The Juliette Society (27 page)

I can hear music, the sound of drums and flutes. It seems to be coming from the ogre’s mouth.

I’m wavering between anxiety and determination, and I wish Anna was here. I think, what would Anna do? But I already know the answer. None of this would faze her. She’d just skip inside gaily because, to her, every experience is a new adventure, a new challenge, a new frontier to cross.

The murmuring sex is speaking to me. It says, ‘Come inside.’ So I do.

Inside it’s so dark that I stumble on a rock almost immediately and nearly fall face forward. I extend my arms out on either side to touch the walls, the ogre’s mouth and throat. They are so close that my arms are still bent at the elbows but I can stand upright without stooping. The walls are cold and damp to my touch.

I feel my way along, stepping gingerly, until gradually my eyes start to adjust to a soft light up ahead. I arrive at a long staircase, cut into the rock with a rusted wrought iron balustrade, leading down into a natural cave system. The roof of the chamber droops like the ceiling of a canvas tent during heavy rain and its surface is covered with long spindly stalactites, brilliantly colored reds and browns at the base, yellow and white by the tip – like the spines of a giant sea urchin. Water drops from the spines into small pools in the rock surface and, as it does so, it reverberates and echoes around me like a bell. Rivulets of water run underneath my feet and I have to hold onto the iron rail to stop myself from slipping. It too feels wet to my touch, as if it’s rotting. The air is stale and sharp.

It feels like I’m descending into the belly of the earth through the gullet of the ogre, like Jonah wandering aimlessly through the whale. There’s nowhere to go but onward, wherever that may lead.

I can see the bottom of the staircase now and I look behind me to see how far I’ve come and figure I’m about halfway down. The further down I go, the louder and more frantic the music gets. It sounds like a hubbub of voices all yelling to be heard.

At the bottom of the steps is a passage that’s barely wide enough for one person and I have to bend down as I walk through. After a few hundred yards it opens out onto a platform that looks out over a large grotto, with stairs cut into the rock leading down to it.

I’m standing halfway up the face of the cavern and opposite, at the other end, there’s a natural waterfall that emerges through a deep fissure in the rock face above it that opens onto the night sky, through which the moon shines down, illuminating the grotto with a spectral silvery light. Flaming torches fixed to the walls provide another source of light; just enough to see that the walls of the grotto are painted with a vividly colored fresco of the garden I’ve just walked through, with the path winding through it and the same stone statues I saw peeking out from behind the foliage. The floor of the grotto is covered in a luminous pink moss that clings to the rock face and glistens and shines in the torchlight like burnished gold.

At the base of the waterfall, the water runs off in two streams that form an island. On the island stands a small round colonnaded stone structure, like a podium or bandstand, that’s open on one side and spotlit by the moon. Arrayed around either side of the podium are several figures wearing white robes and oversized cartoonish animal costume heads, each playing an instrument – either a hollow-bodied hand drum or small cymbals. Two of the figures are playing long wooden flutes that flare out at the end. The music is so loud and piercing as it echoes around the grotto that it fills the space with a disorientating clamor of conflicting rhythms and pitches and I can feel it reverberating through my body.

On the podium is a throne with upholstered red velvet seating trimmed in gold and a lion carved into each of the two front legs. And on the throne sits a veiled figure in long flowing white robes that are so loose around the body it’s hard to determine its sex. At its feet is a woman, a naked woman with blonde hair, just like Anna’s, and my heart skips a beat when I see her, but I can’t tell if it really is Anna because she’s too far away and she’s kneeling with her head in the lap of the robed figure, whose gloved hand rests on her head, the way a cleric might do when granting a parishioner absolution from their sins.

This woman has clearly committed great sins because her back is covered in a criss-cross of painful-looking red welts and another robed figure is standing behind her with a whip drawn back, ready to administer more. I think back to the time Anna showed me the marks on her wrist and how horrific it looked, and I realize how naive I was, how that was really nothing at all.

Five other naked women, two blondes, two brunettes and one redhead, are kneeling in a semi-circle at the base of the steps leading up to the podium, facing towards the throne, their hands on their knees and their heads bowed. Waiting their turn.

