The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

THE PLEASURE CHATEAU by Jeremy Reed

WHEN BETTY CAME to she was lying on leather. The black surface mouled itself to her body. Someone had sprayed her hands with gold body paint, for they became instantly visible to her as two fluorescent toads squatting on either side of her. She was lying face down, and the positional arrangement of her hands and feet was such that she couldn’t move. But there was no crudity of handcuffs or shackles. Some sort of invisible adhesive tape secured her immobility. Betty rested her head on the point of her chin. She was lying facing a blank maxi-screen. The room was lit by two flaming torches, one protruding from the mouth of a white statue, the other socketed into a kneeling marble form. The pervasive stillness was like being at the bottom of a lake. Betty imagined panthers, jaguars, pumas, slumped down beside her. Black on black.

What she recalled was the bizarre dinner table, the conspiratorial stretches of conversation that had been issued wide of her, the unnerving silence that pervaded the château – and green – the man’s lenses that had fixated her, as though she had confronted an alien with emerald VR contact lenses instead of eyes. Her mind was busy reassembling fragments of the narrative. The woman talking to her from behind the limo’s partly open window, and the other one in the moulded leather skirt, the sexual liturgies delivered by the midget and the two oriental pashas, the hints at a menagerie contained within the house. Visuals flashed across consciousness. She had found herself in this position often in the past, but always voluntarily. Dungeon bondage was one of her specialities, an elegant cigarette drooping from her cherry gloss lips as she hung suspended from a chain, a man kneeling in front of her, blowing her engorged erection. It was so close to death, and the mutual stimulus came from this recognition. Betty regarded each S amp;M trip as a pre-death initiation. She often hoped to die in an act that was as flagrantly anti-social as it was self-debasing. Violating convention by bringing its administrative bureaucrats down to their gold-plated knees for her whiphand was part of Betty’s attraction to being a prostitute. It allowed her to undermine those proponents of political correctness – politicians, bankers, accountants, lawyers – the whole glitterati of moral pretence had opened wide for enemas, or shouted obscene imprecations as the whip had established slats like a blue Venetian blind across delicate flesh.

Betty blamed herself for having ended up captive at the château. She should have considered the possible dangers in being transported out of town. She usually dictated her own reference points, and only rarely and to her detriment allowed a client this prerogative. Her neck was free, and she hadn’t been blindfolded. She could assess the sizeable dimensions of the room in which she was bound. The torches assisted her in this. They gave proportion to the dark. Betty anticipated anything. She was doubtless being watched on a closed circuit screen, and she knew at some stage the four people would impose their needs on her vulnerability. She remembered on another occasion having been whipped with pink roses – the man had gone on and on striking her oiled bottom with the generous heads, and when they snapped on their stems, he would place the flower to his lips and then float it in a large terracotta bowl of red wine. Betty wondered if they were discussing among themselves what they would do to her. It should be the preferences entertained by the implacably cool men and the aesthetically perverse women. Tyrannical pleasures of every kind had been carried out on Betty’s submissive body. She had acquiesced to bondage because she trusted in the master’s ability to modify his threats. Here the terms were potentially unconditional, as no demands had been raised. Her subjective fears were of orgiastic violation, at least of the kind that appeared to exploit her nature as a woman who possessed a penis. Betty liked the contradiction. To receive an orgasm as a diva and to impart that received pleasure to a woman, was to her a complementary unity.

