The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  They closed the door, and it was like stepping back from a dream. Leanda contemplated calling the midget and his monkey to her room to assure herself that someone had survived the autonomous change over, but she was certain these phenomena were invisible to others. The midget would arrive as always and prepare to tell an erotic episode from his life, and the monkey would sit anticipating its opium pipe. Or the oriental girls would bring in more captives procured exactly to fit Leanda's requirements. She knew this and so avoided the confirmation.

  She and Nicole continued dressing and then went out into the maze of corridors to reach the red sitting room next to the dining hall. It was a long way to their destination. It felt like they were travelling round a circular time loop. They encountered no-one. Torches had been lit. There was an open coffin standing in one of the corridors, dead roses inside its indigo interior. They walked round it and continued on their way. They could have been marching to a marriage or an execution in the château's secret chapel. Once they looked back and saw a blond youth floating above the floor, another sleepwalker pursuing a somnambulist itinerary. He had a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, and wore a peaked leather cap; otherwise he was naked.

  When they entered the red room, the midget brought in a wine and a menu for dinner. Nicole said that once again she had prepared a speciality, and that its renowned aphrodisiacal properties had it prized the world over. Leanda would have to guess its identity. Two other guests were expected. None of them would be informed of the nature of the dish until after dinner.

  Leanda heard Nicole cross her stockinged legs: a sensitised rasp of silk that translated itself into excitement in her nerves. The unending night was ahead of them. The guests would impart erotic narratives. They would see how far words could go in taking experience to the edge. Perhaps this time there would be a man with shocking pink contact lenses sitting at the table, dressed in a white suit and with his shaved hair dyed the pink of his lenses. And the other one would be a member of a secret sex cult. And he would know the red devil who kept vigil by the Orgy Tree at night. The story would begin all over again. There would be a fire and two young men slung on crosses in the flames. Men would be running away through the trees. A routed orgy would disperse in panic.

  Everything was prepared for the night to come. The leopard had been fed on pheasants in the kitchen, the stilettos on her paws had been changed from black to violet. Books had been brought out of the library and would be dipped into and read later. They sat secure in the order of things round them. Nicole felt if she opened a window, big night clouds might float into the château and join the processional cortège through the labyrinthine interior. They would open their bedroom doors to see a labouring white cloud negotiate the bend in a corridor. Upstairs, white elephants might be juggling blue tennis balls with their trunks. The château was open to the marvellous.

  They luxuriated in the time before the midget would come and announce dinner. He would lead them to the table carrying a black candle in one hand and a black book in the other. There would be another open coffin to bypass, full of dead roses and lined with indigo silk on the inside. The two guests who were already seated word rise without saying a word. They would have been pre-selected for their perverse sexual propensities, and would coldly and deferentially begin to confide their respective stories over dinner. They would assume they were to be paired off with Leanda and Nicole, but both of them would end up in the dungeon, or as drugged participants in a ritual orgy.

  It was night. It would always be night.

  Leanda talked of the time when she was twelve, and she used to sit up in the attic in her panties reading the green-backed Olympia Press erotica. She had painted one fingernail scarlet in order to tickle herself. She had known ecstasy on long autumn nights with the rain setting in and hearing her mother down below entertaining a lover by running a long pink feather over his cock. She had seen it through the keyhole.

  And Nicole told of how one day they would dredge the lake and find the ruins of the house of Usher. Roderick Usher's dead body would still be sitting upright in an armchair. He and his sister would come into the château and be recycled into the endless stream of somnambulists.

  But now the midget was here. Dinner was to be served and the story begun all over again.

  *

  The End

  SISTER MIDNIGHT

  Jeremy Reed

  "A voice is like a dress;

  playing a record is sonic drag."

  —Wayne Koestenbaum

  "If you want to buy my wares

  Follow me and climb the stairs

  Love for sale"

  — Cole Porter

  "My life a wreck you're making,

  you know I'm yours for the taking:

  I'd gladly surrender myself for you,

  body and soul."

