by Jeremy Reed
She poured herself another whisky, and felt her nerves seethe to make a positive connection.
'No amount of wealth can buy essential truth,' he was saying, more like he was answering himself than paying attention to her question. He shifted neither his eyes nor his voice over to her direction. He kept on staring at the rim of his glass. 'You've got every reason to believe that sex need not be attached to the physiological body. It can and often is a psychic manifestation. I don't know what you could be imagining. But if you're sufficiently trained in meditation techniques, then of course it's possible to make love by thought transfer. Get a friend to sit with you, in front of you, and make it happen. It's simple. You each communicate a preconceived image. It may be a position, a violation or whatever turns you on. And by isolating the image, you can frictionalise it to orgasm. That's the simplest technique, and it elevates mutual masturbation to a level of thought contact. But it takes a long time to perfect. But you can apply it to all the erogenous zones, so that eyes, ears, nipples, noses, and all the areas that don't normally get in on sex end up in contact. Imagine coming through polarising your third left fingernail to your partner's. No-one's ever tried to have sex that way. The erotic impulses are in need of being re-zoned. Contact between a penis and a vagina, a penis and an anus has gone on replicating itself for a whole genetic history. It's time we freed the body, or rather you did, as members of the cult have already gone beyond those limitations.'
'And that's where I want to go,' Leanda replied. 'You tell me of general theories, intended techniques, but I want to know the truth.'
But he was gone off again, only this time he stood up, and walked in slow circle round the glass table. But it wasn't like he was looking at anything. She could see that intense concentration really had turned his eyes silver.
'You've heard the story,' he said, 'how we were out there at the beach. Ten of us. Five men and five women. It was far more valid than a lunar landing, for we had created our own time and space. Even if someone had shown up, they couldn't have broken the circle. It was locked tight into imaginary time. We were travelling. We got beyond biorhythms. These aren't small things, and they're also scientifically disputable. What happened beyond that is what we're still researching. Only initiates are permitted access to that knowledge. If you study, and have an aptitude for it, you may in time share our discoveries.'
'But on a level of the senses,' Leanda urged, 'my concern is only with the erotic.'
'You can't separate the erotic from its psychic components,' he replied, 'to go that way is in the nature of death. There are things I could tell you that would be greater than anything you've discovered at the château, but they would be useless to you. We learn only from things we can assimilate.'
Leanda narrowed her eyes at his imperturbable composure. He wanted nothing of her and she wanted everything of him. There had been no uptake to her implied offer of a gift. And if he accepted, she knew it would be with contemptuous indifference. He was unreachable because he contained the secret that others needed. She recrossed her long legs, feeling the itch in her and imagining all the men and women in the world who would like to have possessed her at that moment. She saw herself wiggling down a city street, eyes smouldering on her bottom, their intensity touching her skin like burn marks. She would get high on this game; the idea of men and women going home and masturbating over her image. XZ wouldn't do that. She was sure of his asexual reserve. Instead she fantasised about going into a shoe shop, and having the pretty assistant tickle her toes, while she tried on an endless variety of high heels, her short skirt affording the girl copious glimpses of her panties, tantalisingly erotic flashes that would lead in the end to her inserting a finger there, then two, despite the other customers, and finally working her little provincial tongue up her stockinged thighs, fractionally nearer and nearer her crotch. As the girl was about to attain that treasure, she would get up and reassert a customer's right for absolute respect. She would then have the girl carry out thirteen shoeboxes to her car, and not even tip her as a mark of disrespect.
XZ was still focused off somewhere. She kept thinking he couldn't care less for her company. But she was too intrigued to let go of him. Men were usually attempting to crawl over her, but this one represented an interspecies whose sexual attractions she had still to unseam.
'I'm a different person now,' he was saying, 'I mean since the entry into imaginative time, and the years of discipline preceding it. But I'll tell you a story which may help you.
'There was a man who came here to the château. He was the one who carried within him a sexual secret so terrible, that whoever hears it undergoes a breakdown. I know he came to you, for he still writes to me. I met him when I was part of a male orgy cult. How many years ago? I don't know, as I've ceased to live in time. But this man was peculiar. He was looking to be burnt in order to burn others. He was from the beginning a serious exhibitionist, and later the master of a sex cult. He came a long way. When I knew him first he used to preside over crucifixions in the night woods. Men would hang from nooses or be mock crucified to trees. The dark was full of colliding bodies. Marauding police would run into the scene with flashlights, S&M fetishists in leather would seek each other out with chains and knives, the air would be loaded with amyl nitrate escaped from poppers. It was so dark there you couldn't see your own hand. And the sex was rampant. Blind body finding blind body in a conspiratorial pact. It was a crazy pre-AIDS world, a disease that affects your people, but not mine. We are immune to viral permutations.