Without warning the screen became animated. Betty was looking at an intimate love scene between Leanda and Nicole. She knew she would be punished for being made a voyeur to their amatory games. Leanda was down on all fours, her bottom filmed by a transparent pink triangle. Nicole’s tongue was working like a hummingbird’s across her slit. Occasionally she would pause, and apply a lipsticked pout to Leanda’s bottom. She would leave the outline of a red carnation on her cheeks, and then return to stimulating Leanda’s pussy. Nicole’s bottom was framed in identical panties. There was now someone behind Nicole, only the buttocks were male, despite the extreme delicacy of the cunnilingus being delivered. And Nicole was instantly excited. She began transmitting to Leanda something of the pleasure being imparted to her. Her bottom was rotating to the man’s tongue. He had instantly found the exact location of her excitement. The three of them continued in this chain of oral stimulus, only after a time Nicole offered Leanda’s haunches to the man, and she by lying on the floor in the opposite direction to the couple, and by inserting her head between the man’s parted legs, was able to suck his genitals in concourse with the rhythm he had struck up with Leanda. Nicole teased his balls like sweets. She pecked them tentatively, lipping them as a fish might the surface of a lake. The man had now slipped down Leanda’s pink panties, and had worked himself fully into her back passage. Leanda was impaled on his deep, slowly articulated strokes. He was enjoying it, and intent on making her wait. Nicole kept on nibbling, her legs spread wide, while a fourth androgynous partner entered the scene, and squatting in front of Nicole lifted her on to his engorged cock, establishing by that a complete quadruple geometry. This rhythm continued with each partner building towards climax. Nicole’s legs were hooked right over the kneeling man’s shoulders. As she moved convulsively towards orgasm, so her tongue manipulated the other man to thrust conclusively into Leanda. There was a slackening of the tension that had sustained the four.

The film cut dead, and the screen reverted to a blue rectangle. Betty imagined that this was a taster of things to come. The first in a series of films that would culminate in live action. She lay there staring at the blue meditative blank. It was like a bit of sky got into a dungeon. Betty imagined treating the space as a swimming pool, and diving into a blue membrane that parted fluently round her body.

Images jumped out at her again. This time the camera followed. Nicole from behind as she walked the length of one of the château’s corridors. She was dressed in a seam-splitting emerald sequined miniskirt. The thin indigo seams of her silk stockings pronounced the curve of her legs. She was walking with deliberate provocation in the direction of a recessed window guarded by a stone lion. And without warning, the two oriental girls who Betty had seen at dinner appeared, one in front and one to the rear of Nicole. They too were dressed in costumes that hinted at fetishistic ritual. Their manner was less challenging than oneiric. They looked like dream figures jumped out of Nicole’s head.

Nicole froze. Her hands dropped to her hips, and her bottom continued to rotate in full circles despite her immobility. The oriental girl positioned behind Nicole, began walking slowly towards her affecting the same stylized manner of walk. She looked like she had been stitched into royal blue silk, her red heels matching her scarlet wig. And simultaneously, the girl who had materialized by the recessed window began to move in from the opposite direction, her movements exactly synchronizing with her partner’s. They appeared to be moonwalking, their progress indefinitely delayed. There were rooms to left and right of the corridor, but Nicole made no attempt to consider the options of escape. Rather she seemed excited by the prospect of danger. The two women closed in on her, all three of them dressed as though they were models in a Herb Ritts shoot. Betty found herself triggering with anticipation. The oriental woman behind Nicole, at the risk of splitting her seamless dress, knelt down and brought her head to the height of Nicole’s bottom, and with unexpected ferocity slashed open the zip on her emerald skirt. The upper part of Nicole’s body looked like a flower escaped from its sheath. The skirt hung open in a V, and the two hands busy caressing her buttocks began slowly to manipulate the sequined fabric, looking to have it give, but finding an extreme flexibility in its tightness. The erotic thrill was in the difficulty of stripping Nicole. Meanwhile the other woman was kneeling in front of Nicole, and her hands slipping around the waist attempted to assist her partner in taking off the moulded skirt. Nicole was growing visibly more excited by the delay. She wanted to be free and unrestrained, but instead was confined to this glittering second skin. The constricted skirt would only give fraction by fraction, and Nicole made no attempt to assist her captors. But by degrees the crack of her naked bottom appeared. She was wearing nothing but a black silk suspender belt under the skirt. The combined efforts of the two women succeeded in finally forcing the skirt to the back of Nicole’s thighs, and from there to her shoes. The green scales sparkled like a tropical fish on the stone floor. The three women, with Nicole in the centre, walked hand in hand down the corridor towards the stone lion. Betty thought the place resembled a chapel. The tenebrous atmospherics were gothic. When they reached the lion, Nicole was transformed into an assertive disciplinarian. The creature held a riding crop in its stone jaws. The two women were made to strip, and bent over the lion’s body. Nicole began flicking the whip over their round bottoms. The decorations made by her work were like painting. Red stripes began to appear alternately on their buttocks. A series of horizontal cuts that followed the curve of the flesh. Nicole appeared excited by the correction she was administering. She would stand back admiringly, her left hand straying across her own bottom as though empathizing with the severity of her discipline. Neither of the girls was bound, and neither made any attempt to elude their voluntary punishment. Rather one, or both of them appeared to be ascending the scale towards orgasm. Their breathing grew heavier, there was a spasmic thrust from the pelvis which commented on pleasure. And as climax was anticipated, so Nicole increased the ferocity of the whipping. A throaty howl, pitched to a note of ultimate pleasure was wrung out of the throat of first one girl, and then the other. And pleasure attained, they crumpled, subsided to their knees, backs still facing the camera. Nicole stood over them, the perfect locket-shaped proportions of her bottom accented by her green spike heels. She returned the whip to the lion’s jaws, knelt down, and began kissing the buttocks she had ravaged.

