by Jeremy Reed
‘The symbols of mystic sex are zoomorphic,' he took up, The mouth is typified by the moth and the vulture, the phallus for Horus, by the eye and the hawk, the mouth as an oral orifice for Ma by the bat — and these are expressed qabalistically as 0 = 2. And that of course is the formula of night. These things will seem inexplicable to you without knowledge. And they are a system I disbanded years ago. But as preliminaries they are invaluable. You must build structure by structure towards ultimate realisation.'
Leanda was growing increasingly restless. She drifted in and out of fascination with the subject. Part of her wanted to be drawn into his occult theories, the other rejected it as incompatible with her hunger for immediate sensation. His coolness was infectiously magnetic. She wanted to be frozen by it, but she couldn't. She continued to burn for perverse experience. She was beginning to recede from the conversation, and not take up his abstruse expositions. But the tension she felt had crept in as a form of estrangement, wouldn't be likely to register. He was too out of it for that.
She got up and walked over to a shelf on the pretence of looking for a book. She wanted to test him, as her bottom oscillated in the tight fabric that clung to her cheeks. Her walk was so provocative it was like she was making love. She pivoted on exacting heels in reaching for a high book. She was hoping he would break, that she would turn round to find him nursing an intolerable bulge in his tight jeans. But he was still staring off somewhere that she'd never find. And no sooner had she rearranged her legs than he got up without explanation. Quite suddenly he wasn't there anymore. She was staring into the absence where he had sat. He was gone without any least fuss. She was sitting there listening to the motor of his silver Range Rover start up, as he coaxed the vehicle in the direction the drive. He was disappearing as a series of audible connections, his legend untouched, his headlights doubtless coming on to compete with the coming night.
Leanda was thrown by his unpredictable moods. She poured out another large scotch and then she heard the door open and for the third time the youth disguised as a turtle crossed the room. This time there was a charge in the air. He made his way over to her at a deliberately slow pace. This time she angled her legs wide in anticipation. She split them open, her crotch caught in close-fitting black panties. Her skirt had slid above the level of her hips. Her desire was uncontainable. She closed her eyes in anticipation. When his lips connected, she convulsed, kicking her legs backwards over her head to grant him fuller access. All her sustained frustration broke out in a shriek that she knew would bring Nicole to the library. She wanted the youth to fuck her deeply, and began to slide beneath him, her hands working across his shell as though she really was in contact with a turtle. The idea of being penetrated by something so incongruous increased her excitement. She was so moist he entered at one stroke. She was crazy for him. Her legs worked round his shell, and her arms too as she urged his wrist-thick cock to serve as the pivot on which she contorted. She was exploding into wave after wave of orgasm. Her fingernail ripped at the youth's undulating shell.
And as suddenly, Nicole was there, her hands lifting Leanda's bottom so that it was made still easier for his urgent thrusts. He was building rapidly towards a crisis. Nicole dug her red nails into Leanda's bottom, as the latter began to throatily unleash her building excitement. As the two convulsed in simultaneous pleasure, so torches and castrati entered the library. They sang a chant over the two bodies, a gothic celebration of the perversity of sex between a woman and a turtle.
*
Part IV
Torch
Leanda sat back deep in a scarlet armchair, and watched the parade of bottoms in tanga-style briefs or thongs undulate across the gallery. Some of them were transsexuals, and others real women. Her game was a selective one, for which she dressed as a man and scrutinised flesh like a jaded voluptué in a fin de siècle house of pleasure. Her button-fly jeans were matched with a white shirt, a splashy green tie, a black cashmere jacket, and black boots. She affected a monocle on a violet ribbon, and her pet leopard lay sprawled at her feet.