  — Body And Soul

  Part I

  Deep Night

  Autumn. A thwack of red leaves flapped like stranded fish on the cracked architrave.

  Marciana stood in front of a full length heart-shaped mirror, decorated with gilt angels, and with both hands in the small of her back, reached for the taut zip on her skirt. In a lightning-flurry of red sequins the garment dropped at her feet. She disengaged her four inch heels from the pooled skirt, as though she was stepping out of a flower, and admiringly reviewed herself back and front in the mirror.

  'I'm Sade's sister,' Marciana kept repeating to herself. She ran a finger up each black seam to where the stocking top was held tight by a six drop suspender belt. She liked the rigidity of the three plated metal clips on each thigh. The black funeral urn tattooed on her left buttock showed through the window of her transparent panties.

  When Marciana took off her stockings she liked to imagine that the tongues of big cats were licking her thighs. Lions, leopards, panthers and jaguars. She bunched her stockings into two silk cocoons, unfastened the hook and eye of her suspender belt, and all the time watching her actions in the mirror, unclipped her bra, and let the two roses of her nipples tumble into arrested contact with the air.

  She flopped back on the bed with her legs wide open. Julie London's sultry phrasing was addressing the standard 'Black Coffee' on the CD release of After Midnight. This subdued diva's perfect diction entered Marciana so deeply that at times she imagined that she herself was responsible for the song, and not the woman in light black slacks depicted on the cover, who had recorded the number circa 1960.

  Julie would float with consummate ease into 'Don't Smoke In Bed' and 'After Midnight' with a coolness of delivery that had Marciana purr. Her voice was like a blue flower opening in the room. It had the melancholy grain, Marciana reflected, of a woman arriving at the Gare du Nord to find that her lover has let her down on a still September day.

  Marciana never knew when Donatien would arrive and take her by surprise. Her days spent in the sealed and partially restored castle of La Coste were like an extended dream in which her erotomania increased in proportion to her fantasies. She dipped into her excitement with tentative fingers outlining a chasm in which all the tumultuous history of the Sade family burnt like ruins flaming at the bottom of the sea. Each time she touched herself it was like setting the fuses to nymphomania. Her imagination activated her sexuality, and the two combined to create a perversely stimulated eroticism.

  Marciana tormented herself with her fingertips. She tickled the circumference of her need, but played at preventing herself from coming. Her fingertips described circular digressions from an irritated clit. She teased herself with exploratory dabs at her eruptive core. She didn't dare allow her fantasies to retrieve Donatien, for he had taught her that the mythos of her back passage contained all the erotic fictions in the underworld. He had made that tunnel his study on a journey to the centre of the earth.

  Marciana kicked her legs over her head and arched herself into the posture that yogis call The Plough. It was a position that Donatien loved her to assume. She had changed the CD to Billie Ho
liday's Lady In Satin, and she wished Donatien was there to play her clitoral ridge with a violin bow, and to tune her up before he set about his obsessive preference for putting her end-up on all fours, her hands ritualistically pointed into stilettos that fitted her fingers like red gloves.

  She relaxed into Holiday's liquor-grained voice, her intimate phrasing evoking a subtext of personal ruin. Marciana had come to identify with the lives of ruined singers, and to her ear Lady Day sounded so irredeemably sad that she could have been standing singing in the arena of her broken heart, an earthquake arena in which bloody roses poured out of dusty fissures.

  Marciana wanted to write a book about fallen angels. All the broken ones: Bessie Smith, Libby Holman, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. She could hear them all crying in the rain. Their tears smudged the windows at La Coste. They were out there in their satin gowns imploring to be taken back into life. They wanted to live and love all over again.