At this point, the heavy reverberation of a door being open and shut announced Leanda’s entry into the film. She too was seen from behind. She was carrying a large black wooden heart in her arms. She was dressed in nothing but minimal see-through blue panties. She walked on high matching heels. The corridor was now strewn with big yellow chrysanthemums. Leanda was seen walking through that yellow ruckus. She held the black heart out in front of her, and there were diamante sprays in her hair. She walked towards the recessed window, a leopard padding behind her, the big cat evidently trained to obey her instructions. Betty froze. Her heart turned over at the prospect of a leopard inhabiting the château’s corridors, and perhaps being admitted to the dungeon. The rehearsed elegance of the film surrogatized the pointers towards implicit danger.

Betty was fixated as the leopard switched sides. It went over to Leanda’s left as though informed by some subliminal message. Leanda’s journey from one end of the corridor to the other seemed to occupy a lifetime. It was a passage through the underworld. Betty watched as the leopard waited obediently for Leanda’s instructions. Leanda stood off at a short distance from Nicole, whose tongue had shifted to one of the woman’s toes. With her bottom resting on her heels, the sensitive underside to her feet had become charged as erogenous zones. Nicole was finding those places where the nerve impulses came alive. She did this by following the other woman’s finger, for she outlined on her right foot the map that should be pursued by Nicole’s tongue. Leanda stood there imperiously surveying the kneeling triptych. The leopard remained sitting upright at her side. At a sudden command from Leanda, the big cat stepped forward and ran its tongue the length of Nicole’s spine. The latter evinced no disquiet at the proceedings and continued to excite the oriental girl through pressure on her foot. At another command from Leanda, the big cat altered its strategy, and began caressing Nicole’s bottom with its tongue. The film cut at this image, and Betty was left to reflect on the surreal juxtaposition of Nicole receiving oral stimulus from a leopard.

The screen returned to a blue rectangle. Silence packed the leather dungeon. Betty kept killing the impulse to panic. The atmospherics works into her until she felt her mind had interiorized the place in which she was captive. She was trapped in a cell within a cell. She hallucinated orgiastic excesses. There were penises in every orifice. Her lips, her ears, her bottom. She was lying on a red velvet cloth thrown over a grave sunk into the flagstones. Her masochistic convulsions were too much for her perpetrators. She objected to nothing. Debasement couldn’t touch her. She defused sexual frenzy by her inability to be shocked. And in between fantasies, she was preparing herself for her captors. She knew a door would open at some stage, and the staccato tap of spike heels articulate a direct line towards her. Would she be blindfolded and handcuffed, her neck placed in a collar? Her mind backtracked to events in the past when she had been exploited. It happened rarely, as Betty’s job was about attaining the upper hand, and when it did, the resulting imbalance had her reassess her psychology. She had never quite locked the door on the man who lived in a rented room in her psyche. He was recalled in the codification of her sexual pleasure. Her universe was still phallocentric, although in every other aspect of her life, she chose to live as a woman. On the occasions when she was exploited, the man appeared. He came out of a green painted door, and stood there a long time blinking into a light to which he had grown unaccustomed. He seemed to want to remind her that he too had a part to play in her nervous impulses. He seemed to be saying, “Don’t lock me in here for ever. The door is open even if the windows are boarded up, and besides, I need to speak. I’m left too solitary. All I have is a place in your unconscious.”

