The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (12 page)

Rodney plucked another flower from the vine, marvelling as the same transformation
occurred. He weighed the book in his palm and said, ‘Holly hasn't read it yet, she
doesn't know.'

Mandy nodded. ‘She'll be back. When she is ready to see the world for what it is
she will come back to us. Go home now. Read the text. Make your own adjustments to
the world.'

‘But Holly…'

‘I'll be here.'

If Holly had stayed and watched she would have seen Mandy lift the book absently
to her mouth and bite into the pages. She would have seen the spill of juices, thick,
sweet and red, oozing over her lips and down her chin. If she had stayed and watched
she would have felt her own mouth water at the sight of the elixir. She would have
felt her own loins begin to spill their juices at the thought of it. But Holly had
not stayed and Holly did not watch, and therefore Holly still had a lot to learn.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by
ANGELA CARTER

Jack. The idea of him was like something hard and smooth she had swallowed. Holly
ran away from the bookshop and her heart was pounding. She felt small tremors under
her feet, as if the book club had opened a fault line beneath them and at any moment
the earth would crack and she would be swallowed by it.

Only something as solid and pure and untainted as her love for Jack could right the
tilt of the world. Holly ran till one of her yellow heels snapped and even then she
skipped along as fast as she could on her uneven keel. She was running fast enough
to leave the books and Mandy and the very memory of arousal behind. Ahead of her
was a chaste embrace.

She loped around a corner and there was Jack's house. His parents' mansion. Marble
steps, pillars, a perfectly clipped hedge, the curtains all drawn. That was odd.
It was as if the house had closed its great sleepy eyes. A light glowed in the
kitchen.
Just one curtain warm orange when all the others were sliding into evening haze.
She pictured him at the kitchen table, flicking through the TV guide, checking the
sports results on the internet.

This was the image in her head when she saw the car. Not in the driveway, which was
empty—his father's Discovery significantly absent—but almost hidden in the adjacent
street. Holly would not have noticed if it wasn't so distinctive. A car not much
bigger than a motorcycle, a squat little thing, yellow and black. So new that if
she glanced at its roof she knew she would see the stars reflected there.

Jennifer's car.

She wondered why Jennifer would be here, at Jack's place. Why she would choose to
park so close and yet not by the gate or in the driveway.

Holly skidded to a breathless halt. She worried at the ring on her finger, touched
her lip and felt a blister forming there. She bypassed the gate; it would squeak.
They could always tell when Jack's mother was arriving home, although of course they
were never doing anything untoward. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly affectionate,
Jack would hold her hand while he sat beside her on the couch and the squeaking gate
would make them jump apart as if they had been doing something to betray the pledge
she had made with the Angels. Holly stepped around the gate, entering through the
driveway. Manicured lawn, manicured hedge. She crouched at a window so earnestly
clean that it might have been a mirror and saw herself in reflection.

She saw her head hovering wide-eyed above a body. She saw the O of her own surprised
mouth and, below this, a back.
Naked, glistening with sweat, moving. Heaving up and
down, bare buttocks slapping in a rubbery dance. The side of a breast bobbing, the
hairy stretch of legs beneath them. It was like a child's game, a composite person
drawn from several imaginations. Head of Holly, body of…Jennifer. Legs of Jack.

She almost laughed aloud. But it wasn't funny really. She stepped away from the window.
Without the reflection of her head it was just the two of them. Jennifer, naked,
riding Holly's boyfriend, Jack.

She must be dreaming, still lost in a daze from the awful sexual heat of book club.

She leaned back towards the glass. Same beast, half Jennifer, half Jack, bouncing
faster now, and Holly clutched her handbag. The bag was empty. She remembered her
book abandoned on the table. Salter would have revelled in such a scene, the voyeuristic
joy of looking in on someone else making love. All the images from
A Sport and a
Pastime
flooded back to her. The fucking, the sweat, the man up to his ballsack in
the woman's cunt. And here, now she could see it, Jack's balls in their tight-nipped
ballsack clenched close to the bouncing of Jennifer's toned buttocks.

