The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (10 page)

Leanda was bored with limitations. She contemplated calling for the leopard to finish the girl off in a way that would leave her terrified. Or the black bear which had walked on its hind legs down the corridor. It too might prove an inventive sexual partner. Or she might have the transsexual line the crack of her bottom with cocktail cherries and pick them off slo
wly with an exploratory tongue.

But mostly she wanted to be rid of her. She decided she would bullwhip these buttocks which were maintained by creams and conditioners like a face. She had the
transsexual bend over a three-legged red chair. Leanda then put on black leather gloves and a corresponding eye-mask, and measured her cut with savage finesse. The transsexual rotated her bottom as though the whip was a lover. Leanda laid down strokes which were cuttingly abrasive, and kept them at that degree of pain which is also pleasurable. She could see the transsexual was working towards orgasm. She would deny her that pleasure, and send her back to the interior. She would have to risk encountering any one of the château's menagerie which had got loose.

She withheld the next lash, while the girl continued to rhythmically swing her bottom from the pelv
ic muscles. Leanda was going to treat that scarred flesh as a face. She took out some Clarins facials from a bedside cabinet and worked tracings of nutrient moisturiser into the mauve stripes. The transsexual was evidently embarrassed by her excitement and the breach of etiquette implied by a prostitute getting more stimulated than a client. Leanda made a clown's face in red lipstick on one of the transsexual's buttocks and dismissed her with contemptuous diffidence.

The girl walked out of the room with her clothes over he
r arm. Already her movements were those of a sleepwalker's. She would join the chain of somnambulists who walked the château's corridors. Leanda looked out of her door and followed the girl's progress. She was like a figure in a Paul Delvaux painting. The red stripes were visible across her intensely white buttocks. She was floating towards nowhere. And when she finally connected with reality she would recall the experience as a dream, and yet a dream in which the bloody marks on her bottom were an accountable reality.

Leanda saw how the bear was
re-orbiting; it came out of a room at a tangent to the girl and clicked into her dimension. It had followed her without any adjustment of its autonomous pace. They would follow each other for ever, until somehow they returned to real time as survivors of the château. At first Leanda had thought she was dreaming the somnambulists into existence. She had suspected she was hallucinating, but as night succeeded night without a day, she became aware of the reality of her vision. Those who came to the château never left. Girls in red or green sequined dresses, animals admitted to the château, the past and the present: all were recycled in a regulated continuity. It was only XZ who had proved invincible to the time warp.

Leanda watched the girl fade f
rom view and then the bear too receded from sight. She wondered when they would next appear. If she waited, would she see them return tonight, the next night, the one after? And would they all attend a banquet one day in the great hall? They would be served tiger's penis and the orgiastic excesses would continue. They would come to form a new species, a cult who had lived outside time and were returned unaltered. Leanda was the officiator over night. At some point she and Nicole might choose to step into imaginary time, and join the chain of sleepwalkers in their procession through the house. Years would pass, and they would return to the world in a new century. XZ would be there, still resting one silver pointed boot on the other, and gay politics would rule the world, such as it existed.

Leanda called for Nicole. She took out the black silk blindfold, placed a red carnation within easy reach, and the ritual began all over again. She would hold the flower as a reminder that she wasn't to touch herself. Fully dressed, she went down on all fours, bottom in the air, and waited for the pronouncement of Nicole's heels. It was the one inveterately reassuring game that always held good in her life. Nicole would place a sheet of red paper in her hand on which was written the form of sex to be practised that night. The rules were inflexible. Nicole would reach for the satin ballet shoe and Leanda would feel a generous sprinkling of slaps on her raised bottom. It would always be like this. They would listen to Marc Almond's voice relating stories of the outsider — transvestites, transsexuals, those who live on the edge of gender and draw a red curtain on the afternoon, the
better to indulge their secret.

Leanda listened to Nicole's heels approaching with a stylised staccato rhythm. She would be wearing the constrictive leather skirt she always put on for the ritual. Her make-up would be perfect. She would be carrying the red or pink ballet shoe in her right hand. Leanda was holding the red carnation in her right hand, fantasising to a degree that was unbearable. She pressed her legs together and refrained from crying out. She gagged on her own frustrated spasm. She crouched there swallowing on restrained pleasure. She would never be able to wait until after dinner to engage with Nicole in a configurated fantasy. She felt Nicole's familiar fingers slowly untie the silk blindfold. She measured each second of that heightened immediacy. It was the fingers as they travelled up from her nape and parted the strands of hair fallen over the secured blindfold that excited her to the point of distraction. She tensed and lived in the moment. She could imagine a life made up entirely of this one sensation. And by imagining its continuity, she was able to extend the pleasure. And Nicole knowing this, suspended the action, it was as though she was untying a knot in slow motion, and then retying and untying it again. She blew into Leanda's ear as she did so, first the right car and then the left. And with Leanda conceding the red carnation in her hand, Nicole
slipped her hand between Leanda's legs, at the same time taking the zip on her skirt between her teeth. With her teeth and fingers she took off Leanda's skirt, manoeuvred her over her knees, and looked at her bottom through the familiar transparent panties. She slid these just to the level of Leanda's pussy, and began gently but consistently to smack her bottom with a red satin ballet shoe. The persistency of the slaps thrilled Leanda. She was already on the way to orgasm. She wriggled over Nicole's stockinged knees. The intimacy of the act reinforced by the château's conspiratorial quiet, and the permanent night outside, had Leanda build with rapid intensity towards convulsion.

