The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (6 page)

Betty listened as the female v
oice she took to be Leanda's continued. Not even her inurement to the most bizarre fetishes had prepared her for the idea of ingesting penis, and then being confronted by a leopard in a dungeon. The voice was informing her that she would be their unconditional slave for the night. She would be led from the dungeon to an attic. As the voice ceased, so the two oriental girls came into the dungeon, released Betty from the adhesive tabs, and placed her in soft leather handcuffs. They had changed their costumes to medieval ones cut in scarlet and black velvet. They served as officials, and Betty was led out of the dungeon into a long bluely lit corridor. There were recessed windows and heavy wooden doors concealing entry into other rooms. To Betty it was like walking into the second of the three films she had observed on the blue screen.

At a certain point in the corridor, two figures appeared in front of them. It was the midget, easily identifiable by his rhinestone encrusted coat, walking ahead of the monkey. They were carrying what looked like a black coffin, open and uninhabited, and the monkey's red jacket made a bold statement in the lugubrious shadows. The march had become a procession to the
château's interior. Betty had been put in a red and black robe, and she walked silently between her guardians. The corridor seemed endless, but cut off at a right angle, and they proceeded through the open doors of a vast hall, the black and white marble floor reminding her of the lozenged tiles a client had in her swimming pool.

The hall was furnished with baroque mirrors, their tranquillizing and dead faces suggesting traps into which the
observer would disappear. Opulent cobalt and dark green rugs formed a mosaic around an open hearth. The logs must have been recently lit, for orange tigers leapt up the chimney. The detailed compartmentalization of walls and ceilings suggested an attenuated accuracy towards gothic. There was a glass case in a recess, presenting what to Betty looked like human skulls. A complex vocabulary of dissolute nerves had ordered the design. Gothic mingled with a clinically minimal modernity. Glass tabletops contained books splashed across their surfaces, nothing was random, everything to the last displacement was stylised, and written into the owner's nerves. Heavy red roses, involuted and inviting the eye to meet the fold of a turban, flopped from a dark blue vase. There were mummies stood up vertical in glass cases, positioned on either side of a door that admitted the procession into another corridor. The coffin bearers continued at an undifferentiated pace, the monkey squealing at intervals in querulous chatter. Betty followed, taking in everything as a series of film stills. It was like being involved in a shoot for a perverse rock video. She was the S&M victim being forcibly marched towards sexual retribution. And the corridor continued with the same monotony as its predecessor, only the subdued ceiling lighting was set at a lower volume, making the journey one carried out in semi-darkness.

At the end of the corridor they began mounting a broad wooden staircase. There were statues placed on the landing, one of them representing a black hermaphrodite, and the other a neo-classical bacchante with an erect phallus protruding through decorative leaves. Their footsteps resounded in the passage, before they ascended a flight of spiral stairs. Betty could see from the tilted-back coffin, that it was empty. The midget and the monkey maintained a practised equibalance in climbing the stairs. The ascent was at a slower pace and the four women removed their heels to climb the steeper gradient. They were going up towards the attic, and despite the pathologically maintained decorum of the company, Betty found it hard to take the proceedings literally. She was a specialised hooker, and not a passive victim to be exploited by orgiastic rites. There was still a way out if she didn't panic, but her recall of how she had got here, and where she had come from, was diminishing. She grabbed at the idea the subliminal drug must have entered her chemistry. Did she know her name? What was her
address and telephone number? 'Was there a past and a future? Was Nile really back in her room dreaming that she was being conducted through a labyrinth of mazes to the château's secret rooms? Betty was feeling progressively disorientated. The sadistic metaphors and politicized suggestions directed at her were permeating her unconscious.

She imagined that she was being led to her execution. They would dress her in a black cocktail dress after her death and place her in the coffin. They would bury
her in the château's vaults, and like Madeleine Usher she would rise and walk through the corridors at night. There would be flame issuing from her mouth, her hands, and her feet. She would be a vampirical simulacrum, rating up people's desire with fire. Ashes would be found in the sheets in the morning. And in time the château would auto-combust from her inimical charge.

Betty plotted
these things as they mounted the final flight of stairs. The top floor was brightly lit in contradistinction to the subdued light of the lower floors. Betty was shocked to see a menagerie of creatures in cages staring out at her from their various locations. There were cockatoos, a yellow eyed wolf, diamondback snakes, an albino monkey with blue eyes, an armadillo, and what she took to be a mongoose. The landing had been made into a surreal zoo, the exhibits juxtaposed to cause maximum discord.

