Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  “Of course, of course,” Dorian whispered. “We shall go outside and inhale the cool, sobering breeze. Then we may go have a cup of tea somewhere. There is no need for you to be subject to all this. You are none of what they say. And Lord Wotton—while I’ve yet to make his acquaintance—why, his doings reflect nothing on you. Though I am not inclined to believe what they say of him.”

  He wanted to give her tousled, blond head a kiss but did not want her to be heckled further.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” he said and, shielding her with his arms, escorted her out of the packed room. A brawl was beginning, and Dorian sensed that if they didn’t get out quickly, they’d be cornered.

  Helen murmured something inaudible as they were walking out.

  “Shh,” said Dorian, patting her back. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Poor dear! No matter the steel façade, she was beneath it, like all women, mere porcelain and pain. He squeezed her shoulder and led her toward the lobby. From there they would exit onto the main street and hail a hansom. They could find peace in a sleepy tavern nearby. He’d have a stiff Alexander. The lady would have a hot tea to calm her jangling nerves.

  “No!” she cried, as if she’d heard the non-alcoholic recommendation. She jerked free of him.

  “What’s the matter?” Dorian asked.

  Helen started toward him and put her hand on his belt and tugged until it loosened. She held the buckle teasingly and laughed at the look of surprise on his face. Her eyes were gleaming onyx. Dear God, had she gone mad? He ought to have known better than to get involved at this capacity with a woman. Women were always going mad. It was like going anywhere else for them, only they didn’t announce it like they did when going to the store. They just went. One moment they were there, the next they had gone to madness, where they could stay for as long as they damn well liked.

  “Helen, please stop.”

  She pouted like a child denied her playtime. With some strength, Dorian removed her hands.

  “Let’s go,” he said, starting back toward the exit.

  “Sybil Vane!” she cried, standing with her arms crossed. She was only one person—a woman, at that—but it looked like it would take an army to move her.

  “What about her?” he asked, and then asked himself, yes, what about her? Where had she gone? Why hadn’t she made an appearance backstage?

  “I know where to find her,” said Helen. Her voice was her own again, husky and sure.

  “Helen, this is play will be showing for a month,” said Dorian. “We can find her any night of the week. Let’s get away from these jeering fools.”

  “No,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Follow me.”

  She veered them down a gas-lit hall with arched medieval doors, some looking like they’d been shut for years, with rusty knobs and sodden cracks. Others were ajar with smoky light peering out. There was a woman laughing somewhere. The air was dank.

  At the very end of the hall, Helen stopped before a door, which read Dressing Room on a slat of wood glued haphazardly to the top. Underneath it was a dingy chalkboard bearing, in a dusty yellow chalk, a name: Sybil Vane.

  Helen stepped back and raised a brow at Dorian, leaving this task to him.

  Reluctantly, he knocked.

  “No, fool!” cried Helen. “Don’t attract attention!”

  “Pardon?” asked Dorian.

  “Oh!” cried Helen, as if she were dealing with an incorrigible child. She pushed Dorian aside and gave the knob a hard turn, pushing her weight against the door until it barreled open.

  It was a dressing room, indeed, although a dingy one. The wallpaper, a pale-blue paisley, was peeling, revealing crusty, water-damaged wood. The room was only big enough to hold a few people, and not comfortably. A small dressing table took up much of the space. Plates of powders and unguents covered it messily with stray brushes hanging around them. The mirror was spotted and cracked so that when someone looked in it, he became doubled and ghastly. A flickering lantern was the only source of light.

  “Sybil,” called Helen in a low voice. “My dear Sybil, I have brought him to you.” She crept to a tall wardrobe that had cheap fabrics sticking out of its not-quite-shut doors. Helen opened them, and a crouched figure stirred. Dorian glimpsed a tendril of coppery-red hair.

  “Sybil, darling,” said Helen. “I promised to bring you your Prince and here he is.”

  Helen signaled for Dorian to come over. She held a finger over her lips, indicating silence.

  “She’s a wee bit timid,” Helen said. “Come.” She reached for Dorian’s hand. Reluctantly, he gave it.