The machinations of the thing were a shock. Seeing them this way was exactly as Salter
had pictured it with words as vivid as real life, the visceral glisten of juices,
the sweat, the disarray. Then, as Holly watched, Jack lifted her friend off his erect
cock, which was slicked with her juices. He eased her down with her bottom facing
the window, and, as if he knew Holly would be looking, he held her cheeks wide open
and slipped his cock easily into that little puckered apple seed in her behind.

Holly watched in horror as her boyfriend began to ream her best friend's arse. Slowly
at first, then faster, with a mounting, grunting pleasure. Then she turned and ran,
matching her footsteps to her wildly beating heart.

All that fucking, all that copulation, all the genitalia in various complications
became damp in her tight-clutched fist. She was full of fury, her heart beating to
the thump, thump, thump of the arse on his erect cock, an image that was burnt into
her so that even as she closed her eyes and aimed herself towards the road, heedless
of traffic, she could not erase it from her mind.

She stood at an intersection staring at the traffic light, which was flashing orange.
Prepare to stop, prepare to stop. She stopped. She looked both ways. The little man
on the traffic light glowed red.

Becca's place was just around the corner from here, Becca and Rachel, whose adjoining
houses shared a fence. Her only two remaining friends. She frowned at the red stop
light and crossed the road anyway, breaking once more into a run. By the time Becca's
parents' equally fine topiary was in view Holly was gasping for every breath, exhausted
from her frantic flight through the suburbs. She almost screamed her relief when
she saw that Becca's bedroom window was still lit by her bedside lamp. Holly jumped
the fence. Her dress caught on a white picket and she heard a delicate tearing sound,
but by now even this did not bother her. She ran to the window and pressed her palms
against it in dumb relief. She was about to lift the sash, as she had done on so
many other evenings, and climb over the sill, but stopped suddenly when she saw what
was happening inside.

Two of them. Becca, her head arched back, Rachel's lips clamped down on one of her
nipples. They were a singular mess of arms and elbows and knees.

Holly stumbled away before her imagination had time to solve this particular puzzle.
She didn't care whose fingers were inserted into whose vagina. She didn't want to
know which toe was up to the knuckle in wet female flesh. She leaped over the fence,
cleanly this time, and kicked off the destroyed heels. Barefoot she began to make
her way to the one place of safety. Home. Her home, only a few blocks south of here.
Her mother—or her father, she longed for them equally—would make her hot chocolate
and put a cold wet flannel on her brow.

Holly heard footsteps. She froze. It was late, after midnight. On such a terrible
night she wasn't sure if she should be frightened for her safety or not. Possibly
the worst had already happened. She stepped back out of the glow of the streetlight
just in case.

She heard voices. Familiar voices. Her mother's laugh.

She waited till the three figures were close enough to identify. Her mother, flanked
by her father and Michael. Walking abreast, their arms linked fondly. They were still
too far away to call out to, but she followed when they turned a corner and hurried
to catch up, peering down a cul de sac, searching for a glimpse. A door was closing,
and yes, that was her mother's skirt disappearing behind it. Holly's stockings were
ruined. She peeled them off, wiped her face and pulled her wild hair roughly back
into a loose knot. Then opened the gate.

There was nothing special about the place. A well-tended suburban garden, two bright
butterfly sculptures clinging to the wall beside the door. Tacky ornaments, a different
style entirely
from the houses of her parents' lawyer friends. This house was low
set, the porch light a vapid orange glow. She peered through the window. Holly could
not see her parents among the crowd of well-dressed guests. There were hors d'oeuvres,
little pastry shells with something piped onto them, slices of cucumber topped with
cheese and sliced olives, carrot sticks arranged next to guacamole. There were bowls
of grapes and little cupcakes with yellow, pink and baby blue icing. Home catering,
no waiters. Such a different atmosphere from other parties she had been to with her
own friends (here a stab to her chest) and with her parents.

Holly pressed the button by the door. She waited. A woman holding a plate of hors
d'oeuvres answered the door, neatly dressed in a pretty cream-coloured frock, white
high-heeled wedges. A blonde bob. She was possibly the same age as Holly's parents,
perhaps younger. Holly noticed the slackening flesh at her neck, the little lines
beginning to accent the corners of her eyes. The woman's arms, however, were carefully
muscled under a very light and even tan. Her legs were the legs of a swimmer, tight
and long and scrupulously waxed.