Betty kept wondering if she wasn't on a hallucinogenic drug cocktail. An acid compound spiked with morphine. She was led into a bedroom that had been prepared in advance. A four poster bed draped with black silks stood central to the room. A mirrored ceiling reflected a mirrored floor. There were three nooses suspended from different planes of the
ceiling. A metaphysic existed between the elaborately decorative and the incorporation of brothel fetish. Betty was led to the coffin which had been placed open on the bed, and told to lie face down inside it. She obeyed with a compliancy that shocked her only into an awareness of how little control she had over her actions. The red and black tunic removed, she lay naked on the silk lining. It hardly surprised her that the black coffin should be lined with indigo silk. She had no conception of how many people were in the room, nor if the midget and his red coated monkey assistant had retired back to the château's ground floor.

The drug was causing her to relax and accept her vulnerability. She was left alone, but she could hear the regular cut of a whip laying into soft buttocks. It was a dull monotonous sound that lacked human punctuation. By averting her head slightly she could see that it was the monkey who was mechanically bullwhipping what looked like the man who had worn emerald lenses at table. He was wearing leather trousers with the back cut out, and the monkey indifferently lacerated the area of flesh presented by this exposure. The punishment was too disconnected from the monkey's own sense of sexual stimulus to indicate any mutual arousal. The severity of the blows were neither modified nor increased.

Betty heard rituals being conducted in Latin, a liturgical incantation delivered antiphonally by male and female voices. She understood that some rite of sexual magic was taking place. An offering was being presented to a phallic altar by a man whose skin was coloured by bright red make-up, an impasto foundation which was toned to resemble a Matisse red. His eyebrows were two black brushstrokes. Betty thought she heard the resonating vibration of gongs operating at a frequency just recognisable to normal audile receptivity. She went in and out of consciousness. Betty could hear the macrocosmic and microcosmic terminals being invoked, and the words
power-zone
and
scarlet woman
. Offerings were being made on a psychosexual plane. A sacrifice was being prepared.

At some stage Betty was commanded to stand. She stood up in the coffin and felt hands on her shoulders turning her round. It was a masked stranger she faced, two eye-slits and a gash of red lipstick showing through the mask. The woman manoeuvred her so that she followed her into the coffin, her legs going up over Betty's shoulders, and there really wasn't space, and she was awkward with her hands constricted, backing off so as to bring a division between their bodies, and then sensing the woman's urgency, bringing her
tongue into contact with her clit, stepping up its sensitivity as though she was entering the door of a cave to an interior forest. There was a woman inside the entrance with violet hair and leopard spot skin. She was setting fire to trees and the animals were running. They were bolting for shelter, or swimming across great lakes. The woman inside was distraught with frustration. She wanted to be forced back by the intrusive thrusts of a giant phallus. She was hoping for stars to explode in her veins.

Betty felt herself being entered from behind. She knew she was being taken by a
woman wearing a dildo, for the insertion was cold, and the rigidity of the object inflexible. Betty settled to the pain of tight entry, and the liturgical imprecations grew in their intensity as the lights dropped and were replaced by black torches. From the rhythmic pressure asserted, Betty could tell that the woman mechanically pumping her was herself being possessed from behind. An orgiastic chain was giving physical expression to the ceremonial chant. But the drug was again in evidence and Betty found herself taken on intimate biochemical journeys. In her mind she was swimming underwater, her body brushing against dolphins, the blue panes of water opening fluently as she accompanied the fish to a submerged ruin, Betty was open to the sound-waves transmitted by the dolphin's nasal passages, and her correspondingly alerted sense perceptions had her body glow. She had followed the school to a barnacle-encrusted hulk. There were ten dolphins that formed an exact circle round two drowned bodies that continued to copulate despite their being dead. And once, when the man temporarily withdrew him penis from the woman, she could see that it was gold. Then he swung his head back and stared at her, and his eyes were gold. She wanted to ask the couple why none of them needed to breathe, but the dolphins created an impenetrable vibrational wall, and she had to remain a detached spectator to events. It was when she realised she wasn't breathing, that the scene changed, and she spiralled back direct to the surface.