  He crouched in front of the cabinet in which Sybil Vane crouched.

  “She’ll come around,” whispered Helen in his ear, and then went to the dressing table, where she pulled out a chalice of emerald liquor—absinthe. Dorian turned to her for an explanation. She merely winked at him.

  “Romeo always keeps a goblet of love potion for his Juliets,” she said, pouring a glass and setting it to heat over the flickering lantern.

  Dorian touched the girl’s shoulder with a kind of cautious gentleness he’d only known when, as a child, he’d held his hand out to feed wild doves.

  “Sybil,” he said.

  She turned to him. Her face was tear-streaked. There was terror in her large brown eyes. Up close he saw that her hair was dyed with henna. Her roots showed an ashy brown-blonde.

  “Prince Charming?” she said, her voice cracking.

  Dorian felt that if he answered, “No,” the girl would become more upset. He placed a hand on her huddled knees. She was trembling.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is Prince Charming. Come, let’s get you out of here.”

  He lifted his hand and held it to her. She looked at him, her lips quivering, and shook her head.

  “It’s all right. I can take you out of here and get you a nice meal. A hot meal. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded and looked up, trying to show him something. He followed her gaze and shrieked at what he saw. The long satin ribbon that had held her Juliet locks back was now binding her wrists to a metal spoke in the cabinet wall.

  His shriek startled her and she looked at him in panic.

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. “Let me just—” he began. “If I may unwrap this, all right?”

  She did not refuse so he went into the dark, mothy cabinet. Behind him, Helen called out. “The drama, the drama,” she said. “It goes on well after the curtain has fallen!”

  “Helen,” called Dorian, wrestling with the tie. She’d made quite a knot.

  “She told me to wait for you,” murmured Sybil. “She told me you would come. I saw you that night. That night at the theater. You saw me. You saw me, too. I wanted so badly for you to come and talk to me afterward. But you disappeared. I thought it too good to be true, a man like you to come to talk to me.”

  The girl giggled through her tears. She was either drugged or totally mad.

  “Helen, what have you done?” he cried, as he finally undid the knot. With her arms free, the girl closed like a Chinese fan unto herself.

  “Oh, Dorian, please,” said Helen. “If you want to make a scene, the stage is out there.” She stooped down to him and held out a glass of absinthe. “Careful,” she warned. “Hot.”

  Dorian took the glass and, not knowing what to do with it, offered it to the poor girl. She grabbed it in a flash and drank.

  “Good girl!” cried Helen.

  Dorian turned to her. “Have you gone completely mad?” he cried.

  “Get the glass back,” instructed Helen.

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” said Helen.

  Frazzled, Dorian reached for the glass. Sybil handed it to him with a look of appreciation. He returned it to Helen.

  “Greedy girls actresses are,” said Helen, examining the empty glass.

  “Helen,” said Dorian, with the girl’s dreamy eyes upon him. “I want to know what is goi
ng on. And I want to know now.”

  “I got us Sybil Vane!” cried Helen, heating up another glass.

  “This is quite a way to go about it,” said Dorian.

  Helen clucked her tongue happily. “Isn’t it, though?”

  “The amount of trouble you may get into for this—” started Dorian, but Helen cut him off.

  “The amount of trouble I may get into for this?” she repeated. “Me alone? Who is the Prince Charming here who has just set her free, for whom she was tied up in the first place? Now, Dorian, don’t be daft. Get what you came for.”

  She handed him the hot glass. He looked from it to Helen to the girl, dumbfounded. The girl smiled at him as if to agree with Helen. There was no longer fright in her eyes, only stupefaction. She slid out from the cabinet, still in full, gaudy costume, and spread herself like a wounded bird on Dorian’s lap.

  “Prince Charming,” she murmured. “Are you going to make sweet love to me now?” She rustled around in a daze. “I’m sorry to tell you I am not a virgin.” Her eyes twinkled with sleazy secrets. Dorian took a gulp of the absinthe and waited as his senses muddled into a new keenness.

  Before he knew it, he had finished the glass and Helen was back at the table refilling it.

