The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  THE

  PLEASURE

  CHTEAU

  JEREMY REED

  THE PLEASURE CHTEAU Jeremy Reed

  Copyright © Jeremy Reed 1995, 2014

  Reprinted 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000

  This new revised edition published 2014

  Copyright © Jeremy Reed 2014

  www.jeremyreed.com

  The right of Jeremy Reed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All world rights reserved

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE: THE PLEASURE CHTEAU

  Part I: The Château

  Part II: The Dungeon

  Part III: Another Sex

  Part IV: Torch

  BOOK TWO: SISTER MIDNIGHT

  Part I: Deep Night

  Part II: Torch Song Extravaganza

  Part III: The Underworld

  Part IV: The Harem

  Part V: Cyberlibrary

  Part VI: New Day

  BOOK THREE: THE PURPLE ROOM

  THE

  PLEASURE

  CHTEAU

  Jeremy Reed

  ‘Spiritual attachments are incompatible with bourgeois morality.’

  – Aleister Crowley

  ‘And if I die before I wake up

  I pray the Lord don’t smudge my make-up’

  – Marc Almond, St. Judy

  Part 1

  The Château

  The room was dark. Leanda sat astride a chair, adjusting her blindfold, one of the black silk scarves, worn to match her panties, which she kept in a drawer specifically for this purpose. She regularly adopted this pose as a form of erotic meditation. Fully dressed, she would cross and recross her stockinged legs, her sex irritated by sustained fantasies. She held a single red carnation in one hand, as a reminder that she wasn't to touch herself. It was an inveterate habit she had been practising for years. As part of the ritual, she would go down on all fours, her bottom pushed out, and rehearse the scatological lines she would feed into her lover's mouth.

  Convulsive, her head buzzing with sexual theorems, Leanda squatted on the carpet, her hands feeling for one of the two pet cobras she kept in the room. Her fingers interrogated the wooden floor, but drew a blank. As though engaged in a yogic posture, she let her bottom slowly come to rest on her black stilettos. The rectangular supports to the heels abraded her skin. She liked that feeling of vivifying contact with leather. It reminded her of childhood, and the hours she had spent crouched in the attic reading her father's collection of Olympia Press fiction, the familiar green backed books concealing the polysexual spectrum of almost every expression of love. She had associated that reading with autumn. Red leaves splashed over sealed castles and châteaux. The owner selecting his toy zoo for the winter nights ahead, when transvestite servants would attend a cellar, and the best Mersault would line a lip expert at giving head. She would touch herself, and imagine the proceedings at the castle. In her fantasy she would be naked except for her high heels. She would climb on to the back of a woman dressed in leather, while a third partner, also a woman, licked her from behind, then tickled the crack of her bottom with a pink feather. When the woman grew tired of supporting her, she would lead her over to a deep sofa, and interchanging positions, the three of them would continue their exchanges on sumptuous cushions. It was then at the age of twelve, she had developed the fetish of painting the fingernail of her right index finger, scarlet. It was the finger with which she tickled herself, and when her parents or school-friends enquired of this bizarre anomaly, she would stare precociously at her art work and say nothing. It was hers to decide. She wanted to honour the finger most instrumental to giving her pleasure. In class, she would suck that favoured nail, and imagine the intimate explorations she would map out that evening in the attic. And even at twelve she had taken to buying sensuous lingerie. It had become part of her masturbatory ritual. She liked black, pink or white transparent panties, and the outline of her scarlet nail frictionalising the moist chiffon drawn taut across her slit was a visual incitement to orgasm.

  The incentive to dress in provocative underwear was a trait she derived from her mother. Leanda remembered walking into her mother's bedroom late one afternoon, and finding her dressed in nothing but earrings and a pair of blue see-through panties. They showed everything, back and front. The crack of her mother's bottom had stood out like the division between two cantaloupes. Her pubic hair was depilated. Her father, an airline pilot, was due home that evening after a month away. They used to wait until they thought she was asleep, before making unrestrained love. Leanda could still hear her mother's unsuccessful attempts to modulate her orgasmic frenzy, but always in the end, she would let go, and her throaty gutturals and sexual directives harassed all silence away. Her mother's pitch was sustained and explosive.

  Fragmented snatches of her childhood years returned behind the blindfold. She itched to train her scarlet fingernail on her aroused crater. She remembered too how she had adopted the fetish of painting her mother's toenails red. It was a serious game that she had deliberately understated in order to maintain her privilege. Leanda had liked the feeling of her mother's foot in her hand. A couple of times she had playfully tickled her mother under the feet, and drawn from her the volatile squeals which featured in the charged foreplay that distinguished her parents' lovemaking. And once, her mother had somersaulted legs over her head as an involuntary reaction to Leanda's exploratory finger. She recalled her mother's compacted vaginal lips as they showed through the blue fabric. Later that day she had withdrawn to the attic, and imagined kissing her mother in the hot spot between her legs. For months she was fixated by that image.

  Unable to make contact with her pet snakes, she remained on all fours listening for Nicole's heels to reverberate in the corridor. It was Nicole who would come and untie her blindfold, imparting a generous sprinkling of slaps to her bottom with a pink ballet shoe. It was a reminder to break reverie and come back to reality.