And he was here again now, as she lay there waiting for release or punishment. He was dressed as she used to be, in blue jeans with a dark tailored jacket and a white button-down shirt underneath. He was holding a pair of dark glasses in one hand. He was tentative at first, and clearly suspicious of being hurt. He stared at her as though implanting his image as a reality. He wanted to be really sure she took him into account. Betty thought how it was like seeing someone standing at the end of an alley, someone you thought you knew, but nevertheless surprised by his being there. He seemed casual but assertive, bored, but wired to immediate action. Betty felt a sense of irreconcilable guilt at having neglected the person she had once been. But there was no way in which roles could be reversed. She couldn’t any longer have him assert dominance, and herself go into the dark room and live there on periodic recall. Too much had happened to allow for this regression. But he was there to give her strength. He was called Mike. She had answered to that name for her entire childhood and youth. Mike. He had run for a red ball in a park circled by cypress trees. He had built imposing sand castles, lit bonfires in October woods, run with a dog through village streets at nightfall. But at some stage his development had been terminated. He was no longer needed in the mirror. His plain clothes couldn’t compete with the girl’s skirts and tops that Betty had adopted. But at first he had been phased out slowly. He was wanted during the day – he was Mike at school – even if Betty resented it, and his place was assured at family meals. But upstairs he wasn’t required. Foundation, lipstick and eyeliner disguised his features. Male clothes were discarded for silk panties and a short skirt. Betty had luxuriated in the feminine. Mike had grown to be a satellite on occasional recall. But he was wanted whenever Betty dressed as a girl, picked up girls, and laid them with a man’s authoritative sex. His role was increasingly confined to a testosterone level.

He was standing there sad-eyed, asking Betty to listen to his psychological advice. Mike didn’t want to be violated. She could tell that. He was holding out for respect. He was saying, “Don’t let them rape us. Think of me. I don’t want to be had like a woman. Oppose these people. They have no right to invade our body. I shall come between you and them. I shall be the reproachful image which will interpose between you and pleasure.”

Betty steadied her focus on the man she had forgotten. His awkwardness and sense of rejection were becoming less pronounced now that she gave him the space to claim a partial identity. He kept coming at her from a past given autonomy by the present. This time he was reading by the seawall in the white room. The book was opened and partly screened his face. A girl in a minimal red bikini bottom was sunning three towels away. She was listening to a Walkman. It was a beach scene from Betty’s youth. That day, that hot moment, were freeze-framed into her mind as she waited in agonized suspense for her captors. Mike wasn’t reproachful of having been denied a life. He was just there offering her his psychological support.

Without warning the screen came to life. Betty found herself facing the dungeon in which she lay, only the film had been shot with more accentuated light. A teenage girl, dressed in a black beret, a black micro-skirt and sheer tights was sitting legs arched on the leather floor. The master of ceremonies was sitting opposite her, silently reading a large book. Betty recognized the man as the one at dinner who Nicole had called John, his steel-blue hair and aesthetically delineated cheekbones drawing attention to the idiosyncratic manner in which he buried his smile behind pursed lips. This man was closed to every form of overt emotional expression. Some intrinsic editing process cancelled out all spontaneous responses. He was deeply absorbed in reading. The schoolgirl placed her thumb in her lipsticked mouth, extracted it, and began tickling herself under her skirt. Her eyes bumped up big and black. When the voice track cut in, the man was heard instructing her in the erotic arts. “The width of a woman’s shoe should be directly proportionate to that of a man’s penis. The one should fit the other like a glove. Place it.” Betty watched as the young girl slipped off a precocious stiletto, lifted the man’s erection from the folds of a silk tunic, and neatly inserted it into a pointed red shoe. With considerable dexterity she also accommodated the scrotum to the heel part. “Now blow on it, nothing more,” his voice commanded. The young girl lifted his genitals in the red stiletto and began to blow rhythmically on the sensitive glans. Disdaining to show any sense of pleasure, the man continued to read. Clearly thinking in stereo, and restraining sensory impulse for mental concentration, he continued to read. “In the course of giving head, a woman should reapply her lipstick three times, the tone dramatically reddening as climax is neared. The rhythm should be slow and investigative. The culinary etiquette of eating asparagus being one example, rolling a soft chocolate on the tongue being another, practising on Japanese toes being recommended, so too the application of lips to a red carnation. The student should begin by applying a thin coat of honey to the frenulum, and using tension points as mouthstops. Proceed.”

