The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  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 intoner entered the scene, and squatting in front of Nicole lifted her in to his engorged cock, establishing by that a complex 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, 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 as though a bit of sky had 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 mini-skirt. 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 stylised 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 materialised by the recessed window began to move in from the opposite direction, her movements exactly synchronising 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 empathising with the severity of her discipline. Neither of the girls was bound, and neither made any attempt to elude their voluntary punishment. Rather, 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 behin
d. 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 eat 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 worked into her until she felt her mind had interiorised 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 it 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 leans 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 girls’ 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. He wasn't asking for ascendancy, only consideration. 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 music on an mp3 player. 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 recognised 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 in 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 s
tereo, 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 the lips to a red carnation. The student should begin by applying a thin coat of honey to the frenulum, and using tension points as mouth stops. 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 flickered 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 not the 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 oval 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 tantalising 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 oh, 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 aesthetically viewed at the château. Proust had a dread of direct physical contact, and half of Betty's clients were the same, preferring to act out elaborate fantasies rather 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.