Betty wasn't being spared by her partner, and while she drifted a man had thrust himself into her lips. His penis tasted of lipstick.

But she was hurrying away again, running naked with her arms full of dresses down a high street she partly recognised, only the shops and houses had changed order, and when the rain came down it blotched her skin with blue splashes. It was an inky rain that ran cobalt in the gutters. She didn't know where she was running; only that she'd recognise the place instantly when she saw it. There were eagles in the sky, and one of them dropped a red flag at her feet. She draped herself in it, and ran on with the dresses loading her arms. The traffic had its lights on, and the rain flashed up in white dipped arcs.

Betty was aware of the urgency of the man's thrusts, he was gagging her with his deep placement, it felt like her mouth was being expanded to thr
ee or four times life size. But mentally she had found the place.

She went in through a wide open door. The shop was dark. There was a white cat sitting on the counter. The silence was loaded. It was a mannequin
that came out of the dark, wearing a white wedding veil spotted with blood. She knew without questioning it that the thing could speak.

'You will wait in this shop a thousand years,' it said. 'When the wind comes in, rusty eyed and dragging its dead tail, and when the rain arrives in the form of a sequined fish, expiring, deoxygenated, and the sun bounces in as a red ball no larger than your compact fist, then...'

The man was starting to come, for Betty could feel the hot salinity decanted into her throat, his agonized pleasure exploding from a volcanic core. And no sooner had he withdrawn, than another penis entered her mouth, and the chant continued, a ritual incantation gradually receding to a sustained whisper. Betty didn't know how long she had been here, or after a time even what had happened or was happening. She moved between inner consciousness and jabs at reality. But she was aware at some stage that she was being marched back through the confused maze of corridors, and this time she was dressed in a violet tunic, and someone had placed flowers in her hair. The midget continued to walk ahead, and the monkey kept an exact pace. They were going back through halls, complexes, and she was finally shown into a bedroom. It was almost dawn. She had completed her journey to the end of the night.

*

Part III

Another Sex

H
e lacked eyebrows, and two silver pencil lines served as substitutes. His grey eyes had an interior luminosity that unnerved Leanda. It was like they would suddenly open up and you'd find yourself on the inside. He was the leader of the deathless cult, slim, angled into a green jumper and blue jeans tucked into silver boots. His movements were quiet and undemonstrative, his voice pitched at a tone of assured conviction. Leanda saw there could be no oscillating pivot to his commitments. He had come to the château at her invitation, and expressed little surprise that a midget dressed in a matador's jacket should conduct him through an elaborate entrance hall with columns to what Leanda called the second library, a glass and aluminium construct with futuristic sculptures, a predominantly silver and blue pyramidal shape in which she sat waiting in a silver sequined micro-skirt.

He called himself XZ, explaining in a circumspect aside that he omitted the Y because he had found the causa
l link between life and death, and that intermediary states of existence were of no use to him. XZ, he added, was the name of the capsule that he and his initiates had taken in order to transcend the death state, and instate immediate genetic repair. They were here and would be for a long time. The destruction of the planet was programmed for 3,083. They, the deathless initiates, calculated they had a thousand years of earth life ahead of them. Leanda didn't doubt this. The man's authority was indisputable. He didn't need to state things. He spoke the truth. Leanda was fascinated by his neural charge. No-one she had met had ever come from such a big interior space. Each time he looked at her it was as though he had travelled through the galaxies to meet up with his eye pupils. And it wasn't unnerving. His aura was one of invincible calm. Green, silver and purple spilled from him as a vibrational halo. He took in everything, but objects were clearly incidental to his inner perceptions. Leanda knew that gurus needed money to finance foundations and projects, and this she was prepared to offer. She imagined writing a cheque, sealing it in a gold envelope, and sending her servant out to XZ's car with the keys, so he could unlock it and place the envelope in the dashboard. It would require that sort of sensitivity to get him to accept. Or she could do it by direct transfer, but she was a ritualistic person and preferred the idea of a gold envelope.

XZ had all the time in the world about everything. He took in the environment without comment. The library gave him the impression that he had exchanged one glass terrarium for another. He told
Xenia as he picked up a silver juggling ball from a black bowl on the glass-topped table, that he had arrived at the notion of symmetry.

'Cosmological expansion is isotropic,' he remarked. 'It's like this spherical ball. It displays no directional bias. Life should be like that in proportion to death. One's psychic chemistry increases only in accordance to universal vibration.'

