The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  Nina led Marciana to the altar. Her hands were placed in supports under the arms of an angel. Donatien called this prop the Angel of Mercy, for it appeared as though his victim, in the act of being flogged, was supplicating for a shelter that was never granted.

  Nina slipped down Marciana's panties, placed them in an alter-dish and handed the sacrosanct offering to the Marquis. Donatien responded by kneeling for a long time at the opaque window of his sister's bottom. He knelt there for five minutes in the absolute silence of the theatre, then rose and motioned to Nina who handed him the finely tuned bullwhip.

  'Prepare for your salvation,' Donatien warned his sister. 'In the name of the House of Sade you will meet your redemption through the whip.'

  Donatien stood back and with an abrupt gesture unleashed it sizzling whipcrack on Marciana's bottom. The echo reverberated like thunder in the vaulted theatre and drew a stifled cry of shock from the victim.

  With unflinching composure Donatien issued second and third cuts with a savagery that seemed inhuman.

  At the first sight of bloody tears, the Marquis knelt, received a tall-stemmed red rose from Nina, who had removed it from an altar vase, and placing the crimson rose in his sister's crack, he began to pray.

  His spiritual agitation was intense. He kissed the flower protruding from his sister's bottom, and called on the abyss within her to reveal its secrets.

  That done he stood back from his sister, his eyes fixed on her bottom. She remained fastened to the angel, as though the two of them had found love on the edge of death.

  Nina went forward, prayed briefly to the rose, extracted it, and with trained expertise began applying alleviants to the cuts inflicted on Marciana's bottom. This done, Nina took the bullwhip from Donatien's hand, and presented him with a glass of vintage cellared from the château's vineyards. The De Sade wine was the colour of a black tulip. Donatien tasted the sunlight, dust, sweat and flinty soil of his estate compounded into the grape. Autumn was permanently in his blood. Each time he performed sex rites he would smell dank leaves and rain teeming into yellow woods.

  Donatien savoured in the taste of the wine the enormous melancholy arena of his heart. All the grief of the centuries had accumulated there, like thunder clouds piled above a graveyard The death he had never experienced through the centuries existed as an enigma in his cells, a potential that was still unrealised. It was with Marciana that he shared the secrets of his deathlessness. The cryonic longevity that invested both their lives was a scientific phenomenon that he had begun little by little to impart to his sister.

  Marciana was escorted out of the theatre by Nina, and taken to her bedroom to be prepared for her brother's visit. Marciana was to be dressed in all the fetishistic accoutrements that appealed to her brother. She lay face down on the bed and felt Nina's fingerpads work a cocktail of aromatherapy oils into her skin, and very gently into the pouting trompe-l’oeil of her rosette. Nina spent a long time working on Marciana's bottom, polishing the curvature of the cheeks, and using an oiled brush on the depilated crack, traced painterly brushstrokes between the abyss and the vault in which it terminated. Marciana's bottom was treated with the reverence afforded a fetish. It represented godhead to the Marquis, and was an artefact that had several times undergone silicone lifts in the interests of acquiring the perfect shape for Donatien's pleasure.

  Nina teased the crack with her tongue, and felt Marciana wriggle with excitement. Her job was to treat Marciana's bottom as a beautician would a model's face. Moisturizers were applied to the buttocks each night, and so were depilating creams. Foundations were matched to skin tones and blushers complemented the subtle artistry of bottom maquillage. Each night Nina applied an hour's massage and skin-care to Marciana's bottom. Marciana's panties were chosen to represent the colour palette of Donatien's moods. All of them were monogrammed with the Sadean insignia of an eight-pointed star. The penalty for anyone else daring to wear Marciana's panties was to be bullwhipped fifty times by the Marquis, a punishment that Nina had undergone in her initial weeks at the château.

  Marciana's bottom, still manifesting evidence of Donatien's savage whipcuts, was sponged with a natural foundation. Its heart-shaped harmonic proportions rose to receive the periodic enquiry of Nina's tongue. The two inverted arcs simmered with expectant leisure. But Nina was forbidden to enter the rosette with her tongue, and so satisfied Marciana by teasing her with prehensile rimming.