  Marciana righted herself, got off the bed, and wearing nothing but her panties, went over and sat on the purple velvet throne that Donatien had insisted be installed in her bedroom. The throne was monogrammed with the ancient symbol of the Sade family, an eight pointed star that had originally been associated with the three magi. The Sade lineage was rich with mystic connotations, and La Coste under Donatien's aegis had become renowned for its sexual rites. Marciana had witnessed how the theatre walls would sometimes bleed in the autumn, and how lines of penitents in chains would arrive at the castle and implore to be granted entrance.

  Marciana's world was so hermetically contained by the legendized sexuality associated with La Coste that she had come to live by night in order to enter more deeply into the château's mysteries. For her it was always midnight, and candles and flambeaux burnt in the theatre. Donatien had originally supervised the building of his private theatre, a space that covered a thousand square feet, with a large stage constructed along the northern wall. Marciana liked to sit there in the deep night. The walls were painted cobalt, and the ceilings were frescoed with stars and extravagant depictions of buggery. From the round bottomed belles of the 18th century French court, to the thong-wearing supermodels of the 20th century, women were depicted being ravished from behind.

  Slipping a full length sequined gown over her black panties, Marciana took herself from the throne in her bedroom to the theatre which lay at the northern end of the second floor gallery. Her staff were asleep. The château was still like a liner on the night seas. But then an urgent and increasingly desperate scale of pleasure reached her from Nina's room. Nina, who had been brought to the château Donatien was in the process of reaching orgasm. Her pleading cries and throaty entreaties were being answered by an expertise that had Nina scream her volatile pleasure to the silent halls of the brooding castle.

  Marciana remembered Nina's arrival at La Coste. Donatien had brought her into the theatre on a long chain, with a shocking, pink bow tied around her naked buttocks. Undoing the ribbon, as though Nina's bottom was a box of chocolates, her brother had placed a red carnation-head in the crack before proceeding to flog his porcelain-cheeked prize. And when it was all over, Nina exhausted body had been carried to a bed heaped with hundred of pink and red carnations. Her blood had mixed with the full throated flowers, and on the following midnight a tattooist had come to Nina's room and needled the Marquis's own symbol of all eight pointed star onto her left buttock. The redoubtable signature D.A.F. de Sade had been inked on to the other cheek.

  Nina had proved Donatien's most insatiable convert. It was she who tuned his whips like the strings of a guitar, stretching and coiling their lengths so that they sung on contact with flesh. Nino knew by ear the precise bullwhip that the Marquis was flexing on any captive bottom, and was adept at polishing their handles, and positioning whatever flower had been chosen to sit in the victim's crack. Marciana reflected on how Donatien could cut the head off a tall stemmed carnation protruding from round buttocks at a distance of twenty feet. The whip would slice off the flower with savage precision.

  Marciana picked up a torch and carried it over to the stage. It was here that torch singers performed by special request, and here that she and her brother presided over prepared rites at La Coste. Marciana remembered being lifted on to the horns of the stage altar after her honeyed bottom had been dipped into a tub of furry bees. Donatien's whip had quickly laid into the squalling bees, but not before she had known the fury of their assault.

  Sitting there in the dark, she was listening for the sound of his boot heels in the corridor. The pale grey leather thigh boots he wore never ceased to excite her by their appearing to be a part of his body. With his three quarter length velvet coat and velvet leggings, and his flame-red hair tied back in a ponytail, the Marquis struck a presence that was both glamorous and vicious. He would sometimes arrive with two humans on leashes, handling them like someone would recalcitrant greyhounds. At the first sign of noncooperation he would produce the lash. He had quickly taught his initiates to sit under the table like dogs, as he sat sipping a vintage the colour of autumn trodden underfoot in deep woods.

  Marciana listened. She was certain a car had drawn up in courtyard. Donatien's limousine with the blackened windows and the orange satin cushions on the rear seat had no registration plates, and was polished to a gloss each day by a chauffeur forbidden to use any other material but black silk.

