semen, dark taste of blood. An alarm went off: what of AIDS?

  And the answer came: This cannot be refused. This is part of the ceremony of my rebirth.

  The kiss was endless, and Robin’s eyes closed, feeling Laura’s hand between her legs, one finger in her vagina and another in her anus. She was enfolded in Laura’s being as the narcotic kiss sent flickers of orgasmic delight to her every cell.

  It wasn’t painful when it happened and she realised immediately that she knew it would happen and she found that she wanted it immensely: the bite of steel at her neck, the release of the spirits of the blood. Laura drank from her like a kitten licking milk until Robin felt light as an angel.

  “Who are you really, Laura?”

  Laura stood up, licking her lower lip where a drop of blood lingered. “I’m anything you want me to be, Robin. Now you’re part of me. I’m your mirror image twenty years in the future. I’m your Guardian witch. I’m the goddess Hera, wife of Zeus — who screws around a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. I’m your friend, and there’s one more thing I want to do with you.”

  Laura’s hands took Robin’s head and pulled it gently to her sex. “Do me with those lips, those sexy lips of yours, Robin.”

  In a dream, in a haze, Robin’s tongue licked Laura Aurora’s plump vulva. She took Laura’s clitoris between her lips and pressed down, sucking and tasting the juices of the goddess. Two fingers explored her narrow vagina and then she plunged her tongue in that succulent hole. Her hands grasped Laura’s muscular smooth buttocks and pulled her close. Vaginal secretions burned in her nose as her mouth explored Laura’s centre. Lust rode her bareback and whipped her so that her mind could make no images of what she was doing. When Laura’s hot piss filled her mouth she drank it as if it were the pear juice she’d had earlier.

  “Fist me!” Laura ordered, and Robin made a fist of her small hand and slowly penetrated Laura’s wet cunt, letting it adjust as she pushed it up until her hand was half-way swallowed.

  “Fuck me, Robin!” It was as if Robin’s moving arm was what held Laura up. The partition shook with their movements which increased in intensity until Laura exploded: “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh...” she babbled, with tears in her eyes, then hissed at the end like a cat and Robin remembered she was a witch.

  They took their time at the sink cleaning up. Laura’s bag contained make-up she shared with Robin, who sought to cover the punctures in her neck with powder.

  “Is there somebody, Robin? Or will you play with us — with me and Baron?”

  Robin frowned. Her back hurt. She could feel the tattoo bleeding.

  “His name is Buddy Tate,” she said it like a curse.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “I am afraid of him. I want to hurt him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I think he’s got something I need.”

  “There are millions of pricks in the world.”

  “I mean he’s got a part of me in him. So I want to hurt that part.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I’d like to see him tied up and spread-eagled. Fucked by Baron and every stiff prick and dildo in this place. Set his heart on fire, and, then when he was smoking I’d cut his throat and put i
t out.”

  “Whew. Your imagination is showing. And what did you do?”

  “Fucked him in the ass with a dildo and left him wanting more. I disappeared because he said yes to something I asked him to do. But he’s inside me, somehow.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just infatuation. It’ll wear off.”

  “He’s not like anyone.”

  “What did you ask him to do?”

  “I asked him to kill my father.”

  Laura Aurora paused and blotted her lipstick on a piece of toilet paper. She turned down the corners of her mouth in a doubtful arc.

  “Why do you want to kill someone?”

  “Not someone. My father.”

  Laura shook her head. “You are more complicated than I thought.”

  “I’m bad.”

  “Well, we’re all bad girls here. We do things and believe things that most people think are terribly bad.”

  “No, I mean bad. Doomed to hell.”

  “You don’t really believe that Christian stuff, do you?”

  “It’s hard to escape from. It runs in the family.”

  “Bible thumpers?”

  “Did you ever hear of Thomas Flood?”

  “Oh, no. Goddess, no! You aren’t related to him — the Crusade against sex guy? Armageddon?”

  “My father.”

  “Then you are bad.” Laura said, giving Robin a hug. “Very bad.” She stepped back with an appraising eye.

  “I can’t get away from him until he’s dead, Laura.”

  “You got away from him in the bathroom. When I nicked your throat and tasted your blood, you were... initiated. You’re about to be reborn. You see, in a way, this gathering is for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you. Iolanthe is going to give birth.”

  Iolanthe was a pre-op with a wonderful smile, long dark hair and large breasts. Her penis was shrunken and still. She was lying naked on a long table, pillows under her head and her knees up in the birthing position. Robin and Laura watched with the rest of the gathering as Iolanthe’s pretty husband breathed and grunted with her.