  Marciana's bottom was perfumed with dense, nocturnal Must, an aphrodisiac scent from Cartier that answered the pungent, autumnal notes that invested the château.

  Nina put on a record of the French chanteuse Barbara, and the wavering notes of 'Amours Incestueuses' invaded the room, the song narrating the poignant story of condemned love between a middle-aged parent and a child of twenty. It was a song that they often listened to together as a prelude to the sodomitical incest that Marciana was to undergo.

  The two women kissed, Nina's tongue rolling in circles round Marciana's palate, before pushing for her epiglottis. Nina aroused Marciana's nipples, touching them like a pianist hardly stroking the ivories, but rather suggesting a sonata by extra-sensory touch.

  Marciana moaned, her body rippling like wind-chimes in an undulating breeze. Nina could bring her to the point of orgasm by this subtle play of energies, and a partly strangled cry escaped her lips, as Marciana sensed Nina's tongue-point stand on her left nipple with her breath tingling on the surface of the purple areola.

  If Marciana hadn't been expecting her brother, she would have called for the bee and honey dip on her vulva. The game involved having her vulva coated in honey, and at a certain point of arousal Nina would release a bee from a glass receptacle, and Marciana would lie on the bed with her legs wide open in anticipation of the insect's inevitable attraction to her honeyed spot. The risk of her being stung on her clitoris as a result of the bee's irascible frustration at being unable to free itself from the glutinous honey was the tension that excited Marciana to convulsive orgasm.

  Tonight, her request for the game was turned down. It was Nina's job to beautify Marciana's bottom, but to keep her erotic hunger tamed until Donatien was ready to begin his mastery of her bottom.

  The castle was so oppressively silent, so cut off from world, that the two women were glad of the music. It was Donatien's authoritative decree that none of the château’s inhabitants should ever leave the fortress's wooded precincts. His abductees were frozen into a time-warp, a trance-state conditioning that held them secure within the castle's labyrinthine complex. And to Nina, who was the most recent of Donatien's captives, the château's complement of slaves resembled drugged noctambulists who only came alive at midnight. It seemed to her that it was only then that they achieved knowledge of their true identities, and with it a regressive awareness of the past.

  Nina stood back and reviewed Marciana's bottom. Its shape had been regularly corrected by liposuction, the misappropriated fat removed with the help of cannula tubes. Marciana's restructured prosthetic buttocks were the result of injections with her own fat to create a solid silicone base to the muscle tone. The process was repeated every two to three years, so as to avoid silicone migration, and to ensure that the bottom she presented to Donatien conformed precisely to his demands.

  While Marciana lay face down on the black satin counterpane, luxuriating in the massage she had just received, Nina busied herself with the other ritualistic preparations necessary for heightening Donatien's sense of illicit sex.

  Nina attended to the massed profusion of red carnations that back-dropped the ornately carved black bed. Black altar candles had been lit around a page from The 120 Days Of Sodom, copied out in a script that employed gothic majuscules and unicals. Nina would have to operate a camcorder and film the event in close-up, so that no least detail of the sexual proceedings would be lost to the Marquis, whose archived footage proved resourceful to his obsessive need to validate and improve his particular method of sex.

  Special condoms mono
grammed with black roses or eight gold stars on a black latex background had been placed in a heart shaped dish beside the bed. Hints of lavender and frangipani dusted the air from a smoking incense cone.

  Billie Holiday was singing 'I Cover The Waterfront' as though she had never conceived that there would be an audience for her work. To Marciana it sounded as though Billie was singing to herself in a hotel room, and so giving voice to a grief that had come to possess her over a lifetime, but which had only found register in the moment of its understated release. It was the naivety in Billie's voice, in contrast to her seasoned heart, that had it live for Marciana as an instrument of confessional pain. Her voice mixed spring and autumn in one timbral season, and Marciana picked up on its fragile pitch as a pivot on which to rest her sadness at being exiled from the world.