It was autumn again. It was as though only one season ever visited the château. Leanda was starting to wonder if the leaves stayed permanently red on the oaks and if the place wasn't frozen into a time still. Living at night, days had disappeared from her life, leaving amnesiac blanks. The sort of spaces located in sleep, when the waking mind connecting with fragmented dream narratives recalls the blank pockets in which nothing seemed to happen. Leanda had given up on the days, and her excursions into the city. if she went out it was to be driven to some nocturnal destination. There were always leaves heaped on the drive, and gusted leaves that flicked the Bentley's windshield as her transvestite chauffeur slid the car out of the grounds. She liked the idea of living in permanent autumn. A blue mist smoking off the lake, an idea of timelessness parachuting into her thoughts. She and Nicole would live for ever without ageing. The château was isolated from real time. Their night would extend across a permanent October, the mineral stars brilliantly clear outside, the ceremonial instructions inside the château carried out with perfect regularity.
Leanda focused on the roundly proportioned buttocks of an Italian girl, tall even without her red high heels, her minimal black thong cut to give her legs greater height. To her trained eye she could detect the body of a transsexual. The over-compensatory female flourishes in her walk, an angular bone structure, shoulders, hands and knees — she could detect all the little give-aways, although this one carried the imperfections well. She had had the op, and was no longer encumbered with a penis. Leanda had gone through a phase when she liked them in between. Large breasts boosted by silicone implants and a cock expanding beneath her tongue. It was a fetish that had occupied six months of her life, a time largely spent in Rome, before the need had exhausted itself. She had grown bored with the anomaly and had gone in pursuit of rarer pleasures.
The girls continued to cross and recross the room like a processional seraglio. Leanda took in every detail. She was looking for a new species. She had grown tired of regulation bodies, no matter their excessive beauty. She wanted to be surprised by the new. Another species. Rearranged or absent genitalia. An eye in the pubis, a speaking mouth in the nipple, a hypersensitive sexual nerve in a fingernail. People with no orifices for penetration or excretion. Women whose vagina was in the sole of the foot; men whose penis was telescopically projected from the big toe.
The bottoms were coming closer, as she had arranged. Abandoning their catwalk decorum the models were growing more provocatively lascivious, pulling their briefs tight into the cracks of their bottoms and rotating as though they were engaged in the act of making love. Leanda let the stimulus fire her nerves. She knew if she selected, the person would turn out to be transsexual. Her instincts always went wide of the natural. In her mind she was constructing an abstract geometry of the passage between Nicole's vulva and anus. It had become a complex structure, a labyrinthine pleasure corridor connected to those in the château. She would find her way through it with the leopard. She would sit down on a velvet chair, and negotiate a way. There would be slaves in Nicole's passage, twenty of them kneeling naked on all fours, waiting to offer themselves to pleasure. Leanda now understood Nicole's passionate shrieks when arriving at orgasm. Her voice was full of the slaves kneeling within her. They all came simultaneously.
Leanda was thinking of Betty, and how she would be back on her street in the city, and how despite protestations to the contrary, she would, if the Bentley turned up for her, begin the journey all over again to the château. She would as before express amazement at the opulent interior, suspicion at the dinner guests, she would again be drugged and detained in the dungeon, and at midnight be led through the château's corridors towards the sacrificial rites in the attic. And if she was procured, she would go on doing it until the action grew as autonomous as sleep-walking.
And the enigmatic figure of XZ froze in her mind. He with his silver boots and silver eyes turned inwards, so tha
t he looked into inner space and never saw her minuscule skirt and long legs. He was sitting in her head the way he had done in the library. Cool, imperturbably sure of the occult truth he had found. Only now she was watching a snake poke its head out of his left eye and erect itself.
She turned back to the parade of models. She had programmed accompanying music for the later stages of this rite. The only music that could sufficiently assuage her decadent sensibility were the French songs that Marc Almond had collected on Absinthe. Here she could listen to Robert Nyel's The Slave, Barbara's Incestuous Love, Charles Baudelaire's Remorse Of The Dead, and Rimbaud's Little Lovers. This suite of songs with its gravitation towards autumn, sex and death, gave her the same sort of fix as reading an upended poem. She luxuriated in their perverse narratives, Almond's voice reading them with an agonized sensitivity in each nuance of pain. His inimitable tenor's voice filled the château on those nights which transferred themselves to nights without days.