The music is so loud I can’t hear myself think, so loud it feels as if it’s slowly erasing my identity and filling it with sound. What I can’t let it steal is my purpose. I have to find Anna. I repeat it over and over in my head like a mantra.

I start to descend the stairs slowly and as I get closer to the floor of the grotto, I realize it isn’t covered in moss, it’s covered in bodies; a writhing mass of copulating bodies, of hair and skin and sweat. The carpet of bodies covers every inch of the base of the grotto and creeps up the sides. They’re so entwined that it’s impossible to discern where one separates from the other. Heads are buried between legs and arms. Torsos seem blessed with multiple pairs of limbs. Legs emerge from shoulders, arms disappear between legs and emerge from behind waists. Hands are fixed to breasts. Penises sprout from bended knees. Mouths are either open in ecstasy or filled with some appendage or other. And it’s as if they’ve all been whipped into a sexual fervor by the music.

And I thought I’d seen it all in Anna’s company – on the SODOM website, at the Fuck Factory. I thought I’d seen just about everything. I was almost starting to become jaded, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even in the movies.

I put one foot forward carefully, stepping into this teeming mass of bodies and, as I do, it seems to register my presence and start to separate and open up, forming a path for me to walk along. I’m moving through these bodies and I feel so self-conscious yet, at the same time, completely inconspicuous because no one is paying me the least bit of attention, as if I’m walking through a crowded city street, one person amongst many, amongst hundreds and thousands, lost in the hustle and bustle.

I glance up at the podium, just in time to see the blonde girl stand up and fall back into the undulating swarm of human flesh. Her prone lifeless frame is being tossed back and forth across the floor of the grotto like a body surfer being passed over a mosh pit. Arms reach out to grope and grab her and pull her down. Others push her up and onward.

It reminds of the opening scene of
The Wild Bunch
, where the children are sitting at the side of the road watching an army of red ants swarm over and devour two scorpions. And they’re watching this terrible spectacle of ritual sacrifice with delight, poking the creatures with sticks to excite them further, encouraging cruelty without conscience.

I watch in horror as the blonde girl gets sucked down and swallowed by the pack, her body lost in the spill. And it’s not as if I can do anything about it. Just before she does I get a good look at her face, enough of a look that I can see it’s not Anna.

Another girl gets up and takes her places at the foot of the veiled figure. The whip is raised, and comes down on her back with a terrifying force and speed. Her body tenses as it hits, her shoulders arch out and her spine in. Her head tilts and her mouth drops open, like a wolf howling at the moon, but her screams cannot be heard, because the music drowns out everything – the sound of the whip, her screams, the mass of bodies around me writhing and fucking – everything but itself.

The bodies continue to peel away in front of me and I’m almost in the center of the cavern now and close enough to the podium to see the faces of the girls, to see that none of them are Anna either. The girl in front of the throne has been lashed into unconsciousness and she’s slumped at the foot of the veiled figure.

This is a weird fucking scene. The weirdest. Too damn weird for me. Right now, I just want to run and get the hell out of here, but I can’t. I’m at the mercy of this swarm of bodies.

The music is pounding in my ears. My heart is beating so hard that it feels like my chest is going to explode. It’s beating so hard that I can feel myself start to panic and hyper-ventilate. And it takes every ounce of willpower to stop that from happening, to slow my breathing down and regulate, so I can take stock of what to do and where to go. And now it seems to me as if the bodies are not opening to accommodate the path I’ve chosen but that, instead, they’re leading me, and as long as I keep walking, the bodies will let me pass.

Soon enough, I’m almost at the other side of the cavern and I can see an opening in the rock face, a passage out, and I realize that’s where they’re leading me. Each of those final steps is more excruciating than the last. And, finally, I can’t take it any more and skip over the last few arms and legs to safety.

I dash through the opening down a narrow passageway as fast as my legs will carry me and I don’t look back until I hear the music decrease in volume, until I can barely hear it any more and I can hear the echo of my footsteps as they hit the floor. And the passage splits into three, then two, then turns in on itself. And it feels like I’m back in the bowels of the Fuck Factory again, getting horribly lost.

