by Krissy Kneen
She saw her head hovering wide-eyed above a body. She saw the O of her own surprised mouth and, below this, a back. Naked, glistening with sweat, moving. Heaving up and down, bare buttocks slapping in a rubbery dance. The side of a breast bobbing, the hairy stretch of legs beneath them. It was like a child’s game, a composite person drawn from several imaginations. Head of Holly, body of…Jennifer. Legs of Jack.
She almost laughed aloud. But it wasn’t funny really. She stepped away from the window. Without the reflection of her head it was just the two of them. Jennifer, naked, riding Holly’s boyfriend, Jack.
She must be dreaming, still lost in a daze from the awful sexual heat of book club.
She leaned back towards the glass. Same beast, half Jennifer, half Jack, bouncing faster now, and Holly clutched her handbag. The bag was empty. She remembered her book abandoned on the table. Salter would have revelled in such a scene, the voyeuristic joy of looking in on someone else making love. All the images from A Sport and a Pastime flooded back to her. The fucking, the sweat, the man up to his ballsack in the woman’s cunt. And here, now she could see it, Jack’s balls in their tight-nipped ballsack clenched close to the bouncing of Jennifer’s toned buttocks.
The machinations of the thing were a shock. Seeing them this way was exactly as Salter had pictured it with words as vivid as real life, the visceral glisten of juices, the sweat, the disarray. Then, as Holly watched, Jack lifted her friend off his erect cock, which was slicked with her juices. He eased her down with her bottom facing the window, and, as if he knew Holly would be looking, he held her cheeks wide open and slipped his cock easily into that little puckered apple seed in her behind.
Holly watched in horror as her boyfriend began to ream her best friend’s arse. Slowly at first, then faster, with a mounting, grunting pleasure. Then she turned and ran, matching her footsteps to her wildly beating heart.
All that fucking, all that copulation, all the genitalia in various complications became damp in her tight-clutched fist. She was full of fury, her heart beating to the thump, thump, thump of the arse on his erect cock, an image that was burnt into her so that even as she closed her eyes and aimed herself towards the road, heedless of traffic, she could not erase it from her mind.
She stood at an intersection staring at the traffic light, which was flashing orange. Prepare to stop, prepare to stop. She stopped. She looked both ways. The little man on the traffic light glowed red.
Becca’s place was just around the corner from here, Becca and Rachel, whose adjoining houses shared a fence. Her only two remaining friends. She frowned at the red stop light and crossed the road anyway, breaking once more into a run. By the time Becca’s parents’ equally fine topiary was in view Holly was gasping for every breath, exhausted from her frantic flight through the suburbs. She almost screamed her relief when she saw that Becca’s bedroom window was still lit by her bedside lamp. Holly jumped the fence. Her dress caught on a white picket and she heard a delicate tearing sound, but by now even this did not bother her. She ran to the window and pressed her palms against it in dumb relief. She was about to lift the sash, as she had done on so many other evenings, and climb over the sill, but stopped suddenly when she saw what was happening inside.
Two of them. Becca, her head arched back, Rachel’s lips clamped down on one of her nipples. They were a singular mess of arms and elbows and knees.
Holly stumbled away before her imagination had time to solve this particular puzzle. She didn’t care whose fingers were inserted into whose vagina. She didn’t want to know which toe was up to the knuckle in wet female flesh. She leaped over the fence, cleanly this time, and kicked off the destroyed heels. Barefoot she began to make her way to the one place of safety. Home. Her home, only a few blocks south of here. Her mother—or her father, she longed for them equally—would make her hot chocolate and put a cold wet flannel on her brow.
Holly heard footsteps. She froze. It was late, after midnight. On such a terrible night she wasn’t sure if she should be frightened for her safety or not. Possibly the worst had already happened. She stepped back out of the glow of the streetlight just in case.
She heard voices. Familiar voices. Her mother’s laugh.
She waited till the three figures were close enough to identify. Her mother, flanked by her father and Michael. Walking abreast, their arms linked fondly. They were still too far away to call out to, but she followed when they turned a corner and hurried to catch up, peering down a cul de sac, searching for a glimpse. A door was closing, and yes, that was her mother’s skirt disappearing behind it. Holly’s stockings were ruined. She peeled them off, wiped her face and pulled her wild hair roughly back into a loose knot. Then opened the gate.
There was nothing special about the place. A well-tended suburban garden, two bright butterfly sculptures clinging to the wall beside the door. Tacky ornaments, a different style entirely from the houses of her parents’ lawyer friends. This house was low set, the porch light a vapid orange glow. She peered through the window. Holly could not see her parents among the crowd of well-dressed guests. There were hors d’oeuvres, little pastry shells with something piped onto them, slices of cucumber topped with cheese and sliced olives, carrot sticks arranged next to guacamole. There were bowls of grapes and little cupcakes with yellow, pink and baby blue icing. Home catering, no waiters. Such a different atmosphere from other parties she had been to with her own friends (here a stab to her chest) and with her parents.
