The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  He came in wearing his familiar rhinestone-studded jacket. The monkey sat on a cushion beside him, and waited expectantly for the opium pipe which it would be offered. Leanda brought out a blue fruit dish full of cocaine, and offered it to the midget. He took a pinch of the multi-coloured dust, lined it on a small lacquered table and snorted. His head rocked back on its axis, as his mind went somewhere else and then cleared.

  'Perhaps I never told you,' he began, 'of my stay in Venice in the summer with an Italian film director. Some days this person was a woman, and on others a man, but that wasn't a problem. It involved minor details, like on the days when she really was a woman, I'd have to dust her silk panties with perfume before she slipped them on, find croissants which would tint her lips with vanilla, brush her false eyelashes with violet mascara, and myself dress as a nun. None of this was extraordinary. But unable to differentiate between film sets and reality, she risked arrest in the pursuit of certain fetishes. We hired a vaporetto and went out to the cemetery island to look for Baron Corvo's grave. There were boys brought along for the shoot. Youths selected for a certain coarse insolence which appealed to my film director friend. She was dressed as a man that day. Black suit and hair piled up beneath a beret.

  ‘When we embarked it was about noon. The siesta hour, with no-one around. I guessed we were off to a bad start when one of the boys got his cock out on the road to the cemetery. No sooner had he done this than another of the group lay down open-mouthed beneath him. This avid piss drinker took the whole lot, the jet reaching him in modulated streams, now thin, now thick, now slow, now fast. We were all compelled to stop and look, for the performance was consummate in its rehearsed skill. Even the escaped runnels were collected by the tongue.

  'This was the starter to an afternoon of mad lust. Luciana, or so I'll call her, insisted on filming the lot. And there were occasional tourists who walked backwards when they saw what was going on in the cemetery. Luciana soon had her suit trousers off and the mould of her bottom in silk panties left no doubt as to the fact she was a desirable woman. She wanted to shoot film under oral stimulation, and one boy knelt in front of her licking her pussy, while another was at her bottom. This would have been extraordinary in itself, if one of the boys hadn't quickly found himself being buggered by a tourist as he applied his exploratory tongue to Luciana. Or rather no-one seemed to know or care if the man was a tourist. He just got in there, and Luciana carried on filming, and the boy didn't protest.

  'And that was nothing compared to the olives. And if there was a lack of refinement in these things, then there was a curiosity which had to be admired for its spirit of adventure.'

  The midget took another snort of coke and continued.

  'The olives. Well, they were mouthed into Luciana's pussy, and out again, and then into her bottom and out again. The sun-dried black ones. Not to my taste. But the game was called the necklace, and seen as a perverse way of stringing pearls.

  'The filming continued well into the afternoon. The boys were made to dress up in costumes — elbow-length gloves, leotards, dresses. One had a ball and chain attached to his left ankle as a means of making him submissive to sexual advances. He was excited by the fact he couldn't run away from a circle of marauding cocks.'

  Leanda luxuriated in these orgiastic vignettes. She lay back with her eyes closed, occasionally sipping at the smoke from the monkey's opium pipe. The château seemed so far away from reality that she imagined it suspended in time.

  'Despite the continuous scenes of depravity,' the midget continued, 'the police were never called. We were in the cemetery until the late afternoon. Luciana ended lying face down in the grass with the lens so closely focused on a boy's bottom that it was almost nozzled into his sphincter. What was got down on film was unrepeatable. And I suppose that's the art of selectively spontaneous image, as Luciana always called the process.'

  Leanda coded the story. She wanted it on permanent recall. It would remain an engram in her memory cells, another constellation in the midget's inexhaustible erotic narrative.

  Leanda let the silence build, and ordered the midget to admit the transsexual to her room in half an hour. She needed to assimilate not only the story, but so much of what had happened at the château over the past months. She had the feeling that she had got free from time in a way that was diametrically opposed to XZ's, but was nonetheless an evasion of illness, reality and death. She couldn't account for her life. It occurred autonomously. She was beginning to believe that she had relinquished all ties with the natural order of life. But even as she conceived of the thought she could see XZ sitting in her mind, one boot balanced on the other, his mind crystallising a theorem she would never receive.