‘Yes?' she said. She seemed cautious, glancing down at Holly's torn and muddied skirt.
She looked around Holly, perhaps expecting to see someone she recognised on the steps
behind her.

‘Helen,' she said, ‘and Peter White.' Holly struggled with her parents' names. Her
mouth seemed full of toffee. She hoped she was smiling but her mouth felt numb, perhaps
it was actually a grimace. A pulse was throbbing in her forehead. ‘And Michael.'

‘Michael?' Her smile widened. ‘Oh. Yes, they just arrived a
moment ago. They've already
gone downstairs, I think.'

Holly gestured vaguely out into the darkness as if the reason for her torn clothing
was lurking just beyond the spill of porch light.

The woman moved to one side. ‘Any friend of Michael's. Come in. Girls enter for free.'

Holly stepped into the room. A man looked up from beside the punch bowl. Holly felt
him stare at her a little too long. She felt the eyes of the group on her. What kind
of party charged an entry fee? Maybe it was a fundraiser for some charity. She picked
up a plastic glass of punch from a row set out on the table. The only charity functions
she had ever been to had much better catering.

Another man stepped close to her. His sleeve brushed her arm and then a slow meaningful
gaze travelled the length of her body. Something was not right here at all. She moved
away from the table, from the searching gaze of the men, and hovered at the top of
the staircase.
They've already gone downstairs.
Holly looked behind her. The woman
who had greeted her nodded approval.

Holly took a tentative step and then another. The sound of the party faded and she
moved into thick silence. It felt as if she were stepping down into a void, leaving
the world of light and conversation. Even the quality of the air seemed to change
as she descended. A closeness grew, enveloping her. It was dark down there and only
a line of tea lights enabled her to see a corridor at the base of the stairs. Closed
doors peered at each other across the corridor, heavy lidded. A looped glowstick
hung on each of the door handles, marking each room with a different-coloured iris.
Holly pressed her ear to the first. A hum.
An electric intensity like the sound of
a generator. Below this, the faint sound of a voice, a woman's voice. Maybe her parents
were in here; she imagined them sitting in the glow of a lamp beside some kind of
machine, talking in whispers. She moved along the corridor listening. Each door held
its own distinctly different secret. A sound like cables snapping, rhythmic, repetitive.
A moaning like the sound you might hear at someone's sickbed. Her unease increased
with each new door she leaned against. Here a wild creaking, like the rigging of
a ship and here the constant splash of water, a tap left on: someone running a deep
bath in a metal tub.

At the end of the corridor there was another flight of stairs leading further down.
Holly paused at the top. Just how deep were the cellars of this ordinary suburban
house? How easily the veneer of the mundane could mask the extraordinary. A world
beneath a world. Just like the revelation that Jack was not the Jack she recognised,
Jennifer not quite the Jennifer she had always known. Her friends and their vows
all a sham. This house was not a house but an entryway to a network of underground
levels, and somewhere down here her parents were involved in some unexpected activity.
All she had to do was find the right door.

A door opened. The sound of creaking was suddenly amplified. Holly skipped down
three stairs, imagining suddenly the horror of running into her parents. She crouched
down where they would never see her and peered over the top step. A woman dressed
in a leather corset, thigh-high boots laced up to her naked hips, the shocking patch
of dark hair at the delta of her thighs, leather gloves with zips that travelled
the length of her arms, right up to the equally hairy armpits. Holly watched as she
leaned against the door and unzipped one of the gloves. She reached into her boot
and extracted a ziplock bag filled with loose cigarettes and a book of matches. She
lit one and took a long drag, tipping her head right back to blow the smoke towards
the ceiling. Holly watched as the woman scratched absently at her naked crotch, leaned
over, pulled at one of the labia hidden in her thatch. Something glinted against
the shock of pink skin, a ring with some kind of gem on it, a diamond. Or more likely
cut glass. Still the twinkle of it drew Holly's attention to the thick pink lips
hidden there, which she guessed was the desired effect. The woman lifted her high-heeled
boot and ground out the half-smoked cigarette on the sole. She slipped the butt back
into the ziplock bag and stowed it away. Primped her short hair, making aggressive
spikes out of it. Set her hips defiantly at an angle, opened the door and stood amidst
the creaking noise, which Holly could now identify as ropes straining against each
other.