  Leanda had lived in the château ever since a stockbroker uncle had bequeathed her his Swiss assets. She had never met her dead benefactor, but had written to him several times a year in bold red ink, sustaining an empathetic relationship through curiosity and a tacit sympathy with his gay lifestyle. Her uncle's private papers and diaries had come to her, and in the former she had read of a lifetime's casual assignations, and a propensity for S&M rituals which had taken him out to the anonymity of night parks, to engage with the faceless pack in the solidly walled dark. She had read the entries with no least sense of shock, excited rather by the extremity of his sexual needs, and the unflinching vocabulary in which he described them. This effete banker had relished the excruciating lacerations of a strap across his back, his body tied to the girth of a seasoned oak. Even today, at times of boredom, she would take his black books out of a trunk, and dip into his life at random, as though she was replaying a film shot ten, twenty, thirty years ago. She could smell the dark, the leaf rot, the fizz of amyl nitrate. There were owls in this, pitching their round vocables across a clearing. The sound of a car drawing near, and one taking off.

  Leanda could hear it now, the staccato click of Nicole's black stilettos negotiating the wooden corridor. Nicole walked in the pronounced, restrained manner of a woman in a skin-tight leather skirt, her constricted movements taking on the form of circular motion from the hips. Leanda knew that her lips would be the crushed red of claret. Her seamed stockings would be scented behind the knees with Rive Gauche. Nicole would go through the pre-prepared ritual. She would untie the blindfol
d, and pass Leanda a folded sheet of red paper. On it she would have written the nature of the sex to be performed later that night. The cork would be drawn on a Nuit-Saint-Georges, and as the continuation of a fetish developed in childhood, Leanda would ask Nicole to paint her toes red, black or gold. Or she would enjoy the slow pleasure of impeding Nicole's silk stockings, and with great application knead the acupressure points in her feet. That done, she would tickle Nicole's feet until the latter was at the point of orgasm, and then abruptly stop, suspending their convulsive lovemaking until after dinner.

  Leanda was restless. She wanted to be driven to the city before a late dinner. Head cradled by the purple velvet upholstery of a black Bentley, she liked her transvestite chauffeur to take her to her various stopping points. From the car's interior she would look out through smoked glass at the reality she feared. Books, a compact stereo and video system, accompanied her on her journey. Listening to a variety of singers from Bessie Smith to Sarah Vaughan, From Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield and Madonna, Leanda would get high on drinking champagne at speed. Her raids on the city were like participation in film. She would emerge from one set and enter another. She defended herself on the grounds that all removed sensibilities employed this form of action, whether they were Marcel Proust or Michael Jackson. Leanda liked to create a sense of mythic illusion. Stepping from a car, dressed in a gold micro-skirt and silver Raybans, she perfected the ideal of a star dramatically entering another dimension.

  Nicole was to stay behind and work on editing the home videos that occupied her creative energies. Leanda was reminded of the time she had ordered the car to be driven to a notorious quarter, and there on the back seat, she and Nicole and a drag queen procured for the purpose had formed an entangled geometry of oral explorations. She had kept her shredded stockings as a memento of the occasion, the lacerating tears looking as though a cat had hung on to two silk verticals.

  It was autumn. There were two swans boating on the black pond in front of the château. The packed lily pads were splashed by red oak leaves. Leanda had let the remains of a receding bridge collapse beneath the water. She liked the idea of a submerged ruin, with tench and pike drowsing through a miniature house of Usher. In the rear of the car, cut off by a glass partition from her chauffeur, Leanda sat with her legs arched, nurturing the intense erotic feelings that the compact unit of a car excited. Intermittently she would flick through Almudena Grandes’ The Ages Lulu, the most stimulating of the new erotic novels to come her way. An advance to her mind on the other accepted erotic classics like The 120 Days Of Sodom, Venus In Furs, The Story Of O and Das Parfum; she had at last encountered a woman whose sexual imagination took on themes in writing that the video purveyors with their mechanical repetition had lacked the vision to explore. But there were other things on her mind.

  Nicole had recently met a man who claimed to officiate over a cult of the deathless. The members all claimed to have been consciously reborn after having died together in a ritualistic pact. Each had taken a precisely formulated death capsule, a code stamped on the streamlined silver gelatin, the slowly metabolised toxic release working on a time delay over three hours. The ten of them, five men and five women, had died on a Pacific beach, the surf planing in from dark blue breakers. But by a meditative pattern through which they had learnt to assert conscious control over their dream life, each individual adept at selecting and editing his oneiric vocabulary, they had by the right manipulation of psychic energies reintegrated with their bodies after a period of six hours in astral meditation. The ritual had taken place on a deserted beach in the evening. Friends had stood guard at strategic points to warn the unsuspecting away. All ten members of the cult had returned to their bodies simultaneously, thereby proving that natural death could be subverted by the right training. What they had returned to were indestructible bodies, for in the transition they had acquired the knowledge of the anti-thanatic chromosomes, and how to release these into the body's chemistry. The death cocktail had contained the necessary DNA and chromosome information.