  Marciana liked, in the deep night hours as she and Nina sat waiting for Donatien's visits, to tell Nina something of her brother's extraordinary life; and of how he had married Renée-Pelagie on May 17, 1763, at the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine parish in Ville-l’Évêque, already poxed, and bringing his venereal disease to the ceremony. Renée-Pelagie had proved singularly unattractive, and despite her family wealth, unrefined in her manners.

  Marciana told Nina of how she had been separated from her mother at an early age, after Donatien had been caught trying to saddle her bottom, and how she had been disowned by her father the Comte de Sade, and sent to a reformatory. But no sooner had her brother moved with his bride to the apartment prepared for them on the second floor of the Hôtel de Montreuil on rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, than he had called for her, and dishonoured the marriage sheets by making love to his sister in the bridal bed.

  Marciana remembered too how she had visited Donatien at the Montreuil's château at Echauffour in Normandy, and how she had arrived late one night in the pouring rain, and had met Donatien at a prearranged spot under a large oak at midnight. Marciana told Nina of how she had worn nothing but a pair of red in, panties under her black greatcoat, and that Donatien had conducted her to an outhouse in which there was an old split mattress and hens bickering in the wadded straw. And there they had spent the night together, while the château slept, and the rain had sheeted its brilliant syntax across the surrounding woods. Donatien had ploughed her unremittingly, and his whip-marks had left her skin looking like a matelot's striped vest.

  Marciana's memory was a constantly downloading source of Sadean anecdotes. She was able to remember the exact colognes her brother had worn on occasions important to both of them, and the colours of clothes he had chosen to match the big crises in his life. She had been the recording eye visually retrieving the detail that had accompanied the moment. She would tell Nina of Donatien's leg of mutton sleeve silk blouses, a modified style of shirt he still adopted on autumn nights at La Coste. She remembered jackets, coats and boots he had worn in his perverse libertine youth, the old Paris cowering at his feet like a dog surprised by authority.

  It was the quiet hour, as the two women called it, the interlude between sex rites when the Marquis prepared himself to consummate incest. It was a space in which Nina too would speak of the life she had known before coming to the castle, and of how she had worked in a bar in Rousillon, a place Donatien had stopped off in on his journey back to the château. His limo had run out of fuel, and he had ostentatiously entered the completely empty bar in which Nina was waitressing, and their liaison had begun with this encounter.

  Nina tirelessly repeated to Marciana the compulsion she had felt in Donatien's presence to humiliate herself before his disciplinarian command. He had ordered her to leave her job on the spot, and to come with him immediately to his château. Nina spoke of how Donatien had dog-collared her in the car, and that she hadn't protested for a moment at the leash to which she had found herself attached.

  The two women would speak of Donatien's indomitable power, and also of the mystic aura surrounding his person. He had in the eighteenth century presided over numerous public flagellation cults: the Recollects of the rue du Bac, the Daughters of the Precious Blood, the Daughters of Cavalry, and the Grey Sisters from the parishes of Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Laurent, Sainte-Marguerite, La Madeleine and Saint-Germain l'Auxerroi. A galaxy of round bottoms had been bled in the street, and Donatien's spectatorial eye had recorded it all through the fast-tracking centuries. Marciana had never questioned her brother's untiring omnivorous preoccupation with bottoms, and had come to accept this fetish, not as an aspect of his psychology, but as the subjective thrust to his whole being. Presiding over the gluteal choreography of coitus in retro, Donatien had according to Marciana found his way to the paradisal city in her rectum.

  Nina busied herself with painting her toenails. Midnight Sapphire. She belonged to the Marquis's private, sodomitical harem, a race of sex-slaves conditioned to obey his every sexual request. She had no way of telling when Donatien would demand her bottom, and so she had constantly to look attractive, should his spontaneous desire demand her favours.

  Nina heard his footsteps before Marciana. Her ears were alert to his impatiently assertive step, and sometimes she would hear him all night long pacing from room to room of the dormant château.

  When he came into the room, he looked like he had ingested drugs, and he was concentrated on Marciana's bottom to a degree that eliminated all incidentals. His eyes were spaced into sexual trance. He placed the lit torch he was carrying into a holder beside the bed, and began slowly to undress.