He extracted a book from its shelf, and said, ‘The message reaches us in diverse ways. I used to read everything I could on psychic research, cosmology, space travel, the now obsolete figure of the astronaut, but of course we, our cult, realised that everything occurs in inner space. The great discoveries are made at the interior.'

He opened the book a
nd appeared to read at chance. “In the contra-terrene universe that lies beyond Andromeda, a man becomes a star, and a star becomes a man. One is a black radiating body in a white space." You could spend a lifetime exploring that concept, or any other notion connected with extraterrestrial intelligence, but we chose to go in a different direction. We reversed interplanetary travel and directed the telescopes inward. As a non-initiate you can only receive certain information from me, and nor would it benefit you to do other.'

Leanda watched as the man took a dark blue capsule out of a star-shaped pill container, manoeuvred it into his hand, and swallowed it with the mineral water he had requested on arrival. Part of her wondered if his remove wasn't drugs. He appeared chemically spaced. The sceptic in her imagined he was flipping into pharmaceutical travel. She was conscious, whatever the validity of his claims, of someone who affec
ted mystique. His gestures were stylised, his needs different. And given her cultivation of the bizarre, she could accommodate his drug interests. She could feed him lines of cocaine coloured by food dyes to his preference. He could snort green, scarlet or cobalt crystals. She would stop at nothing for his knowledge. She would reinvent the vocabulary of decadence to appease his nerves. The château was a centre from which to conduct sensory experiment.

XZ sat back in his chair and looked up at the skylight. The glass was dark blue like the gelatin shell of the capsule he had just swallowed. Leanda couldn't access this man's emotions. The positioning and repositioning of her legs u
sually served as the focus of visual attention. XZ transmitted no sexual impulses. Her curiosity was heightened by his neutrality. What she wanted to how was how the deathless have sex, or if areas of hypnagogic meditation sensitise nervous impulses not usually associated with sexual desire. Her own controlled nymphomania wanted to learn ways of heightening orgasmic sensation. There wasn't any form of physical sex that she hadn't experienced. In the château's private chapel she had known sex with her leopard. She had resolved the enigma of bestiality. There were no limits attached to what she had tried. She had lain naked in the swimming pool, her genitals smeared with fish food, in order to feel how her clitoris responded to the soft-lipped grey mullet brought there for the experiment. But each new experience only increased her appetite. She needed to entertain extreme fantasies in order to feel excited. And with Nicole as her partner, there was no lack of practise. They were continually learning how to intensify sensation, and in particular by delaying pleasure, working on each other so slowly and with such consummate expertise that the way to orgasm built through excruciating suspense. Leanda, even now in her state of metaphysical disquisition, longed to be fucked in a way she had never experienced. She was continually building on that fantasy. She fidgeted in her micro-skirt and ached for starved philogynists. She excited herself by conceiving of improbable encounters. She would like to have visited a men’s toilet, knelt down in front of a marble urinal and been sodomised in that position by a rent boy. She imagined herself in a boy's dormitory, going from bed to bed of the sex-starved teenagers, their hormonal urgency having them jump on her like a trapeze. And with the shy ones, pretending to sleep despite their serious erections, she would slide in on top, her full breasts having the boy gasp, her pelvic buoyancy riding the impalement to fury.

XZ was so laid back he continued to drink the silence as though he was attuned to whatever cosmic vibration relayed his equibalance. He placed one silver boot over another and waited. He would volunteer nothing. It was his refusal to expatiate on his difference that afforded him fascination. Leanda had never found it so difficult to make contact. He was secure in the invaluable knowledge he retained. She wondered at his lack of personal security. He had come here without guards, perhaps in the knowledge that he was invincible. Perhaps, she thought, it wouldn't touch him if someone was to fire pistol rounds through his heart and head. He'd continue to sit there with the same imperturbable cool, no hole in his skin, no blood leaking across the floor. He'd get up and walk over to a shelf and take down a book on quantum physics, and then look over to her as though the action had never registered. She had met smackheads who were like this, so far out of it on heroin that even the effort to articulate a word had seemed a betrayal of an inner state. Only XZ was armed with formidable intelligence and articulacy when he cared to open up. She imagined his sexual interests were as omnivorously restrained. If he possessed male genitalia, he would be capable of anything.
She thought of him doing it noncommittally, his eyes planted deep in inner space, his orgasm withheld and kept from lighting up a star in his lover. And he calmly saying that if he chose to come it would be a silver apocalypse. It would be a continuous supernova.