  Nicole had arranged for the leader of the cult to visit the château the next evening. Leanda, who was interested in everything weird and bizarre, welcomed the opportunity to meet men with adjusted chemistries. She fantasised about their possible sex energies. Or was sex a deletable faculty, now that the fear of death had been extinguished?

  She watched gardens flash by, a red splash of geraniums standing up in her eyes. She used to wonder if the road would ever change, and if one day she would be surprised by a white horse crossing the road with carnations in its mouth, a naked girl following, and in pursuit of her a line of statues tiptoeing across the road. She lived to convert reality into fiction. Sex was another trajectory towards that realisation.

  Leanda felt like shocking. She played little games with her transvestite chauffeur, who was not allowed to manifest desire. She lay back and curled her legs towards her shoulders, her short skirt riding up to reveal her black stocking tops. With a carnation pout, she pretended to be looking for a flaw in her left stocking, and she insolently ran a red fingernail over the dark seam. She knew the chauffeur would be getting erect beneath his uniform. With studied attention to detail, she examined first one and then the other stocking with the disinterested manner of a woman performing this in privacy. It was getting hard for her to separate fantasy from reality. Would she request one day that the car was stopped near a wood, and living out the persona of someone else, have the driver release years of contained desire by flicking her on the back seat? She had teased him until she could feel the tension exploding in his frenulum.

  Leanda recrossed her legs. The menu she had devised for dinner was calculated to unnerve the two male guests. For the main dish they were to be presented with roast penis, the thing being baked in foil and stuffed with dissolvable pearls. It was a speciality with which even the most sophisticated gourmet usually lacked acquaintance. Nor would the guests be provided with knowledge as to whether the delicacy was human. It was to be the archetypal gothic extravaganza. Each of the guests would be asked to describe the particular taste of this flesh, and draw up associations with other forms of food. Leanda had been preparing to spring this anomaly on select company for years. The château was the ideal setting. The table was to be decorated with black candles burning in human skulls. Her two pet cobras would be slewed across the wooden floor. At each place there would be set a red envelope, inside which was a sexual alphabet. After dining, the guests would be transposed to a room which was the opposite of gothic. Seated on minimal aluminium furniture, and facing a maxi video screen, the only light in the room would prove to be a blue meditative rectangle. A cornflower blue blank. Looking at it was for Leanda a transfusion of imaginative space. Blue implanted the backdrop against which images formed. And the visuals worked subliminally. Viewers acted out the suggestions autonomously. Two to three hours after watching they performed fragments of the buried narrative. They imagined they were participating in a dream, but they weren't. Some of the concepts transmitted by the film led to new forms of sexual expression on the part of the recipient. It was Leanda's way of breaking down preconceived conventions. She was endlessly preoccupied with establishing a new sensory vocabulary. The notion of a cult who may have acquired disembodied sexual transference, Fascinated her, so too the idea that extramural sex on the part of one of its members would lead to genetic mutation if a child was conceived.

  Leanda had entertained so many freaks at the château. She had converted a large basement into a dungeon, specifically for this purpose. The walls were cobalt and the ceiling and floor, black leather. There were dog collars, handcuffs and chains for those who entertained these fetishes. All manner of anomalies had filed in and out of her underworld chamber. Transsexuals, hermaphrodites, toefuckers, nibblers of caviar off genitals, disciplinarians, all those whose bodies were the catalyst to a complex release of sexual energies. Dressed in a severe black suit, and with her face masked, Leanda had presided over a confe
ssional. She had video-recorded an archive of sexual admissions. She had removed an elbow-length satin glove and allowed extreme initiates the right to kiss her hand. There was an Argentinian ambassador with a retracted penis which had to be coaxed out of an enveloping clitoris, who had visited the château one November night, and confessed to her secrets which seemed to flow out of an underground river. His words were heavy like coffins floating on black waters. What he had told Leanda that night had induced in her the need to be alone for a month. She had left the château precipitately at dawn, the car headlights stroking the drive with white sticks. She had taken off for the mountains and read Hölderlin there, the diamond clarity of light helping crystallize her thoughts into constructive images. For a whole week she had used ideas as building blocks. She would have sworn that she handled the tangibility of her thoughts. She ordered them into a mosaic of architectural blueprints for the construction of a new complex. The bacilli which had entered her blood-stream were exorcised. She undertook meditation on a blue cube, and on her return consulted a hypnotherapist to assist with de-intensifying the knowledge imparted to her by the hermaphrodite ambassador. Wanda was conscious of how there are confessions so terrible that they belong to a book worse than the grimoire, and are the lore of piss drinkers, coprophiliacs, the weird that go beyond S&M conventions and enter into the restructuring of anatomy by pain. This man had buried his secret like a black seed beneath his tongue, and implanted it into her consciousness as scalding venom. Even now, modifications of his truth invaded her sleepless hours, and alerted a terror so acute that only immediate recourse to sleeping tablets could erase that knowledge. Leanda would at such times dive straight into the dark pool that sleep offered. There was respite down there among defused images, old patterns buried in the sand, ruins inhabited by the blue eyed octopus.