Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  ‘That way the patterns will hold for at least 24 hours,’ I was told. She then departed. ‘The next part of the Ball commences after midnight,’ she said as she walked away. ‘You have full access. Enjoy.’

  Lauralynn walked over to another table and slipped off her pale silk blouse. She searched through the racks, pulled out an item of clothing and stepped into it, then turned to the mirror.

  ‘That’ll do me,’ she said. Having revealed her bottom half through the performance she had now reversed the trend, in a pair of navy satin trousers with inbuilt braces that covered her nipples but left the rest of her breasts and her torso bare. She picked up a hat – the sort of style that went with costume-shop issue policewoman outfits, only handmade and no doubt infinitely more expensive – that was balanced precariously on a nearby hat stand, as though someone had thrown it there from across the room and it had landed but not quite settled onto its hook.

  I stood there motionless, still overcome by the strength of the sensations that had raced through me towards the end of the performance.

  ‘You?’ She held out a garment of some sort towards me.

  I didn’t even look at whatever she was proposing I should wear for the rest of the Ball.

  ‘No,’ I said. I looked down at my body, the deep marks running across my skin and the way they still highlighted my private parts, decorated me. ‘I’ll just go like this.’

  She glanced down, smiled and said, ‘Great. The high heels are just right for the outfit …’

  It occurred to me, as we headed out that I didn’t know whether or not I would see Antony tonight. I suspected I would, of course. But I hadn’t seen him yet, and I didn’t know if Aurelia had also given him a ring. I was acutely aware that the two of us hadn’t discussed the confines of our relationship or how we expected the other to behave as part of the Ball, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted from tonight, either.

  ‘Antony will be there,’ Lauralynn announced, answering the question that I hadn’t yet asked and breaking the silence that had fallen between us. ‘Though still on duty. Working, till later at least.’

  We had first travelled in one of the mini motorised carts that served to carry equipment and people between the multitudinous canopies and trailers that were spread across the desert and had parked near what had appeared from the outside to be just a medium-sized red tent, lacking any remarkable features. Inside though, it seemed to be much larger than it had looked from the outside, and Lauralynn strode ahead as I followed her through a complicated network of passageways and heavy canvas flaps that functioned as doors. We appeared to be travelling downhill, which ought to have been impossible, as I knew the landscape was entirely flat for miles.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘Good.’ And I realised that I meant it. I was looking forward to seeing him.

  ‘Have you ever given any thought, Summer,’ she continued, after another long pause, ‘to the undeniable fact that the reason you like to be told what to do is because you don’t know what you want? Or you don’t have the balls to ask for it?’

  I stopped dead, shocked by her out of the blue remark.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I replied.

  She turned and faced me. Her hat was perched at a jaunty angle covering half of her face, and it was hard to take her seriously when she looked like an expensive dominatrix version of a strippergram.

  ‘Is it? Have you talked to Antony about tonight?’

  ‘Haven’t had a chance …’ I said. ‘We’ve barely seen each other.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be harsh,’ she sighed, putting her arm around my neck in a gesture of apology that made me almost lose my balance and stumble against her. After years of nights out and wearing heels to gigs, I still hadn’t learned to walk in them. Lauralynn strode along in hers as though her feet had evolved stilettos sometime between adolescence and adulthood and they were now no more an encumbrance to her than fins on a fish. ‘It’s just that you need to learn to tell people how you’re feeling. You can’t play it all away. Or fuck it all away, for that matter. Any more than he can drink it all away.’

  ‘You know about that?’ I asked her, surprised when she referred to Antony’s tendency to hit the bottle when he was depressed.

  ‘Alissa has a big mouth,’ she said. I frowned in disapproval. ‘But a big heart too,’ she added. ‘I don’t think she was spreading things around. We were just having a girlie chat.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you two had got so close.’

  ‘The gal does have her good points,’ Lauralynn said, smirking from ear to ear. ‘At least two of them,’ she chortled.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know …’ I grumbled. By now Alissa’s tits had enough of a reputation they could have had a part of their own in any show.