  “Will you . . .” began the girl in a slur. “Finish untying me?” She laughed and her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Dorian was slow to register, but then understood that she wanted him to unfasten her corset. Blearily, he obliged. A heap of paper stuffing came out of her bodice—support to amplify her small breasts that now lay vulnerably before him. Dorian wondered how old the girl was, estimating that she couldn’t be more than sixteen. What sort of life had she led? He touched her breasts lightly, as if they would tell him, and Sybil Vane writhed. She’d led a life of writhing.

  “Prince Charming, are you going to make me your Princess . . . ?” she asked and paused to think of a title for herself. Unable to invent one, she giggled. “Your Princess Charming?” she said and laughed maniacally. She had teeth missing in the back of her mouth.

  Helen stepped in and deftly undid the girl’s petticoats, bringing them to a rustling halt against her ankles. She ran her fingers up the girl’s legs. Sybil giggled squeamishly.

  “That tickles!” she cried.

  Dorian felt he had nodded off for a moment— absconded with a beautiful dream in which a harp was playing in mellifluous splendor and Rosemary, her sweet body lain out before him, was quivering at his touch. He snapped back into reality and saw his hands still on the slight breasts of the young but used actress. Helen was head deep in the girl’s knickers.

  Sybil Vane moaned contentedly, her eyes still cast in a fantasy on Dorian’s. She brought her hand to his face as if to touch stained glass, a look of worship filling her eyes.

  “My prince,” she said, flinching as Helen’s tongue darted into her. “My beautiful prince, won’t you kiss me?”

  And so he did, rubbing her breasts. With a tongue between either of her lips, the girl cooed and wiggled. Together, Dorian and Helen were coaxing her into exultation. It was a kind of erotic choreography, and soon they traded places. Helen was perched at the girl’s breasts, sucking her nipples, and Dorian was between her legs, rousing her with his fingers.

  “Yes, my Prince,” she crooned. “Come inside me now.”

  The absinthe and the opium and the gin were all simmering in Dorian’s veins, blurring his senses, connecting them to each other and to everything around him. Sight, sound, smell, touch—it was all melting into one evanescent channel. And then there was his cock, which was taking it all in, hard as iron.

  As he mounted Sybil, Helen moved aside. She sat on the floor beside them, watching as Dorian entered Sybil, relishing in the girl’s cry of completeness when he pushed his cock into her and began to thrust. She was not as tight as he’d have liked, but he still felt a gentle bursting at her thick seams.

  “Oh!” screamed Sybil. “Yes! My Prince!”

  Dorian and Helen locked eyes, and she started rubbing herself in a fury, moaning and trembling as she brought herself to a near-instantaneous orgasm. Her face was smeared with the girl’s furtive juices, and she had a drunken smile on her face. Dorian continued to thrust into the girl, feeling he could go on forever without coming. The girl’s pussy tightened with each of his thrusts and he felt she was on the brink of coming. He went on thrusting, holding her hips as they gyrated and went into a flurry of spasms.

  “Ah!”

  The girl came in a fast flicker and flung her arms back in surrender as she subsided, panting.

  Dorian felt nowhere near close to his conclusion, but went on drilling into her. He could go on forever if he must, but must he? Something was wrong.

  Helen sensed it. She got up from her sunken post at the wall and came over to Dorian. She crouched down beside him, studying his position. The girl lay languidly beneath him.

  “Hi,” she said dreamily to Helen.

  Helen looked at Dorian, who was furious in concentration. She clucked her tongue, assessing the situation, then went to the wardrobe where the girl had been tied up. She returned with the long yellow ribbon that had been used to hold Juliet’s hair up, and then Sybil Vane’s wrists.

  “Get up,” she instructed Dorian, putting a hand firmly on his sweaty shirt. He had only undone his pants. He pulled out of the girl, who promptly wailed.

  “Oh, Prince Charming!” she cried. “How huge and perfect you are inside me!”

  Helen grabbed the girl by both arms.

  “You, too,” she said. “Get up.”

  The girl rolled up drowsily. She looked around the room as if trying to remember where she was.