  And suddenly the corridor was coming to life with his presence. His boots were ringing their staccato arrival, and his indomitable energies could be felt rushing through the vaulted corridors. Marciana felt the excitement communicated to her sexual itch. Her brother contained within him an erotic dynamic that would have brought even an enraged bull to heel.

  When Donatien entered the theatre he resembled somebody who had crossed three centuries without incurring a line. There were no signs of the successive facelifts he had undergone in the course of surviving hundreds of years of being hunted across the face of Europe. He frisked a rhinestoned lead on which a girl with black hair cut straight to her hips was in tether. When Donatien came to a halt she cowered at his side, while he fastened the lead to the outstretched arm of a wooden angel.

  He stared long and deep at Marciana, who opened her sequined robe so that her full breasts tumbled into view. By torchlight her eyes looked like a panda's, and she placed her tongue in the hollow of her cheek as a sign that she was ready for him.

  Donatien immediately asked for Nina to be brought to the theatre.

  'See to it that she's tuned the South African bullwhip,' he said to Marciana in an imperious tone.

  'You create permanent night,' Marciana threw back at him, allowing her gown to slip to the floor, as she crossed the theatre, presenting her bottom to him on high heels, as a foretaste of what he would later enjoy.

  Donatien sat in a deep velvet chair, awaiting his sister's return. He reflected on how he had christened her Sister Midnight one night in Berlin, in the years when they had travelled together. It had come about due to his having allowed Marciana to be the only woman to have sodomized him, and she had done this with a leopard-spotted dildo, entering him dead on the stroke of midnight.

  The next day he had gone out and bought her a black catsuit and a black rose, and after whipping her severely had left alone for Paris.

  Donatien was jolted out of his reverie by the sound of two sets of high heels clattering across the theatre's wooden floor. Marciana and Nina walked hand in hand towards him, and Nina who had been dragged from her lover Jacques's embraces, carried in her left hand the prized bullwhip that he had requested.

  Nina who was dressed in a floor-length diaphanous negligée approached the Marquis, knelt at his feet, and placed the whip handle in his lap.

  'It's tuned, your eminence,' she said, resting her chin on the toe of a polished boot.

  ‘Let me hear it sing in the dark,' he instructed. 'But first of all I will powder Marciana's cheeks.'

  Nina handed the Marquis a Guerlain compact, a
nd without waiting to be prompted Marciana bent herself over her brother's lap. With a practised fluency of movement, Donatien hooked down Marciana's transparent panties, and proceeded to dust her bottom with iridescent powder, kissing each cheek after he had perfected the shimmering glaze.

  Marciana submitted to her brother's playful teasing by kicking her legs as though she was swimming in heavy water.

  Donatien, as a master of restraint, disconnected from the urgent impulse to ravish his sister's bottom and prepared himself to savour the sweet agony of delay. Only later, after he had marked his love, and won from her the approval of suffering, would he begin again his long pleasurable journey to the interior.

  Marciana was reluctant to get off her brother's lap. Donatien appeared to be polishing her bottom with the fond appraisal of a jeweller working on a stone. Marciana's buttocks symbolised la qualité française to Donatien, a harmonious distribution of gluteal tissue that dictated a shape as perfect as an inverted ace of hearts, Donatien ran a finger deep into the cleft, feeling for the rosette that had become his portal to mystic revelation. That cleft shaped like a circumflex accent in reverse was a dark window giving on to the starry abyss.

  Withdrawing his finger and placing it into the perfumed thimble that Nina held out to him, Donatien dismissed his sister with a round slap on her cheeks.

  'Show me how your tears will bleed for me,' he said. And like a Daughter of the Precious Blood, Marciana walked towards an altar lit by torches. Photographs of contemporary singers were framed like icons against the altar's backcloth. An androgynous Elvis Presley, a martyred Billy Fury, a drugged and pouting Judy Garland, a leather-boaed Shirley Bassey, a saucer-eyed Dusty Springfield, and a histrionic, diva-like Marc Almond stared out of photographic portraits into the diffused candlelight.