  ‘All I mean to say is talk to him. Work it out. Tonight will make you feel like a maenad … Remember the island. Like you’ve lost control of yourself, but you won’t have, really. All the Ball does is give people space where they can behave how they really are. Let themselves go. Some folk are shocked by their own desires, so they blame it on something they can’t see. Drugs, booze, magic … Whatever. But none of that is true. It’s an illusion. The notion that participants bear no personal responsibility for what occurs here is what gives them the freedom to do what they like. That’s why they keep coming back, Ball after Ball. Humans, huh … we’re such fucked up, predictable creatures.’

  I barely absorbed her mini-soliloquy, I was too eager to hear more about how Aurelia, and the Network, created these illusions. Apparently spontaneous orgies I could understand, under the right circumstances. And I’d been involved in enough shows to realise that incredible things could be pulled off with a good set, expert technicians and a pliable audience. But disappearing and reappearing, moving tattoos? Vines that came alive? I thirsted to know more about it, all about it. There was a part of me though, that didn’t want to know how it worked, in case that ruined the mystery of it all. I liked believing in magic. And sex was magic, in my opinion. The right kind, at least. And the wrong kind, I knew from personal experience, could be just as powerful and traumatic as any form of voodoo curse.

  ‘Illusions? Aurelia said the same thing …’

  I was about to ask her to tell me how she got involved with it all when the lights went out and a sound like gunfire cracked through the air, sending the fabric on all sides of us billowing outwards as if a huge gust of wind had entered the tent. Then the ground beneath us gave way.

  I shrieked, and flailed for something to grab on to with about as much grace as a spider on roller skates. One hand knocked against and instinctively seized one of Lauralynn’s breasts, the other clutched at thin air.

  We dropped for not even a second before our journey was ever so softly halted by whatever now surrounded us. What had seemed like a natural desert floor of compacted sand had become a tunnel leading directly downward, swirling with something that apparently held back the forces of gravity enabling us to travel safely to our destination at the bottom.

  Darkness was replaced by a light that grew steadily brighter and as my eyes adjusted and my body got over the shock of the fall, I began to register what was touching my skin.

  Hands.

  Dozens of pairs of soft human hands were guiding us downwards, each of them wearing skin tight, ultra thin rubber gloves in a different colour so that when I looked up at those we had already passed by we seemed to be dropping through a field of flowers, the fingers attached to each palm opening and closing like petals waving in the breeze. Their touch was cautious and delicate and at first totally transactional, engaged only in catching our weight and easing us lower. But as we travelled on, the fingers became bolder and I felt firm strokes against my buttocks, my breasts were kneaded, even a gentle exploratory digit navigating the folds of my pussy as other hands wrapped around my ankles and wrists, slowing my progress further and enabling the roamers to tr
averse the length and breadth of my body at will.

  I relaxed. There was nothing else for it. And before long, I drifted into that same heightened sense of arousal that I had experienced on the island. Every gentle breath of wind, every slightest brush of contact on my skin was magnified a thousand times.

  ‘Oh,’ I sighed, when we finally reached solid ground again, disappointed that our strange journey was over. The hands were attached to a towering tunnel of acrobats, connected like a long chain, not unlike the barrel of monkeys toy I remembered playing with as a child. When one tired, another acrobat was hoisted into place in a never ending circle of athleticism.

  Alissa was waiting for us to arrive, standing nearby and clad in an interesting ensemble of tube-like bits of latex that covered all of the parts of her that would normally be uncovered – her thighs, arms, throat and belly - and left her cunt, arse and breasts bare. I’d seen so much of them lately that her nudity didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. It would have been more of a shock to see her fully dressed.