I pass by chamber after chamber and as I pass each one I peek inside. Each one looks like a scene from the SODOM website. There is a girl in some kind of stress situation or scenario – tied up, caged, chained, restrained – and surrounding them an audience, like the one in my dream, all wearing carnival masks, galvanized and aroused by the spectacle that has been presented for them.

Like the grotto, the walls of chambers are painted, but this time with an interior scene, like a theater set, complete with windows, doors and adjoining rooms. I pass by each chamber slowly enough that I can make sure Anna is not inside and then move on. I’m walking through these catacombs and after a while it feels like I’m walking around in circles. Either that or the punishments just all start to look the same.

I come across one room that looks empty. Curiosity gets the better of me and I walk inside. Like all the other chambers I saw, all the furnishings are painted on the walls, except a small dais, made up as a bed, and a marble statue standing opposite it.

A man’s voice from behind says, ‘What took you so long?’

He sounds so familiar to me. This voice, I know it.

I turn around to see the man in the harlequin mask, the man from my dream, my sex partner from the Juliette Society party. A sense of relief washes over me at the sight of a familiar figure. He’s wearing a knowing smile and a black hooded cape. He was expecting me, but I can’t work out how.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ I say.

And I scan the room as I say it, even though there’s not a lot to scan.

‘Well, here I am,’ he says, intent on drawing my attention and my eyes back to him.

‘Not you,’ I tell him. ‘My friend. Anna.’

‘Do I know her?’ he says.

‘I don’t know… ’ I reply, looking into his eyes.

‘Should I?’ he says. That smile flickers across his face again. I don’t really know what this is about or where it’s leading, but it feels like he knows more than he’s letting on and he’s teasing me.

‘Come,’ he says, walking towards me and extending his hand. ‘I want to show you something.’

He motions to the marble statue in the corner of the room.

Willingly, I take his hand and it seems so familiar, like when a child reaches for its parent’s hand and slips inside it like a baseball glove and it feels so comforting and warm.

From the back, the statue looks like a man with really hairy legs. He’s kneeling down and bending forward with his arms out in front of him, either kneeling in prayer or masturbating with his back turned so that no one can see. As we get closer, I see that he’s doing neither.

It’s a statue of a man, and there’s no other way to say this other than to be blunt – it’s a statue of a man fucking a goat. Well, not exactly a man, but a half-man/half-goat, with horns, like the devil. The top half is human; the bottom, goat. Technically, I guess, it’s really a goat fucking a goat and no laws of man, nature, or God are actually being violated or transgressed. But still… it is fucking, there’s not really any doubt about that, because the goat-man has his penis inserted into the goat’s lower regions. If a goat has a vagina – this is really embarrassing, I don’t know if a goat has a vagina – then, yes, it’s inserted into the goat’s vagina.

The goat, like most goats, even when they’re female, has a beard. And it’s lying on its back, with its hind legs up in the air and the goat-man is fucking it and tugging on its beard at the same time. And the goat, it’s not looking terribly happy about this state of affairs, it has to be said. In fact, it looks terrified. Or maybe I’m just projecting. But I’ll tell you this, the whole scenario looks pretty creepy, even if the statue itself is beautifully carved and rendered.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he says.

‘Pretty explicit,’ I say. ‘Other than that, no idea.’

‘Take a guess,’ he says.

‘Ancient Etruscan pornography?’ I ask.

‘Close,’ he laughs. ‘A couple of centuries off. It’s Roman. Pan. The God of fucking.’

I’m listening to his voice and it’s really bugging me because he sounds so familiar, but I just can’t place it.

‘Do you know where this comes from?’ he says.

‘The Playboy Mansion?’ I say.

And now I’m just fucking with him, because he’s trying to patronize me. If I could see his face, I’m sure it would be scowling.

‘Herculaneum,’ he says, as if I should know. ‘Italy, near Pompeii. In the private villa of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, who was himself an extremely powerful and influential figure.