With indomitable assurance, Leanda took up the bullwhip at her side, and laid a single lash across the buttocks she desired; a disarmingly red lash that bit into the soft flesh, and stayed there as a single stripe. It was along that horizontal that she would place her teeth later. She thought of it as her brand. To be marked by her personal lash was to begin the journey towards being a slave. This transsexual's bottom was better proportioned than that of any Latin beach beauty. Leanda would select a red or pink silk slipper with which to spank those cheeks. She might even crush a fig or guava fruit into the checks and eat it off their round curves. This would serve as an aperitif to later pleasures. The midget's gustatory palette extended to licking bottoms, and with a black velvet bib tucked into his white shirt, he would proceed on a lengthy exploration of the anal crack, savouring it and afterwards comparing it to other bottoms that he had licked while they were arched over Leanda's lap. He kept notes on a comparative scale of satisfaction. He treated his fetish like the gourmet does the rarest of dishes.
This midget, whose only proper relationship in life had been with a pet monkey, was a man with an exhaustive knowledge of sexual repertoire. He had seen service with a count, who insisted on wearing a different coloured ribbon round his cock for every day of the week. A pink one on Sunday, a blue on Monday, a green on Tuesday, a red on Wednesday, mauve on Thursday, orange on Friday, and black on Sunday. The midget's job had been to tie the ribbon with a flourishing bow at the base of the cock, a not-simple task for the count had to resist getting erect, and the midget's fingers invariably triggered this response, so hours were often spent in the nervous preparation of the count's idiosyncratic fetish. This same man had also liked to be spiked with a pink hairbrush that had belonged to his mother, and after the correction it was the midget's task to dab his flushed cheeks with a powder puff. Leanda had memorised so many of the midget's experiences. It was he who had devised the recipe for roast penis, for the count's favourite aphrodisiac was at the same time tiger's penis, a dish that had to be prepared according to exacting instructions. And when the count had fed on this delicacy, it was the midget's job to fill the red drawing room with rent boys, who dressed in ballet skirts flurried round the room.
Leanda watched as the girls filed out of the room. Her chosen one would be taken to a black marble bath and got ready for the night. It was a lengthy preparation, for she insisted on each detail being obeyed. She continued to draw on the midget's recollections by way of self amusement. She would like to have met the lesbian rock star for whom he had acted as sexual adviser. This woman was said to have married a female lover standing on her father's grave. And at some point in the ceremony a little girl who had been continuously supplied with Coca Cola was brought forward to piss on the gravestone. Dressed in black leather, with a peaked cap to match her mouth outlined by black lipstick, she had married a partner got up in a formal white wedding dress. The gay priest had a cloned head and wore biker boots. The midget never tired of telling her indecencies in a manner that was rewarding in terms of narrative, and confidential in its genuine tone of unshockability. He would come to her late at night, or even at dawn, always at her request, and recount one of his stories. Leanda found herself thinking of last night's story, and how, sleepless, she had called for him in the deep night. As he claimed never to have slept for years, he was immediately dutiful when called. And today, was it tomorrow, he had come up with the narrative of the man who kept white mice in cages and liked to have them let out to run across the bed and the room, while he was making love to a hermaphrodite who worked at the local village station. This man would ask the midget to place cubes of cheese on his body so the mice, growing calmer after their initial shock on release, would come and explore the offerings sprinkled over his body. He liked to feel their needling incisors in contact with his skin.
The midget had recounted this story in his usual non-committal manner. His sexual preferences were now confined to anal gustatory, but also extended to masturbatory rites involving a photograph depicting two boys playing with each other on the back of a stuffed alligator. He had never discussed his own pathological obsession with this image. He was also into impaling himself on black mambas — 'They have to be the width of an elephant's trunk,' he would say, and be hand-crafted according to his intimate dictates.
