The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine

by Krissy Kneen

  The air sparked and flared with a light as bright as an atomic explosion. She screamed. The light might blind her. Screamed again, and was joined by the pain of twenty men and women and by their pleasure too as the whole naked tangle of bodies was suddenly drenched, awash with juices of all kinds. She smelled sperm and cunt and piss and shit and it was all of it wonderful and terrible at once. Holly gasped and opened her blind eyes wide, her arms stretched out, every orifice gaping. She stood like a saint martyred and as her eyes became accustomed to the glare she noticed the flames. The curtains were on fire. The dusty fabric burning with a bright blue flame. The light from her own cunt was still burning too, brighter than the glow from the bulb at the head of the bed. Nick stood at the window batting at the flames with his bare fists. At some point he had freed his own cock from his pants and it still spat its final bursts of orgasmic energy in frightened little gasps.

  ‘Oh god!’ he screamed. ‘They will see! They will find us now! They will find us!’

  Holly covered the light from her sex with her hands but the pulsing beacon shone out between her fingers. Staccato bursts of light punctuated by legato echoes, a sexual SOS that seemed to swell and throb without end. She looked down between her legs to see a wild-eyed man gorging himself on the glowing juices. Another man, the one called Chatterton, pushed at the first, his tongue extended, struggling to take his place at the front. A woman shoved her hand up between their tongues, entranced, and scooped a measure of the bright liquid, sucking on her fingers in a pantomime of ecstasy. All eyes were on Holly, all hands, all tongues. She felt as if she were being drunk dry. She remembered the woman in the shop, Culculine, the terror of her incessant lapping. She tried to struggle away from the writhing mass but she was trapped between limbs and breasts and cocks. There was a loud hushing sound. Nick stood by the curtains brandishing a fire extinguisher, spraying foam onto the ruined velvet. He turned towards her and took in the desperate, clutching pile of human want. The mouths, the tongues, the crazed eyes. He pointed the extinguisher at her cunt, braced himself and pulled the trigger. Holly was bathed in the glorious chill of foam. The relief of bubbles slipping up between her legs. She thrust her hips forward and the slick jet of foam scoured her vulva, pummelled her anus, coated the heads of the ravenous horde. They fell away one at a time as the glow from her cunt hissed and faded, leaving foam up to her tits and the pile of bodies writhing in it like an early morning scene post–mardi gras. Holly felt dizzy from the energy she had expended. She wanted to sit up; tried to steady herself, but her hands slipped on someone’s foamy shoulder and she fell back, fainting away completely on a slag heap of expended sex.

  Nick paced. He had hung thick blankets up in the windows and hauled the soiled sheets and mattress into a reeking heap in a corner of the room. Now he had nothing left to do but worry. He lifted the blanket a fraction and peered out at the night sky. Ran his hand through his tormented hair.

  ‘Nick, we need to sleep. You should come over to my hotel room. Clean sheets, blankets.’

  He bent to the side of the accumulator and began to fuss with the strange contraption, all tubes and pipes and dials.

  ‘You can take the battery with you, Nick. We should go. Honestly. I am so exhausted I could sleep on the floor.’

  Nick shook his head. ‘We can’t transport this now. Do you know how much orgone’s been captured in here? It would be like carrying a nuclear weapon in your handbag.’

  ‘So no one will hurt us then. We have all that energy to protect us.’

  ‘But we don’t know what to do with it yet. What if they find us before we figure out how to use it?’

  ‘OK, then.’ She moved to hug him. His shoulders were cold and so thin she thought her hug might break him. He turned and buried his head in her chest, breathed her in. He was shaking slightly. She kissed his cheeks.

  Nick pulled away suddenly and moved back to the window. He pulled the blanket aside and peered up into the scrap of sky.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I am sure they must have seen.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Holly, you have no idea.’

  ‘Nick. We’re in this together, remember?’

  ‘The government wants to get their hands on the accumulator.’

  ‘Which government?’

  He gave a tense laugh. ‘Well, most of them really. But they’re not the only threat. And certainly not the most powerful one.’

  He looked back up through the chink in the blanket towards the darkness of the night sky.

  ‘Holly.’ He turned to her and pressed something into the palm of her hand. She shivered. It was cold, metal. She opened her hand. A flash of silver. A key.

  ‘Do you know the Musée de l’érotisme? In Pigalle?’

  ‘No. I haven’t been there yet.’

  ‘Well, if anything should happen to me you must go there.’

  ‘Nothing will…’

  ‘Holly. There is a room of phalluses. In the room there is a box. This key fits the lock in the box.’

  ‘What’s in the box?’

  ‘A relic. The last remaining relic. Promise me you will go there. Take the relic and run. Go home. Hide.’

  ‘OK, but nothing is going to happen.’