  There had been news weeks ago, or was it months or years ago, in the château's permanent autumn, that pink culture had marched. The apparently passive minorities had reversed the spiral on orthodox heterosexuality. Gay politics had assumed the ascendant. The old macho stranglehold had been broken. The takeover, at first a process of infiltration, had occurred dramatically and without violence. The pressure of mediatised marches and the incisive exposure of the corrupt values inherent in sexual politics resulted in the fall of most major leaders. Capitalism was seen as the monolith on which sexual lies were founded.

  Leanda had these facts as received information and believed them. Nicole told her of changes for the better in every aspect of the city's life, and one day she would leave the château again and cruise the docks where Betty would be waiting back to the wall in the late afternoon. She would be a tight red dress positioned in the mist.

  Leanda began slowly to make up. She re-pencilled her high thin eyebrows, selected a dark green eyeliner and composed her face round a dark lipstick bow. Her silk stockings were so sheer they were like air breathing on her legs. She delayed the ritual, conscious that she was living out a moment in life. Or was she? She kept on returning to the notion of timelessness. The château was exempt from involvement in the temporal. There was only her voyage through the night, a nocturnal journey that would take her to the château's interior.

  Leanda slipped into a silk chiffon dress. The translucent fabric tightened on her skin. She was neither excited nor curious about the transsexual who would soon enter her room. She had exhausted the limited sexual repertoire of anomalies. This one like all the others, pre-op and post-op, would lay claim to having been re-born by hormonal structuring. She would earn admiration for her constructed figure, and for the way she took off elbow-length gloves like stockings. Leanda would enjoy her and then watch her disappear back into the house. And did they all remain there, a convention of sex slaves crowding a hall? She wondered if they were admitted back into time, or if they remained casualties standing on the edge of events, and no longer assimilated with the dimension on which they had lived. Perhaps she would meet them all again in one of her dungeons, and on one of those nights when she walked endlessly through the château's multiplying rooms. In a room she had never entered before, she had found one of the oriental girls lying beneath her leopard, and had expressed no surprise that the two should form an incongruous sexual act.

  When the transsexual entered her room, she was wearing a micro-skirt made of green and mauve ribbons, and heels so exaggeratedly high that she wobbled when she walked. She had been made up according to Leanda's specifications, and the blonde wig she wore together with the pronounced lipstick line had her look like Jayne Mansfield.

  She came and sat on Leanda's lap, submissive, desperate to please. Her tongue had been scented with a glass of cassis, and Leanda slipped her hand up the transsexual's skirt to find that she was now a woman. The male genitalia had been replaced by an artificial vagina. Leanda preferred it this way. Nicole still liked it if they had cocks in contrast to conical breasts. She encouraged the transsexual to explore her and they began a process of mutual masturbation, something Leanda found exciting for she could exactly empathise with the other's sensation. It was like tickling herself, and watching a strange
r's open mouth answer in response to stimulus.

  In her mind she hadn't yet conceived the strategy she would employ with this slave. Whipping her would prove too mundane, as would selecting the right colour and size dildo with which to enter her bottom. Leanda just allowed their exploratory fingers to create a tantalising friction. She let herself drift into fantasies in which she was lying beneath her leopard on the four-poster. And without instructing the animal, it had her with all the sinuous expertise of the best male lover. The creature withdrew before climax and left her shaking with convulsive orgasm. Then she was somewhere else. Strings of pearls were being fed into her bottom and vulva. The contact of the beads with her sensitive tissue was excruciating. The trick was repeated with increasing speed. As her mouth widened to a red oval so a cock was forced into that apace. She didn't know who she was sucking, she might have been practising fellatio on a leather giant. And she wanted the whole cock inside her, the balls as well. She achieved this with oral felicity. The recipient gasped in way he would never repeat. And after him there were others who invaded her mouth, a whole succession of phalli desperate to be deep throated.