  “Come on,” said Helen, bringing the girl to the dressing table. She kicked one of its legs to see how sturdy it was, then tied the ribbon to the leg and the ribbon to the girl’s wrists.

  “Again?” murmured the girl.

  “Nothing is the same thing twice,” replied Helen.

  “Oh,” the girl said, looking at Dorian, confused. Helen’s abstruse witticisms were lost on the poor girl.

  “It’s all good for your Prince Charming,” said Dorian.

  Sybil smiled. “Yes,” she said. “My Prince Charming.”

  As he watched Helen tighten the knot around the girl’s wrists, he felt his erection grow. He was desperate to fuck the girl. Helen posed Sybil Vane on all fours, on her elbows and knees. Her ass was surprisingly large for her build. In the scant light it was luminous, the slender dark crack running between its cheeks gleaming, an ideal point of entry.

  Dorian jumped up and seized the girl roughly by the arm. He mounted her and stuck his unyielding cock inside her, where he’d been before. The girl cried out, happy to be filled up again by him. He grabbed her hair, pulling her head back. He did not want to kiss her, but he did want to bite her, and he sunk his teeth into her neck with animal hunger. The girl cried out. When Dorian took his mouth away, he tasted blood.

  “Do you like it, whore?” he asked, enraptured by his climaxing and not guarding his thoughts. Yes, she was a whore, and she was his to do with whatever he wanted. He plowed harder and harder into her, and when he felt himself about to come, he started hitting the girl—not just on her ass, but on her back and neck. His cock stiffened and grew closer to erupting its seed when he got the idea to hold her by the neck. How frail and small her bones were. It would take so little to break her. He went on thrusting as little choking sounds escaped her mouth. He came at last and remained in paradise for a stretch of moments, then let go of the girl and rolled over onto his back, breathless.

  Sybil Vane was making the ugliest noises—gasping, coughing, and sounding like she may retch.

  “Untie me!” she screamed.

  Helen, who had been sitting out of view with a glass of absinthe, approached the girl and offered her the glass. The girl shook her head.

  “Untie me!” she repeated, sobbing.

  “I shall untie you,” said Helen calmly. “But yo
u shall drink this first.” She held the glass out to the girl, who took a small sip.

  “Another,” ordered Helen. The girl heaved but did not retch and took another drink—this one a gulp.

  Within a minute, her sobs subsided. Her head began to droop. Helen ducked under the table and untied her. As soon as the girl was free, she caved forward, falling on her face.

  “Dorian!” called Helen.

  Leaning against the shabby wardrobe, Dorian was feeling a stabbing headache coming on. His heart seemed to be racing at an abnormal pace—more rattling than beating—like a rodent caught in a plumbing pipe. He felt unable to move, and wondered with a quiet sob: Would his beautiful, young life come to an end in this forsaken back alley of a dressing room? How perfectly tragic he felt!

  “Dorian!” Helen was shouting his name still. “Come here at once!”

  “Yes,” he said, or tried to say. There was a great static noise in the lines of communication between his brain and his body. The latter was not receiving messages clearly. And overwhelming need for sleep penetrated him. For a moment, he drifted off and into Rosemary’s bosom, where he found a most extreme peace. He snapped awake in a fright. To lose consciousness now would be to risk losing it forever.

  He was helplessly nodding off again when the ice water was dumped on his head, forcing him to wake up entirely. Helen was standing beside him with a metal pitcher, tapping her boot expectantly.

  “I drugged the girl with laudanum to keep her from scrambling out into the street in hysterics getting herself either killed or arrested,” said Helen in a strictly business tone. “But she’s gone totally dead—oh, don’t bug your eyes out, the insufferable actress breathes. But she is fast asleep on her face beneath her dressing table, and I need you to prop her up in her chair while I clear the scene.”

  Sopping wet, with a chill in his spine, Dorian stood up and approached the dressing table under which the girl lay in a naked heap. He dragged her out and laid her on her back. A cry of horror nearly escaped his lips, but the chain of command between mind and body was still too muddled to get the job done. Dark blue and black bruises streaked her neck, evidence of his prying fingers.