  He shook his head and glanced up and out of the tiny crack in the window. She followed his gaze. There in the night sky she could see a pulsing orange glow that might have been a star.

  The She-devils

  by PIERRE LOUŸS

  Holly’s cheeks were icy from the chill of the day as she bustled through the streets of the 4th Arrondissement. Her head was crowded with architecture. She wished Nick had agreed to come with her, and now she wanted to tell him all about Lacoste, the palace of the Marquis de Sade, once a crumbling ruin, now restored; the symbolism of it, a restoration of the great satirist himself. We can now lift de Sade back onto his terrible throne of glory, she had realised. He can continue his reign of glorious perversity with our blessing.

  Somehow this idea heartened her. Having spent the day in the great man’s chateau she felt as if Nick’s work had a context. As if their orgiastic revelry belonged in a venerable tradition of moss and stone. Where lawns were mown and tended, shrubbery clipped into shape. The shapeless mass of writhing bodies she had been part of the night before seemed to draw a meaning from today’s exploration. This is what she would say to Nick when she pushed through the door and he lifted her up into his arms.

  She had her own key now and she used it. Entering a room clothed in darkness, the blankets blocking out the afternoon sun. She felt for the switch, fumbling at the wall till she found it. Even before the room flooded with light she knew that there was something wrong. It felt strangely empty, bereft of energy, a dead space. And when her eyes made sense of what the light touched, the fragments of their weeks together, what she saw dismayed her.

  The bed was torn apart. Not disassembled but destroyed: beaten into submission. The wood cracked and splintered, the steel wool spilling from the wreckage. She could see the intricate construction of the accumulator, the layers of zinc, the wool, the wood now no more than an archaeology of its components. All the craft that had gone into making the thing utterl
y trashed. The desk was broken too, the lock destroyed, the drawer hanging open. She remembered the leather-bound notebooks, could feel the soft covers in her hands. She knelt in the remains of the broken desk and placed her hand in the empty space where Nick’s life work had rested. She remembered the diagrams in his notebooks, the one with her own naked body at the centre. She imagined some faceless man in a cheap suit placing his finger at the point where the orgone began. And what of Nick? Where had they taken him?

  There was no blood. This in itself was a relief. If they had injured him then it wasn’t in this room. Either he had fled, or they had taken him without violence. They had certainly taken their anger out on the furniture. The orgone-measuring instruments were missing, the notebooks, the shooter tubes and funnels, all gone. Holly felt a wave of rage overtake her. She picked up a chair leg and swung it forcefully into what remained of Nick’s desk.

  Her own suitcase had been forced open, the books strewn, the spine of Venus in Furs rent in two, Irene’s Cunt torn into its component parts, and she felt a sudden shock as she saw her copy of Josephine Mutzenbacher ravaged and curled in a corner like a tiny frightened fawn. There was only one book left intact, The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. She picked it up, held it in her lap like a frightened child with a doll. She sat in a pile of torn cushions, watching feathers swirl and settle on her skirt. She wanted to cry. She would have, but then she remembered what Nick had told her. The Relic. Find the relic and run.

  She had put the silver key in her pocket. She took it out now, the metal cold against her fingers.

  It was late afternoon. She would need to hurry to get to Pigalle before the Musée de l’érotisme closed. Would it be open after dark, she wondered. Exactly what kind of place was it anyway, this museum of sex?

  Holly brushed the feathers from her skirt. She slipped The Story of the Eye into her bag like a talisman. Then she hurried out of the room and into the bright cold glare of the afternoon.

  She was exhausted. Her feet were sore, her head felt dense, fuzzy. In her bag The Story of the Eye beat against her thigh like a rider’s crop, urging her forward on her headlong bolt from the Métro.

  Pigalle was a place she had heard of—a red-light district, a suburb of bodily delights. The Moulin Rouge, the haunt of prostitutes and procurers.

  And here was the museum, exactly where Google said it would be. Holly paid the entry fee to a bored-looking man at the counter. Beside him was an array of old-fashioned porno magazines, glossy books featuring naked women, postcards, dildos, vibrators. From the front—even here in the foyer—it looked like nothing more than a sleazy sex shop. She pushed past the automated gate.

  Dazed as she was, she failed to spot the narrow staircase. She peered instead at glass cases crammed with explicit sexual carvings and replicas of famous dildos. The Japanese seemed to be the most perverse: dogs and horses with their stiff pricks poised to enter prostrate women. Monkeys humping rabbits, men penetrating women’s anuses. She blinked, dumb with fatigue, examining figurines of bone, combs, leather harnesses, odd chains designed in some way for female pleasure. There were phalluses, plenty of them, but nothing that resembled a locked box where she might try the key.