Leanda went over to the window. If it had been day it was now night. She could see the mass of dense oaks backing off into a wood. She could tell by the light that it was autumn. She would have statues placed in the upper forks of the moulting trees. In her mind there were owls in that wood bigger than men. They would scruff a child or a dog in their beaks rather than a petrified vole. Their eyes were like traffic lights, their claws were as long as the tines of a pitchfork. Leanda trusted nothing outside the château's walls. It was Nicole now who took solitary journeys into the city, couched on the back seat of the Bentley and naked under a leopardskin coat.
Leanda began the journey towards her bedroom. The transsexual would be brought to her later. It seemed to her that the corridors had grown more labyrinthine. Only yesterday she had encountered the two oriental girls leading a bear through a hall that she couldn't remember, or hadn't visited for so long that she had forgotten its existence. It was possible that extensions had been created by her dreams. There was the château in which she lived, and the one which was internalized in her dreams. The latter building was becoming progressively more predominant in her waking hours. There was a torch burning at the end of the corridor. She walked over a sumptuous red and gold carpet. The dehumanised figure that looked at her out of a painting, must have been a Balthus. She took off her high heels so as to feel the sensuous contact made between her silk stockinged feet and the red carpet with its sumptuous gold border. Her pet leopard came sniffing after her, followed at a short interval by the black bear she had observed yesterday. The bear appeared to be sleep-walking. It came down the corridor upright on its back legs, its eyes resembling the glazed staring of a somnambulist. The creature passed her by without recognition. The autonomy of its movements had it appear to float rather than walk. Leanda watched the leopard disinterestedly track it, until the two creatures branched off into an open bedroom.
Leanda walked on unconcerned. Sometimes processions of images which she had believed belonged to last night's dream would appear in a corridor or bedroom. Was it yesterday she had seen a green fish, a black glove, a creature with leaking eyes and a coral horn slung up on a cross, her father at fifty, a telephone out of which a red carnation was telescoping, a white dress walking without a body; the whole lot had been assembled as an integrated mosaic at the turn of a corridor. And on being seen, the symbols had dispersed immediately. It was like those other times when she had dreamt of hot blue snow covering her skin, and had gone outside to be snowed on by blue and red flakes that warmed her skin on contact.
Leanda reached her bedroom, and went and curled up on her silk four-poster. She unzipped her skirt and lay back in her black panties and silk stockings. She liked the half-somersault posi
tion, legs over her head. It helped her relax, and also served as an exercise to stimulate the elasticity of her love-making. She lay with her legs arched over her head, the toes touching a silk cushion. She would like Nicole to have walked in now and discovered her in this position. Or else in her fantasy, a total stranger, particularly one who was nursing a substantial erection. She wouldn't protest. She would prove versatile to his instant commands. Her love juices were ready to flood at any engaging proposal.
Leanda ran a finger across her slit to incite its sensitivity, and then restabilized. She found herself thinking of XZ again, and the rigid asceticism he had prescribed. The side of her bored with excess leaned towards the spiritual discipline he had advised, but much more towards the idea of ritualised sex magic. She liked the notion of being an initiate to higher realisation, and the château lent itself to the zoomorphic symbols of which he had spoken. The snake, the vulture, the bat. Surrounded by unusual beasts, she could surely create a corresponding menagerie in her inner world. But it was his manner of appearing to assimilate nothing external to him, that had her return with fascination to his image. She would have other gurus visit the château, but she doubted any would have the extraterrestrial qualities manifested by XZ.
It was late, but it was any time. It might even be October for ever, she hoped. A burgundy autumn with mist bushing the (lees. They would go boating tomorrow night. Leanda would have one of the oriental girls row her across the water in her black gondola. A lantern would be placed on the beaked prow, its purple light snaking on a lake in which huge pike browsed in the depths. She would dress in a black evening gown and pour a bottle of vintage wine into the waters as an offering, a propitiatory rite.
Leanda used a mobile to order the midget to her room. She had time to kill before having the transsexual brought in. Nicole would be editing her video shoot from last night, and books or music would engage her after sex. What she wanted at the moment was it another of the midget's sexual confessions.