  Leanda clicked out of her successive fantasies, and found the transsexual awaiting her instructions. She ordered the girl to strip to her red sequined thong. Her breasts with their silicone implants were like Monroe's. Generous to the point of appearing deformed. She wanted to come between them. She sat astride the girl and worked her clitoris to a comfortable position in the cleavage. Leanda felt like cheapening the act. She straddled hard, working her clitoris from breast to breast, delighting in the contact of each nipple with her slit. She wanted to cry out, but didn't. She pulled up short of reaching orgasm, and began slowly and with modulated passion to kiss the transsexual full on the mouth. And all the time she was imagining death, the erotically charged split second before extinction, the moment supra-consciousness exploded like amyl nitrate in her nerves. It would be literally like breaking through to the other side. She would leave her partner stranded in time as her trajectory reached for the stars. This person was too malleably inert, too obsessed with the body to get beyond its limitations. Leanda sensed that this sex would take her nowhere. XZ had pointed to far more interesting possibilities. Not only extra-dimensional contact, but the programming of the senses to create new erogenous loci. There was no way in which Leanda was going to discover a means of eroticising this transsexual's stomach button or left eyebrow, and there was no way they would meet on a subtle plane, each of them attached to their physical body by a vibrant thread that tensed silver in the light.

  Leanda was bored with limitations. She contemplated calling for the leopard to finish the girl off in a way that would leave her terrified. Or the black bear which had walked on its hind legs down the corridor. It too might prove an inventive sexual partner. Or she might have the transsexual line the crack of her bottom with cocktail cherries and pick them off slowly with an exploratory tongue.

  But mostly she wanted to be rid of her. She decided she would bullwhip these buttocks which were maintained by creams and conditioners like a face. She had the transsexual bend over a three-legged red chair. Leanda then put on black leather gloves and a corresponding eye-mask, and measured her cut with savage finesse. The transsexual rotated her bottom as though the whip was a lover. Leanda laid down strokes which were cuttingly abrasive, and kept them at that degree of pain which is also pleasurable. She could see the transsexual was working towards orgasm. She would deny her that pleasure, and send her back to the interior. She would have to risk encountering any one of the château's menagerie which had got loose.

  She withheld the next lash, while the girl continued to rhythmically swing her bottom from the pelvic muscles. Leanda was going to treat that scarred flesh as a face. She took out some Clarins facials from a bedside cabinet and worked tracings of nutrient moisturiser into the mauve stripes. The transsexual was evidently embarrassed by her excitement and the breach of etiquette implied by a prostitute getting more stimulated than a client. Leanda made a clown's face in red lipstick on one of the transsexual's buttocks and dismissed her with contemptuous diffidence.

  The girl walked out of the room with her clothes over her arm. Already her movements were those of a sleepwalker's. She would join the chain of somnambulists who walked the château's corridors. Leanda looked out of her door and followed the girl's progress. She was like a figure in a Paul Delvaux painting. The red stripes were visible across her intensely white buttocks. She was floating towards nowhere. And when she finally connected with reality she would recall the experience as a dream, and yet a dream in which the bloody marks on her bottom were an accountable reality.

  Leanda saw how the bear was re-orbiting; it came out of a room at a tangent to the girl and clicked into her dimension. It had followed her without any adjustment of its autonomous pace. They would follow each other for ever, until somehow they returned to real time as survivors of the château. At first Leanda had thought she was dreaming the somnambulists into existence. She had suspected she was hallucinating, but as night succeeded night without a day, she became aware of the reality of her vision. Those who came to the château never left. Girls in red or green sequined dresses, animals admitted to the château, the past and the present: all were recycled in a regulated continuity. It was only XZ who had proved invincible to the time warp.