Holly pressed the button by the door. She waited. A woman holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres answered the door, neatly dressed in a pretty cream-coloured frock, white high-heeled wedges. A blonde bob. She was possibly the same age as Holly’s parents, perhaps younger. Holly noticed the slackening flesh at her neck, the little lines beginning to accent the corners of her eyes. The woman’s arms, however, were carefully muscled under a very light and even tan. Her legs were the legs of a swimmer, tight and long and scrupulously waxed.
‘Yes?’ she said. She seemed cautious, glancing down at Holly’s torn and muddied skirt. She looked around Holly, perhaps expecting to see someone she recognised on the steps behind her.
‘Helen,’ she said, ‘and Peter White.’ Holly struggled with her parents’ names. Her mouth seemed full of toffee. She hoped she was smiling but her mouth felt numb, perhaps it was actually a grimace. A pulse was throbbing in her forehead. ‘And Michael.’
‘Michael?’ Her smile widened. ‘Oh. Yes, they just arrived a moment ago. They’ve already gone downstairs, I think.’
Holly gestured vaguely out into the darkness as if the reason for her torn clothing was lurking just beyond the spill of porch light.
The woman moved to one side. ‘Any friend of Michael’s. Come in. Girls enter for free.’
Holly stepped into the room. A man looked up from beside the punch bowl. Holly felt him stare at her a little too long. She felt the eyes of the group on her. What kind of party charged an entry fee? Maybe it was a fundraiser for some charity. She picked up a plastic glass of punch from a row set out on the table. The only charity functions she had ever been to had much better catering.
Another man stepped close to her. His sleeve brushed her arm and then a slow meaningful gaze travelled the length of her body. Something was not right here at all. She moved away from the table, from the searchin
g gaze of the men, and hovered at the top of the staircase. They’ve already gone downstairs. Holly looked behind her. The woman who had greeted her nodded approval.
Holly took a tentative step and then another. The sound of the party faded and she moved into thick silence. It felt as if she were stepping down into a void, leaving the world of light and conversation. Even the quality of the air seemed to change as she descended. A closeness grew, enveloping her. It was dark down there and only a line of tea lights enabled her to see a corridor at the base of the stairs. Closed doors peered at each other across the corridor, heavy lidded. A looped glowstick hung on each of the door handles, marking each room with a different-coloured iris. Holly pressed her ear to the first. A hum. An electric intensity like the sound of a generator. Below this, the faint sound of a voice, a woman’s voice. Maybe her parents were in here; she imagined them sitting in the glow of a lamp beside some kind of machine, talking in whispers. She moved along the corridor listening. Each door held its own distinctly different secret. A sound like cables snapping, rhythmic, repetitive. A moaning like the sound you might hear at someone’s sickbed. Her unease increased with each new door she leaned against. Here a wild creaking, like the rigging of a ship and here the constant splash of water, a tap left on: someone running a deep bath in a metal tub.
At the end of the corridor there was another flight of stairs leading further down. Holly paused at the top. Just how deep were the cellars of this ordinary suburban house? How easily the veneer of the mundane could mask the extraordinary. A world beneath a world. Just like the revelation that Jack was not the Jack she recognised, Jennifer not quite the Jennifer she had always known. Her friends and their vows all a sham. This house was not a house but an entryway to a network of underground levels, and somewhere down here her parents were involved in some unexpected activity. All she had to do was find the right door.
A door opened. The sound of creaking was suddenly amplified. Holly skipped down three stairs, imagining suddenly the horror of running into her parents. She crouched down where they would never see her and peered over the top step. A woman dressed in a leather corset, thigh-high boots laced up to her naked hips, the shocking patch of dark hair at the delta of her thighs, leather gloves with zips that travelled the length of her arms, right up to the equally hairy armpits. Holly watched as she leaned against the door and unzipped one of the gloves. She reached into her boot and extracted a ziplock bag filled with loose cigarettes and a book of matches. She lit one and took a long drag, tipping her head right back to blow the smoke towards the ceiling. Holly watched as the woman scratched absently at her naked crotch, leaned over, pulled at one of the labia hidden in her thatch. Something glinted against the shock of pink skin, a ring with some kind of gem on it, a diamond. Or more likely cut glass. Still the twinkle of it drew Holly’s attention to the thick pink lips hidden there, which she guessed was the desired effect. The woman lifted her high-heeled boot and ground out the half-smoked cigarette on the sole. She slipped the butt back into the ziplock bag and stowed it away. Primped her short hair, making aggressive spikes out of it. Set her hips defiantly at an angle, opened the door and stood amidst the creaking noise, which Holly could now identify as ropes straining against each other.
‘You ready to come down yet? No? No? I’ll make you beg to be let down. Don’t you worry about that at all.’
She slammed the door behind her and the echo throbbed through the candlelit darkness.