Betty found herself transfixed as the young girl produced a lip brush and a pot of honey, and extracting the man’s erect penis from the shoes began to coat the skin with a fine lacquering of amber honey. She applied herself with the meticulous diligence of a make-up artist. She pulled her head back and examined her work. For good measure she tinctured honey into the slit, took out a scarlet lipstick and satisfied that it was exactly the right tone, began delicately to apply her mouth to the engorged cock. Savouring the honey, her tongue flicked between her lips like a snake’s. The man registered no appreciation of her oral expertise. The girl began assiduously to work up from the base to the head in dabbing flicks, and then increasing her tempo proceeded to flatten her tongue more firmly into the skin. She applied the pressure necessary to give a love bite to the triggering head. The man continued to consult the book while the girl experimented with various rhythms. There was no least sense of synchronicity in their actions. The girl stopped at this point, checked her lipstick and applied another layer of scarlet gloss. She now took the penis into her lips, resting the shaft on her nether lip and working at it with the upper. Little by little she took it into her mouth, demonstrating the tongue rolling a soft chocolate method, her green eyes looking up at the man’s expressionless ones. He showed no vestige of pleasure at the girl’s alacritous versatility. He continued to read impassively. The girl now began to feed on his cock. She took it in like a rigid mauve banana. Her movements were vigorous, she was going down on it and taking it deep into her throat. It was like she had discovered a favourite flavour and was anxious to know it to the full. After a time of working at this committed speed, she stopped for a pause and touched up her lipstick. It was the third part of the prescribed ritual. Once again the man demonstrated no premonition of pleasure at her making up a last time to bring him to orgasm. The girl seemed instinctively to know a strategy best calculated to please. With her painted red fingernails she began tickling his balls, while her mouth was strained to an expansive oral accommodating his taut sex. There could be little doubt that the man was nearing an orgasm, despite the emotional repression he showed. And the girl sensed it too, for she took all of his cock into her mouth and increased the tantalizing motion of her fingertips. The man jolted three or four times in spasmic thrusts, and the girl held him tight inside. They remained like that for a long time, she unwilling to release him and he declining to make any comment on the climactic experience. He continued to read with the same unimpassioned note of boredom. Eventually the girl let his penis go, and the film cut out as she returned to her sitting position opposite the master of ceremonies.

Betty was left wondering what action had ensued. Did the girl masturbate to the man’s instructions? Did she ride him later on, their two bodies floating like somnambulists on a bed removed from time? Did she discover that although she was connected to his penis he was untouchably far away in another dimension? Perhaps they were living in parallel ones. Betty had known men who were never able to come. They experienced pleasure, but were unable to ejaculate. They could make love for hours but to no conclusion. She usually avoided these, for they tired her with their unappeasable frustration. She had read how Marcel Proust, when he was unable to relieve himself at the sight of a naked boy, had a cage of rats brought into the room. His thrill came from seeing the rats attack and kill each other, a perversion that Betty surmised would be sympathetically viewed at the château. Proust had a dread of direct sexual contact, and half of Betty’s clients were the same, preferring to act out elaborate fantasies than to engage in one to one sex. Microphobia. Autophobia. She just wanted to get out of this dungeon, and go back to a familiar bar by the port. But she could hear footsteps now, and the grating of hinges as a heavy door was ceremonially unlocked.

The leather floor cushioned acoustics, but Betty heard the jab of two pairs of spiked heels cross the intervening divide, and stop at the level of her feet. She couldn’t look round to see who was standing behind her, and she tensed in the uncertainty. Someone or something was licking her toes, and adrenalin shot through her circuit as she realized it might be the leopard. And if it was, the leopard might be instructed to work its way upwards to her thighs. She was still staring at a blue screen. She believed that if she projected hard enough she could travel through it. Her astral propulsion would power her like a jet. Her captors would find nothing but a hole burnt in the blue.