  Leanda watched the girl fade from view and then the bear too receded from sight. She wondered when they would next appear. If she waited, would she see them return tonight, the next night, the one after? And would they all attend a banquet one day in the great hall? They would be served tiger's penis and the orgiastic excesses would continue. They would come to form a new species, a cult who had lived outside time and were returned unaltered. Leanda was the officiator over night. At some point she and Nicole might choose to step into imaginary time, and join the chain of sleepwalkers in their procession through the house. Years would pass, and they would return to the world in a new century. XZ would be there, still resting one silver pointed boot on the other, and gay politics would rule the world, such as it existed.

  Leanda called for Nicole. She took out the black silk blindfold, placed a red carnation within easy reach, and the ritual began all over again. She would hold the flower as a reminder that she wasn't to touch herself. Fully dressed, she went down on all fours, bottom in the air, and waited for the pronouncement of Nicole's heels. It was the one inveterately reassuring game that always held good in her life. Nicole would place a sheet of red paper in her hand on which was written the form of sex to be practised that night. The rules were inflexible. Nicole would reach for the satin ballet shoe and Leanda would feel a generous sprinkling of slaps on her raised bottom. It would always be like this. They would listen to Marc Almond's voice relating stories of the outsider — transvestites, transsexuals, those who live on the edge of gender and draw a red curtain on the afternoon, the better to indulge their secret.

  Leanda listened to Nicole's heels approaching with a stylised staccato rhythm. She would be wearing the constrictive leather skirt she always put on for the ritual. Her make-up would be perfect. She would be carrying the red or pink ballet shoe in her right hand. Leanda was holding the red carnation in her right hand, fantasising to a degree that was unbearable. She pressed her legs together and refrained from crying out. She gagged on her own frustrated spasm. She crouched there swallowing on restrained pleasure. She would never be able to wait until after dinner to engage with Nicole in a configurated fantasy. She felt Nicole's familiar fingers slowly untie the silk blindfold. She measured each second of that heightened immediacy. It was the fingers as they travelled up from her nape and parted the strands of hair fallen over the secured blindfold that excited her to the point of distraction. She tensed and lived in the moment. She could imagine a life made up entirely of this one sensation. And by imagining its continuity, she was able to extend the pleasure. And Nicole knowing this, suspended the action, it was as though she was unty
ing a knot in slow motion, and then retying and untying it again. She blew into Leanda's ear as she did so, first the right car and then the left. And with Leanda conceding the red carnation in her hand, Nicole slipped her hand between Leanda's legs, at the same time taking the zip on her skirt between her teeth. With her teeth and fingers she took off Leanda's skirt, manoeuvred her over her knees, and looked at her bottom through the familiar transparent panties. She slid these just to the level of Leanda's pussy, and began gently but consistently to smack her bottom with a red satin ballet shoe. The persistency of the slaps thrilled Leanda. She was already on the way to orgasm. She wriggled over Nicole's stockinged knees. The intimacy of the act reinforced by the château's conspiratorial quiet, and the permanent night outside, had Leanda build with rapid intensity towards convulsion.

  The two disengaged, and Nicole poured two glasses of Veuve Clicquot champagne. In real time they were on the threshold of another night. That hour when they tensed with expectation of the journey to come, they would both undress and then re-dress for the night ahead. Nicole stood in her black silk panties looking in the mirror, before slipping on a tight black velvet dress, a strapless sheath that accentuated her curves. Leanda walked around the room in a red feather boa and her seamed stockings. She dressed in a red velvet dress identical to Nicole's black one. They linked arms and stared into the mirror. Their particular moment in time had extended into permanence. They heard the bedroom door open behind them and the black bear sleepwalked into the room, made an autonomous circuit of the space, and then went out again to pursue its itinerary of the château. The animal was clearly in a state of deep trance or even dead. When they looked out into the corridor, they could see the transsexual about to recede around a corner. She had her arms extended in front of her, and her feet floated inches off the floor.