Holly stood. She turned back towards the dark tip of stairs. The candles were fewer here and she kept her hand on the wall for balance, feeling it cold and damp under her fingertips. There was a smell to it, foetid like groundwater, thick as moss. The lower stairs were slippery, greasy. She thought of snails and rats and sewers. Whatever could have brought her parents to such a place?
There were only three candles in this new corridor. It was lined with doors as before, but these were solid and dark, the wood old and cracked and damp with seepage. Holly picked one of the candles out of a puddle and held it up to the gnarled wood. The handle was brass; ornate. Holly was afraid even to touch it. She moved between the doors listening, but the wood was massive and silent.
A slit. A crack in the heavy surface of the door, right at the base. Holly knelt, water slippery on her knees, palms submerged in a puddle. She pressed her face to the door. It took her a moment to adjust to the darkness, but when she shaded her cheek with one hand she began to make out something. Teeth. A snarl. Some animal, a lion or a tiger, glaring at her. She sprang back, blinking.
She took a deep breath and looked again. Not a tiger. The head of a tiger. A rug. She almost giggled with relief, leaned closer to the crack in the wood, letting the mud and muck soak into the front of her black dress. Her nipples hardened with the cold, her thighs snapped closed like an oyster protecting its pearly prize.
There was a man standing on the rug. A naked man. She took in the tight toned buttocks, the fine silvering of downy hair on each cheek. The shadow of his balls swaying between his thighs as he shifted from one straight strong leg to the other. The man had a mask over his head, a leather sack with coarse stitching holding the edges together. He eased himself from tiger paw to tiger paw. She noticed his toes, so long they were almost fingers, the arches of his feet high enough for a rat to scamper under them safely. In his hand he held a stick with a leather tag on the end. He slapped the leather gently against his thigh and yet the sound of it was amplified as if he had raised the crop over his head and brought it thunking down on the back of—
—Her father.
It was her father who cowered at the feet of the masked man, chained to the wall with a great metal shackle around his neck. Her father: naked, his cock larger than Holly would have imagined, erect, so engorged with blood that it was almost purple in colour. The tip was twitching, a single drop of liquid dangling from the swollen head. Holly watched, appalled, as the mysterious fluid trembled on the tip of her father’s penis before plummeting down onto another animal fur. A zebra this time. She noted the stripes, and the pained frozen whinny of its horse-like head. Her father’s face glowed with terrified excitement that filled her with horror; and yet somehow she could not look away.
The other figure was revealed only when the masked man slapped his crop down on the ground beside her father’s legs and he scampered away in mock, or perhaps real, terror. The woman was chained more tightly to the dank wall. Her legs were spread wide, the ankles fastened, the knees bent slightly. Her arms were secured behind her back, thrusting her large breasts forward. Holly could not see her face. The woman was as anonymous as her torturer, but Holly shuddered to think that this pathetic submissive might just, by association, be her mother. Her mother. The woman who had packed her school lunches for so many years.
‘Again,’ the torturer spat, a voice that sounded barely human. A slap of the crop on her father’s quivering buttocks echoed awfully around the walls of the chamber.
‘Again.’
And the man who had sat Holly on his comforting knee, taken her to the high school formal, proudly clapped her mediocre performance in the final-year musical, this man, her father, took his frightful, swollen, sweating prick in hand, turned to the bound and blinded torso of the woman, and plunged it like a weapon into the gaping maw between her thighs.
Holly shied like a pony, scrambling away from the door. She batted a
t the mud that caked her chest, and clawed at the insects that suddenly seemed to be crawling through her hair. She hurled herself, skidding, slipping, grazing her elbows on the stairs. A respectable-looking woman was rearranging her skirt in the upper corridor. Holly shoved past her, hands outstretched, leaving a perfect muddy print of her fingers on the woman’s neat white blouse. She must have looked like a banshee as she hurled herself through the polite crowd still milling around the living room. She upset a plate of crudités.
Holly ran till her feet began to bleed. She ran till she had no idea where she was or where she had come from. When she could run no more she stood, gasping, tipped her head back to the sky, and there was the bright luminescence of the moon. She opened her mouth and screamed. It was a sound that seemed to shake the pavement, the rumble of an earthquake looming. She screamed until her throat was raw and red. She shook her fists at the sky and when the moonlight glinted off her abstinence ring she wrenched it off her finger and flung it out into the darkness. She heard the click as it hit glass. A light flicked on suddenly. A light that clearly illuminated the interior of a telephone booth.
The bookshop. She was here where the night had begun. She walked towards it like a sleepwalker, the scents of mint, lavender, rocket rising under her bare feet. The book was still there where she had thrown it. Not one book but a pile of books, all identical, a hundred copies of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman scattered like fallen leaves under a strange and curling plant. She touched a naked branch and sniffed her fingers. A strange oceanic smell, an odd stickiness on her skin. She bent and picked up a copy of the book. She felt the sharp sting of a thorn pricking her finger. Put her thumb into her mouth and tasted blood.