  Long lace-up boots encased her calves, but rather than her usual stilettos, they had a high but flat platform and were covered in an alarming array of silver spikes and studs. In one hand she held a thick black leather paddle and her hair had been pulled into a severe knot that balanced on the top of her head like a solitary bun on a baker’s tray. Her lipstick was the deep blue red of smashed berries and her eyes ringed with kohl. She looked positively delighted to be playing the part of dominatrix, albeit one with a somewhat backwards approach to allowing the eyes of onlookers to roam unhindered over her body.

  ‘Enjoy the ride, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ I replied.

  ‘I asked to go back up again,’ she said. ‘But there’s plenty more where that came from.’

  The expression on her face was like that of a food addict who has just found herself trapped inside a French patisserie.

  I followed her gaze, surveying the room.

  It wasn’t so much a room, as a landscape.

  ‘But …’ I mouthed.

  ‘I know,’ Alissa replied. ‘It doesn’t seem possible. And yet …’

  ‘This is what Antony’s been working on.’

  She nodded.

  The ground that we were standing on was like the surface of the moon, and stretched out so far I could not make out any walls delineating the edge. Up above us, a vast open space loomed, dark and twinkling with stars, like the night sky. A gentle draught of cool air brushed across my face, as though we were outside.

  ‘How did he …?’

  ‘Climate controlled. False ceiling. They’ve been digging up underneath, that’s where they disappear to every day.’

  Her mouth was full. She was munching on some kind of confectionery. Custard squeezed between her teeth as she talked and a line of icing sugar powdered her lip.

  ‘You’ve got to try this,’ she said, between mouthfuls, and thrust a cream and pastry covered finger between my lips. It was moist and chewy and tasted of peanut butter, banana and caramel.

  Lauralynn opened her mouth, signalling that she would like a bite, or more precisely that she would like Alissa to feed it to her.

  To my immense shame, Alissa snapped her fingers in the air to call for a waiter. Within moments, a server stood in front of us holding a flat white platter on which miniature desserts were balanced; skewered fruit coated in chocolate, candied almonds, tiny mounds of jelly and pots of light-as-air mousse equipped with teaspoons smaller than my pinky finger. I picked up what appeared to be a bunch of grapes and popped one of the smooth, emerald green fruits into my mouth where it promptly burst like a bomb on time delay and sprayed my tongue with fizzing, sweet juice that tasted alcoholic.

  ‘Careful with those,’ said the server, ‘they’re full of grenadine. A bunch will leave you punch drunk.’ He was dressed to blend into his surroundings in a very thin fabric that stretched tightly over his skin. As he walked away and moved around the room I noticed that his outfit took on the appearance of whatever he stood next to, whether that be another of the unusually clad guests, a piece of furniture or something that appeared to be a rock formation carved out of the earth.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked Alissa. ‘Antony. Have you seen him?’ I asked her again when she didn’t respond. She and Lauralynn had abandoned the pretext of feeding one another cream cakes and were now enthusiastically snogging, each with their hands clamped tight around the other’s buttocks. Alissa still had her paddle, dangling by a leather strap wound around her wrist, but I doubted that she would dare use it on Lauralynn.

  Finally Alissa disengaged her tongue from my friend’s mouth and responded briefly and breathily to my question.

  ‘That way,’ she said, pointing into the distance at what looked to me to be just a vast space with no discernible features.

  ‘What way?’ I replied, annoyed, as she barely paused for long enough to wave her arm in the right direction.

  ‘Just keep walking, you’ll find it,’ she hollered, her voice breaking under the arousal elicited by Lauralynn’s insistent kisses on her neck.

  I began to tread carefully in the direction that she had pointed out, fearful of losing my footing in the low light and uneven ground beneath my impractical shoes but within just a few steps I discovered that I had unwittingly stumbled on a smooth path, and with each step that I took it seemed to grow brighter. Sensors, I wondered, that lit up automatically in response to body weight?

  Despite my fantastical surrounds I was finding it difficult to switch off and enjoy the party as my mind kept interrupting with questions, analysing, interpreting my environment, trying to find the key that would reveal the machinations of the Ball and how it all worked. I was like Dorothy seeking out the Wizard of Oz, not content with just listening to the apparent power of his voice but incessantly drawn to discovering whatever lay behind the curtain.