The two disengaged, and Nicole poured two glasses of Veuve Clicquot champagne. In real time
they were on the threshold of another night. That hour when they tensed with expectation of the journey to come, they would both undress and then re-dress for the night ahead. Nicole stood in her black silk panties looking in the mirror, before slipping on a tight black velvet dress, a strapless sheath that accentuated her curves. Leanda walked around the room in a red feather boa and her seamed stockings. She dressed in a red velvet dress identical to Nicole's black one. They linked arms and stared into the mirror. Their particular moment in time had extended into permanence. They heard the bedroom door open behind them and the black bear sleepwalked into the room, made an autonomous circuit of the space, and then went out again to pursue its itinerary of the château. The animal was clearly in a state of deep trance or even dead. When they looked out into the corridor, they could see the transsexual about to recede around a corner. She had her arms extended in front of her, and her feet floated inches off the floor.

They closed the door, and it was like stepping back from a dream. Leanda contemplated call
ing the midget and his monkey to her room to assure herself that someone had survived the autonomous change over, but she was certain these phenomena were invisible to others. The midget would arrive as always and prepare to tell an erotic episode from his life, and the monkey would sit anticipating its opium pipe. Or the oriental girls would bring in more captives procured exactly to fit Leanda's requirements. She knew this and so avoided the confirmation.

She and Nicole continued dressing and then went out into the maze of corridors to reach the red sitting room next to the dining hall. It was a long way to their destination. It felt like they were travelling round a circular time loop. They encountered no-one. Torches had been lit. There was an open coffin standing in one of the corridors, dead roses inside its indigo interior. They walked round it and continued on their way. They could have been marching to a marriage or an execution in the château's secret chapel. Once they looked back and saw a blond youth floating above the floor, another sleepwalker pursuing a somnambulist itinerary. He had a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, and wore a peaked leath
er cap; otherwise he was naked.

When they entered the red room, the midget brought in a wine and a menu for dinner. Nicole said that once again she had prepared a speciality, and that its renowned aphrodisiacal properties had it prized the world over. Leanda would have to guess its identity. Two other guests were expected. None of them would be informed of the nature
of the dish until after dinner.

Leanda heard Nicole cross her stockinged legs: a sensitised rasp of silk that translated itself into excitement in her nerves. The unending night was ahead of them. The guests would impart erotic narratives. They would see how far words could go in taking experience to the edge. Perhaps this time there would be a man with shocking pink contact lenses sitting at the table, dressed in a white suit and with his shaved hair dyed the pink of his lenses. And the other one would be a member of a secret sex cult. And he would know the red devil who kept vigil by the Orgy Tree at night. The story would begin all over again. There would be a fire and two young men slung on crosses in the flames. Men would be running away through the trees. A route
d orgy would disperse in panic.

Everything was prepared for the night to come. The leopard had been fed on pheasants in the kitchen, the stilettos on her paws had been changed from black to violet. Books had been brought out of the library and would be dipped into and read later. They sat secure in the order of things round them. Nicole felt if she opened a window, big night clouds might float into the château
and join the processional cortège through the labyrinthine interior. They would open their bedroom doors to see a labouring white cloud negotiate the bend in a corridor. Upstairs, white elephants might be juggling blue tennis balls with their trunks. The château was open to the marvellous.

They luxuriated in the time
before the midget would come and announce dinner. He would lead them to the table carrying a black candle in one hand and a black book in the other. There would be another open coffin to bypass, full of dead roses and lined with indigo silk on the inside. The two guests who were already seated word rise without saying a word. They would have been pre-selected for their perverse sexual propensities, and would coldly and deferentially begin to confide their respective stories over dinner. They would assume they were to be paired off with Leanda and Nicole, but both of them would end up in the dungeon, or as drugged participants in a ritual orgy.

It was night. It would always be n
ight.

Leanda talked of the tim
e when she was twelve, and she used to sit up in the attic in her panties reading the green-backed Olympia Press erotica. She had painted one fingernail scarlet in order to tickle herself. She had known ecstasy on long autumn nights with the rain setting in and hearing her mother down below entertaining a lover by running a long pink feather over his cock. She had seen it through the keyhole.

And Nicole told of how
one day they would dredge the lake and find the ruins of the house of Usher. Roderick Usher's dead body would still be sitting upright in an armchair. He and his sister would come into the château and be recycled into the endless stream of somnambulists.

But now th
e midget was here. Dinner was to be served and the story begun all over again.

*

The End

SISTER MIDNIGHT

Jeremy Reed