'It was summer. We waited longer for night to fall, and for its grainy texture to get in under the trees. We called the central pivot to the woods the Orgy Tree. To go in there was to be lacerated. I never risked that furnace. I stalked it like a panther. But he was always there, wearing a leather crown. I'm careful not to name him for his prominence in politics. You couldn't see it, but he wore red leather, as opposed to the uniform black, and was usually dressed in a red studded leotard and biker boots. He was evil if one uses that definition in terms of describing someone who extracts from others in order to leave them permanently depleted. He marked people like that. It was said that no-one would ever be the same after listening him out. He was vampirical, his voice was never pitched above a whisper and was lethal. You could hear the man limiting on his restrained breath. It was his loaded eyes that trapped victims. They had so much adrenalin shine in them they were black. Big blow-up eyes: eyes that would follow you into sleep and beyond.
'We were all mobbed in there one night. But there was something wrong. It was hard to describe it but there was panic in the air. Too much silence. The sort of twitchy feel you get before a storm. I saw two men running away and they didn't look like they'd ever stop to say why they were running. I thought it was a police raid. And there were other freaks came out to the woods; gangs, off-duty policemen wanting to let off steam, a range of pathological thugs. I thought someone had been murdered. But there wasn't anywhere to go in that pitch black, and I started making my way towards a fire which had been lit near the Orgy Tree. I pushed my way through foliage, alert and ready at any moment to fly. Already the smoke was bitter in my nostrils. I saw that something terrible was happening in the night. I heard people running away. They were cracking through the undergrowth. I got through obstacles and within view of the fire. And he was standing in front of the flames In his red leotard, the shadows jumping on to his thighs. He was performing some sort of rite. There were two men hanging from crosses in the flames. Periodically, and himself untouched by the flames, he would walk through them to his victims and commit sex acts. I was compelled into watching, but at the same time I knew that this scene would disturb me for ever. I broke off after a time, and I was shaking. I couldn't breathe. Anyone who came within range of seeing the red devil at work got out of there quick. I was conscious that if the flames rose his two victims would be roasted. A massive enquiry would ensue. I wasn't going to stay around to get caught. There was a smell of burning on the air
I didn't like. I struck off into the woods and joined the exodus of bodies running away.
'There's much more I could tell you about this individual, but I won't. It was at a formative state in my life, a period of sexual confusion, that I encountered him. Soon after that I pursued hatha yoga and other meditational arts as a means of focusing my energies. And what happened after that is another story.'
Leanda listened attentively as his words faded on a dying trajectory. Once again he assumed the manner of someone who had never spoken at all, and who was too far out to be engaged in something as trivial as conversation. He re-clicked into a guarded silence. If he'd got up abruptly and walked out of the door, she wouldn't have been surprised. He would have walked out to the car, disconnected, and as though nothing of their meeting had ever taken place.
For a moment they were distracted. An effeminate young man with a turtle shell strapped to his back, and gold horns protruding from his forehead, slid into the library on all fours, and proceeded to cross the floor without reference to Leanda and her guest. He was wearing gold slippers on his feet and matching gold gloves on his hands. He went over to the far bookcase, retrieved a volume on molecular biology, and with the same inexplicable deliberation made his way out of the room again, disappearing into one of the château's endless corridors. Leanda watched his progress with close scrutiny, observing at the same time that XZ, after recording the boy's initial entry, ceased to pay any attention to him, and seemed to have forgotten his existence. It was like he let everything extraneous to his inner life go.
'Why is it so impossible to teach me a method?' Leanda asked. 'In your terms I may be at a low or different state of incarnation, but all experience is valid. I'm as inquisitive about sex as you are about life and death. I've studied the secular and the mystic texts on the erotic, and I'm left wanting. I want to be fucked by a gantry, an iguana, and an extraterrestrial. Nobody refuses me anything. This château is the embodiment of my fantasies. When I die it is to be razed. But until then I will have everything. Everything.'
There was no immediate pick up. Leanda listened to her words dip into silence. Last night she had reached intense orgasms due to Nicole tickling her with a face powder brush, a mauve handled brush, the hairs worked to a friction across her cut. The images of their perverse love-making returned to her. She wanted something now, but so heightened, so bizarre that even she would be surprised. She remembered the time she had seduced a twelve year old boy in a newsagents. His father was away for an hour, and she had walked into the shop in a black micro-skirt, locked the door behind her, the limo waiting outside, and had sat on the counter reading Paris Vogue. The boy was too shocked to measure any note of disapproval, and turned dumb as he saw the V of her black panties under the tiny skirt. She had sat there pretending indifference as his hand dropped automatically to his crotch. And as he did so, she widened the angle of her legs so that he could see all the way up. His urgent desperation had her push her skirt up to her hips, insert a finger beneath the elastic string of her panties, and snake a resonant snapping noise. The boy had jolted to avoid spontaneous orgasm. Without speaking a word, she had unzipped him, taken his throbbing cock in her hands, appraised it as though it was a sculpture, then applied it to her dark lipsticked mouth. The boy had almost lost his senses at the immediate sensation of being engorged by her lips. With one hand tickling his balls, while she expertly draped her tongue along his frenulum, his detonative orgasm was sudden and draining. Easing his cock from her lips, she had left the shop and retreated to the car even before the ecstatic aura of post-orgasm had filled his nerves with light. Her thrill had been in his confusion. Was the experience real? And in the idea of the hunger it would instate in him for future experience.