  Overhead, the blanket of stars in the faux sky, or whatever it was that we were beneath, were leaping and diving and whizzing across the heavens as though a container load of firecrackers had been trapped and let off in the atmosphere. One dropped suddenly from the sky, landed directly in front of me with a gentle thud and then unfurled and stepped to her feet. It was Nina, the aerialist with the cropped ginger hair who I had seen hanging from a hoop in the Grand Desert Inn lobby when I first arrived. She was dressed from the neck down in a glittering sequined body suit that reflected the light around her so well she sparkled like a disco ball. Her face was bare, without any trace of make-up but her hair was tied into an elaborate array of knots that covered her head, each of them threaded with coloured bulbs that flashed at regular intervals.

  She smiled at me and held a finger to her lips.

  ‘Shh, you didn’t see me,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to all be up there for another few hours but I had to come down, I’m dying for a piss.’

  To my astonishment, instead of wandering off in search of a bathroom she pulled down the zipper at the front of her suit, peeled it down to her knees and then squatted and peed right next to me on the rough ground alongside the path, aiming her stream carefully so she didn’t douse the fabric bunched around her calves and ankles. Then she pulled her costume up again, and tried in vain to kick some dust over the pool that she had left on the rugged floor, before shrugging her shoulders in my direction and jogging away.

  It hadn’t felt right to address her directly as she urinated, even if by choosing to do so right in front of me she had waived any semblance of privacy. I hadn’t walked in on her, after all. Still, I didn’t ask the question that hung on my lips as my mouth opened in shock – how on earth did she do that? Instead, I narrowed my eyes and watched carefully as she gathered speed, jumped into the air, and was apparently borne aloft by invisible threads. Bits of her outfit glowed brighter and I heard a faint hum as she powered through the air. A rocket suit of some sort,
I decided.

  On I travelled, covering ground slowly, in part due to my cautious, small steps, but also as I kept being distracted by other events and sights around me. What had appeared to be a rising dust storm from a few steps away turned out to be a circle of male dancers, all nude besides long ochre-coloured chiffon scarves tied to their wrists, throats, waists and ankles that billowed out as they pirouetted in full flight. My gaze was immediately drawn to their limp dicks. Each of them was utterly bare with not a single pubic hair to distract from the onset of the shafts that bounced, bobbed and swayed between the men’s thighs. Their flaccidity was in sharp contrast to the taut shock of the muscles that bulged in their calves and thighs. I imagined the velvety softness of their flesh against my lips if I knelt down in front of them and took each of their cocks into my mouth one by one, like a communion, and sucked until they sprang to life. If they would even stop and allow me to pleasure them. The men danced on around me, unaware of my presence, uncaring.

  I paid closer attention from then on to any apparently natural features in the landscape and noticed that what I had presumed were rock formations or strange desert plants swaying in invisible gusts of wind were in fact groups of people embracing, their limbs and extravagant costumes masquerading as inanimate species. Some were couples, standing and holding on to each other, as still as boulders. Others were triads, or tangles of four, five or more, fucking or pleasuring one another with wandering tongues and fingers.

  My ears had suddenly attuned to another frequency, like dialling into a radio station I hadn’t previously known existed. The sound of the whispering wind or a coyote howl that I had thought was some kind of desert soundtrack being broadcast through loudspeakers dotted all over was actually the hubbub of bodies sliding against one another, men and women moaning as they were penetrated, the soft shift of skin on skin as people everywhere made love precisely where they happened to be sitting or standing when the mood took them without a care in the world for the roughness of the soil beneath them or who might be watching. There were piles of bedding laid out like nests for the purpose, I noticed, but many were not in use. People were embracing passionately just twenty yards from a bed and then falling on top of one another right then and there with the desperation of lost mountaineers who collapsed just metres from their tents.