Leanda felt a restive heat, and got up and walked over to the drinks table, her long legs travelling right up to the almost non-existent hem of her silver skirt. No-one, she knew, could resist this provocation. She poured herself an Isle of Jura scotch, while he refused an
ything but his mineral water. Leanda wasn't sure if she had made the right decision in having him here. XZ was naturally defensive, and being away from his own cultic microclimate didn't help matters. He was talking quite suddenly about virtual body images, and quantum leaps in identifying psychological states. He was concerned with imaginary rather than real time. This wasn't a clue to his condition, but it was something; an oblique deflection, an obsession, an enigma he was trying to resolve? Leanda didn't know.

‘The
answer,' he was saying, 'is movement in real space without any movement in real time. You have to think of a person in the shape of a space-time triangle with its real leg longer than its imaginary one. This figure in the form of a hypotenuse will represent a real space interval, so that if he goes up city three microseconds, and then across town a distance of five blocks or five microseconds, the hypotenuse will represent a real length of four blocks or four light-microseconds. If we work out this person's speed it's 5/3 or one and two thirds the speed of light. We call this movement imaginary time. It's the future of any potential species who want to outlive the purely temporal. That is, defeat biological time.'

He sat back deeper in his chair
, took up his glass, and continued reflecting on the blue skylight. It was like there wasn't anyone in his body again. It was like he had travelled off into imaginary time.

Leanda felt a deepening sens
e of alienation. XZ defied her by his aura. There was no way in to discover his putative authenticity. His thoughts went off on trajectories where she couldn't follow. She wondered if their both snorting lines of multi-coloured coke would have them share a common dimension for the time the drug lasted. She would offer him silver and blue crystals, while she opted for green and pink. She lifted her mobile and ordered the midget to bring in the glass box.

'It's the best Bolivian coke,' she told XZ after the midget had left the library in a blaze of rh
inestones. Shall we lift off together?' But he disdained interest in the substance, waving it off in the way a connoisseur rejects an inferior wine. He must have been through all this, she imagined, or else he had his secret drug in the form of the blue capsule she had seen him swallow. She too declined to go through the ritual of lining alone. She would select a colour later when she and Nicole were seated in the red gothic library, reading perhaps Robert Desnos's
Liberty Or Love
, or a piece of erotica she had chosen to have hand-bound in black watered silk.

'But what is it you want of me?' he asked, as though he had re-united with body consciousness after a phase of astral projection. 'Your letter wasn't clear. As a sect
we're inundated with requests. Everyone wants to tap our resources. But we're not like that. We may in time consider taking initiates, but that's a long way in the future. For the moment we're busy learning. Knowledge is vital to our continued future.'

Leanda was again left in the dark. He spoke always in terms of impersonal generalisations. She could find no way to his centre. She had hoped the château's contrasting atmospherics would encourage him to give something away about his attainments. But the dungeons, bedrooms equipped with every aid to sexual stimulus and the availability of every form of sex, were clearly of no interest to this detached mystic. If he had told her that he had been an astronaut prior to studying the cult of deathlessness, she wouldn't have been surprised, given his apparent sense of temporal dissociation. Leanda had once heard the story of a man who tried to have an elephant's trunk go up him, and for some reason the concept of this extreme aberration crossed with the more metaphysical plane she was pursuing. She had been told stories of men who had a fist, a head or a saddlebag go up, but never an elephant's proboscis.

'You have probably heard of the notion of parallel worlds,' he began. 'Space-time distortion allows us to travel out of time. We're not all heading for the same future. There is no fixed future, there are an infinite number of possibilities, in the same way as there are multivariant parallel universes. Your letter hinted at your concern about these things. We in the cult accept a number of theories to do with quantum physics, but in large have cultivated our own scientific hermetica. And we're relaxed about that. We keep our theories cool. Maybe if we could enter an electron, we'd understand the feedback from black holes. And by doing this we'd better understand the existence of parallel worlds in our own electrons. And then for some humans it might be possible to become a time machine. We wouldn't have to die because we'd know how to break the biological clock. That's not what we've discovered, but it's a theory, and one to which I subscribe.'