The asperity of a hot tongue interrogating her toes, ceased. No one came forward. Betty lay there every nerve alert, as the silence was punctuated by the rapid breathing of an animal. Then it appeared. The leopard walked along her right side on an extended lead, and sat down in front of her head. Betty was able to observe how the cat’s feet had been fitted into four high heels, the five-inch stilettos that Nicole wore with her constrictive leather skirt. The consequences were those of creating a surreal monster. It also meant that although the animal was deprived of claws, the leather heels would be equally effective instruments should the creature lash out with its paws. Betty thought she was connected with a nightmare. At any moment she would wake up and consign the incident to a dream. The leopard settled down and lay on the floor, eyes lazy with potential menace. Betty felt nothing. Fear had displaced her. She wasn’t here or anywhere. And quite suddenly there were two figures standing with their backs to her, right and left of the leopard. They were dressed in identical black leather. The curve of their figures told Betty that they were women. She imagined it was Leanda and Nicole, features disguised by masks that left holes for the eyes and mouth. Neither of the two paid any attention to her. Rather, they acknowledged the torches, and stared direct at the flame. When she looked again she could see that one of the women was performing a rite with a black dildo. She was intoning a chant, and offering the mamba to the statue. She held it to the marble lips, and Betty heard the voice engaged in a liturgical imprecation. The leopard yawned, and flexed its stiletto paws. Betty had the apprehension that the dildo was being offered up prior to its entering her. She had a vision of the two women strapping it on respectively, and violating her with the fierce pretence of being men. And where were the two men? She could hardly believe they had left the château after dinner, their long wavering headlights pushing white feelers through the country dark. Were they in a relationship, the two of them hiring a penthouse overlooking the harbours, the red and green shipping lights winking on the night waters? And did the man with emerald lenses change them to violet or orange? Betty’s suppositions were conjectural. She had lived for so long amongst people who were of indeterminate or exchangeable gender, that she took no-one’s sex at face value. She knew only the odd and the extreme. Men who dressed up as women for sex, were to her the norm. And she had been had in the past by women who strapped on dildos with the intention of entering her as men. She knew a client who kept a cupboard full of interesting shapes, colours and sizes. Some of them were personally made for her. There were green, blue, mauve, silver and gold artificial phalli which for her extended the vocabulary of sexual possibilities. How many women or men had been made love to by a gold penis on which was drawn the eye of Horus? And for purposes of pure decoration, the woman had dildos encrusted with jewels, metallic or velvet phalli which instead of flowers she placed in a vase beside her bed. That room came back to her now. The woman pleased that she wasn’t a real man, for the ritual surrounding the wearing of a dildo thrilled her. So too did the making out of instructions for the craftsman who delivered her specifications in a series of satin shoeboxes.

Having offered the mamba up as part of a weird ritual, the leather figure kissed it, and returned to her standing position facing the statue. Betty kept blanking out by closing her eyes, in order to avoid the leopard. The creature remained slack, but tensely alert. It was like a tuned guitar, waiting to be played. The two figures continued to stand with their backs to her and then one of them, without warning, spoke. “You will be released at dawn, and driven back to the city tomorrow tonight. You will never know this place again, nor will you remember where it is situated. You are a paid captive. You are expected to obey. You have been given a drug which will subliminally alter your conception of time and space for a week. Your memory of what has happened here will be erased. So too the knowledge that you have eaten flesh from the sacrificial penis. For it was penis we ate at dinner, that most subtle of homeopathic aphrodisiacs. Your priapic virtues will increase enormously as a consequence.”

Betty listened as the female voice 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 amp;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 specialized 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 she 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, eating up people’s desire with fire. Ashes would be found in the sheets in the morning. And in time the château would autocombust from her inimical charge. Betty plotted these things as they mounted a 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 yelloweyed 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 elaboratively 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 recognizable to normal audible receptivity. She went in and out of consciousness. Betty could hear the terminals macrocosmic and microcosmic 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 intricate 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 coral-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 his 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 realized 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 recognized, 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 recognize 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 three 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 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 she 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.