XZ must have had some form of telepathic correspondence with her train of thought, for without warning, he said, 'I can't teach you methods of out-of-body sex. The development of your sensory perception wouldn't receive that information. I mean there's an occult ganglia to the unconscious. ESP sense ducts have to be opened. For you to practise lambika yoga, a technique involving higher cunnilingus — the milking of the third eye or subtle vagina, you have to study and isolate yourself. I can recommend a teacher. The mystical symbol of this technique is the vampire bat which hangs upside down in a sleep induced by satisfaction. It's representative of the backward way, and most typical of that inversion of the senses which leads to states of ecstatic trance. Trance states lead to the most powerful methods of sublimation.'
Leanda was fascinated by this theory of higher sex contact. She had taken her physical desires to the limit. There was only one place to go — inner space with its subtle distinctions. For the first time she felt sympathetic to this isolated stranger. Had he grown to be a humanoid, or did he drop here from the sky, she wondered.
'But do I have time to begin?' she asked. ‘The attainment of levels of sex magic sounds like it demands time. What do I do? Give up life and become a recluse?'
'You don't need to,' he replied. 'Exclusion at this level isn't necessary. You can cultivate lambika yoga by devoting several hours to it a day, and of course by extensive study. You may or may not be suited to it.'
Leanda was again stung by his lack of reassurance. Life for her was a series of intensified moments, each sensation competing with the next. She bit her lip thinking of the possible missed assignations, chance encounters, she would pass up in the pursuit of yogic techniques. Part of her wanted to be in pursuit of pleasure now. Nicole must have sent the youth beneath the turtle shell into the library as a reminder of what would follow. She wanted to be sodomised by this youth disguised as a turtle. She would copulate with all marine creatures. They would chase her across the black marble swimming pool, force her from the water and mount her on black tiles.
'You see,' he was saying, 'it's control you learn to assert, in the same way as true dreaming asks that the unconscious awakes within the dream. To lose the dream or break it by waking up is negative energy. You can begin simply by understanding sexual congress on a simple but positive level. I used this sort of intermediary stage a long time ago. Take the 69 position. The six indicates the sun and the nine the moon. There's a balanced electromagnetic polarity at work there. You can reverse the spiral and have two suns, that is two men perform the act, but that's more dangerous. The mouth is the energiser in this rite. The male sucks the lunar current, and the female absorbs solar seed. That's a simpler way of looking at magic-associated sex symbols, than the advanced rites that our initiates would study for five years before attempting to realise those energies in practise.'
Leanda felt discouraged. It was a state of mind which often led her to want to shock. She could make no inroad into his defensive theories. His neuro-scientific and occult explanations continually went wide of the areas in which she was interested. Her skirt had risen to her crotch, and she didn't care. Rather, she savoured the human fire of her libido. She wanted to be buried alive again, with Nicole's impassioned tongue working her to a frenzy. She wanted a red fog to surround the château. She wanted to change sex and back again within a day. She would be a man seducing a curvy Italian beach girl, going back with her to the hotel, then drawing from her orgasmic shrieks which would shock the staff, and within hours she would be a woman again in the same hotel, brought back by a Latin youth who would elicit the same intense shrieks of pleasure from her. Who was this man, she kept asking herself. He didn't bear much resemblance to the human species. Normally, this would have fascinated her, and this was the reason for bringing XZ here, but the attraction no longer held.
And almost telepathically the door opened, and the boy, carrying the turtle shell on his back, and with gold gloves on his hands and gold slippers on his feet, returned. He made his way in a straight line towards Leanda, and without saying a word brought his tongue to her crotch and began to caress her, the point making contact between her fractionally-parted legs. She made no attempt to resist these advances, but rather threw her head back, half choking on the s
hriek she repressed. She was convulsing with restrained orgasm, hypersensitive to each motion of the youth's tongue, and acutely conscious too that she was in XZ's presence.
She pulled herself back from abandon, and the youth began to retreat. His passive deference for her disturbed by its lack of apparent motive. Money alone couldn't induce this obedience. It was as though the youth had been mind-trained, and Leanda suspected that Nicole had been implanting subliminal video images into his unconscious. He would now be trained to serve both of them and to excite the most subtle fetish.
But she needn't have feared, XZ was still somewhere else, looking through a silver window into inner space. His eyes hadn't moved and there were no signs of the least arousal. He was pointing one silver boot over the other with arranged elegance, while all the time focusing on an invisible punctum. In Leanda's vocabulary such indifference might have been construed as a perverse way of getting kicks. The voyeur who refused to admit excitement until he came involuntarily. She had met men like that. They pretended disinterest, assimilated the action, and came surreptitiously, their back to the subject, biting their lips to prevent the irrepressible orgasm that had been building for hours.
'You see,' he said, and again without warning, 'You have to be active at astral levels of consciousness. That means activating not only dream control, but thought selection. Sex depends on isolating and sustaining image at the moment of orgasm. Selective, consciousness is indispensable to physical pleasure.'
Leanda was again thrown by the authoritative manner with which he expounded theory. His silences invariably preceded knowledge clusters. His thinking came from way back in his head, arriving in a form that was crystallized energy. He spoke always as though her intelligence matched the formulae he was expositing.