  She noticed the staircase on the second pass of the room. It was more of a ladder really, only just big enough for her to climb. The paperback thudded against the wall as she hauled herself up, as if Bataille himself were urging her on, setting her pace.

  On the second floor there was a screen with pornographic films playing, old stag films in black and white. Holly glanced at the people on display, people from another age disporting themselves in all the positions a modern couple might attempt. The men and women on the film were dead now. She watched them, young, fleshy, virile. Imagined the slow creep of age, the skin slackening, the bowels loosening, the cheeky grins replaced by slack-jawed, toothless smiles. It was unsettling to watch coupling after coupling, knowing the people were old enough to be her great-grandparents. Holly shuddered. She continued up the stairs.

  Floor after floor of erotic delights, and yet there was a veil of neglect over everything. A veneer. It was more than just the dust, it was the carelessness. Original artefacts crammed in beside clever reproductions, a sloppiness in the labelling, a disregard for era.

  On the very top floor she found an exhibition of posters for pornographic films and beside that, finally, the phalluses. There was nothing here that was not phallic: wall-hangings in the shape of penises, penis-shaped cigarette lighters, a chair with a penis backrest and balls that would slip easily between the sitter’s thighs. Shoes, handbags, walking sticks, toys with giant phalluses and, of course—almost anti-climactically—an array of carved dildos. Some of the dildos were in open boxes lined with satin or velvet. One of the boxes was closed.

  She glanced around. There was no one else here. She looked into the upper corners of the room. Cameras. Holly angled her body to block a direct view of her hands. They were shaking as she took the key and fitted it into the lock. The box sprang open to reveal another dildo, an ivory beast of a thing resting on a silk handkerchief, and carved with the bodies of people caught mid-fuck. She didn’t have time to examine it. She slipped the dildo into her bag and pulled aside the handkerchief to reveal the leather cover of a notebook. The notebook was thick, the edges of the pages sealed in gold. The letters WR were pressed into the cover in gold leaf. Holly picked up the book, slipped it too into her bag and locked the box again. Her heart was pounding. Too fast, she could barely breathe. She turned and hurried down the looping flights of stairs. The sound of long-dead couples fucking, on and on into infinity, was a counterpoint to the thump thump of her bag against her leg. The Story of the Eye, the last remaining notebook of Wilhelm Reich and a disembodied cock providing the percussion track for her flight. Her own heart contributed a frenetic counterpoint. What strange music she was making in her panicked flight.

  She hurled herself out onto the footpath and leaned on a sculpture to catch her breath, a large crouching woman carved from stone, her generous breasts exposed to the passing traffic. She touched the statue’s left breast as if for comfort. She had made it. She had the relic.

  When she looked up there was a man watching her, thin as a street lamp, the glow of his cigarette flaring greedily as he sucked. The cloud of smoke and warm breath as he exhaled. He saw her notice him and looked away. Holly took her hand off the statue’s breast. She crossed the street quickly and disappeared into the ornate mouth of a Métro station.

  On the train she risked a peek into her bag. The gilt edge of the notebook gleamed. She pulled it from her bag; the thing seemed warm, alive. She could feel it pulse under her fingers. She squeezed the cover and the page edges slipped to an angle, slightly askew, the front cover angling forward from the back cover. She drew in breath as an image became visible. There was an image drawn on the very edge of the pages, she saw it had been hidden by the gold edging, but when the pages were spread out just a little the image leaped into sudden clarity. It was a picture of a woman, legs splayed, breasts round and prominent. A set of sun-like rays seemed to radiate from her vulva. Holly realised that the woman in the image hidden in the edging of the book looked very much like herself.

  She pushed the notebook deep into her bag. She didn’t want to open it. She was suddenly afraid of what might be inside. Instead she pulled out the other book, the Batail
le, tried to concentrate on the words. Her heart was beating too fast. She needed to calm herself. The text made no sense to her at all. She read one paragraph over and over again. She was distracted. She had Reich’s notebook and all that was left to do was to pack her bag and run to the airport, but first she had to endure the train ride back to Nick’s place. She took long, deep, calming breaths. She pressed the book flat open on her knee.

  As far back as I can recall I was frightened of anything sexual.

  Only a matter of weeks ago Holly had felt just like that. A simple fear of the unknown. So much had changed in so little time. She continued to read, but even as she read she became wary. The pornographic images described in the book were like nothing she had read before. It was more perverse than she could have imagined. She glanced up often; the hairs rose at the back of her neck.

  She put the book down and stood, walking from one end of the train carriage to the other, suddenly very afraid. She peered through the doors to the next carriage. She saw him there. Tall, thin, still smoking his cigarette. Holly crept towards the main doors and stood, trembling, poised to run as soon as the train pulled up at the next stop.

  She felt their momentum slowing. She felt the lurch of inertia. She heard the doors hiss open. And she ran.