  He was indomitably erect, and Nina kissed the head of his cock, before applying a star-glitter gel to the prepuce. As a preliminary to entry, and Nina's rolling on one of the Sadean-crested condoms especially manufactured for his use, Donatien would like to tease Marciana by placing his cock along her cleft. He would position it like a guitar-neck on her similarly lubricated crack, and pick out frets of pleasure along the soft lining of her vault. It was Donatien's tuning process, a prelude that would excite Marciana to the point of screaming.

  Donatien's penis was jutting out from a pair of Marciana's black silk panties. It was part of the ritual that Nina should tease these off his bottom, after having gelled the tip of his cock. He submitted to Nina's provocative manner of undressing him with an air of passive resignation. It was only with his sister that Donatien gave voice to the excitement that would rage through his body. With any other partner, male or female, he would adopt a role of autocratic diffidence, and appear to be fucking them from the remove of his aristocratic hauteur.

  Marciana was lying face down, her chin resting on silk cushions, her hands tied, and her bottom raised by the support of cushions beneath her stomach. Her buttocks were angled to ensure maximum provocation. Nina extinguished the cove lights and the room was lit by the single torch that Donatien had placed by the bed. The frescoes on the cobalt walls jumped alive, their sensual morphologies suggesting a correspondingly shaved pubis on the other side of foregrounded buttocks.

  Donatien, who derived pleasure from anticipation, withdrew from his foreplay with Marciana, and motioned to Nina that at some stage of the activities, Jacques was to be introduced to the room in the role of dual-fucker. Donatien liked to receive what he was giving his sister, and through being active and passive at the same time, his arousal was intensified. The chain had been known to extend to triple, quadruple and quintuple fuckers, all of whom in their remorseless fucking communicated with the sex trigger in Donatien's brain.

  Marciana's bedroom was soundproofed, for her brother fed on silence as a stimulus to his clandestine sexual vocabulary. He would gorge on Marciana's bottom like a snake, knowing that no scream of protest would ever find its way to the château's other inhabitants.

  According to a preconceived ritual Nina rolled the special Sadean sheath on to Donatien's tugging cock. The eight gold stars were grouped round the teat, and Nina ran a viperine tongue over the shark-headed prepuce. Donatien tilted for deep throat, as though he wanted to fill an impossible constriction with maximum input.

  Jacques burs
t into the room with the pretence that the Marquis was under arrest. It was his pre-rehearsed role to enter on an authoritative note of law, and to bullwhip Donatien if he showed any least sign of weakness in his resolve to fuck Marciana.

  Donatien entered Marciana's lubricated rosette with the expertise of a man who over the centuries had accustomed himself to no other form of sex than sodomy. The blind eye in his penis began to open as it penetrated Marciana, and found its pivot in her abyss. From there he could view his past sexual history as a series of insightful footage. He saw himself convulsively flicking a red-haired adolescent in the 18th century in a small house in Paris, while two glowering negro pimps bullwhipped the Madame for some minor act of impoliteness to himself. There had been something about the autumnal streets which led to the closed house that had alerted him to the awareness that one day he would be criminalised for his actions. He experienced it all over again, as his deepening thrusts provoked extended moans from Marciana.

  He had known on that afternoon with the redhead that the secret contents of his mind had grown transparent. The big chestnut trees umbrellaed above the house appeared raffishly conspiratorial in bringing his sexual misdemeanours to light. There was a feeling in him that the street had something on him too.

  He had reached a brief resting-point in Marciana. He eased his weight off her back, but still kept her impaled on his indomitable erection. She wriggled, making circular motions from her hips as a signal that he was not to withdraw. Donatien felt an excruciating tension in his balls. He felt like he was being tickled by a testicular nest of ants. He knew from the anticipation that when he finally came his ejaculation would be like a solid column of scalding sperm.

  But he was still back in a grape-coloured 18th century day. This time it was at La Coste. He had insisted on taking girls and youths from the local village back to the castle. Something about the atmospherics of the place hooked them, the funereal corridors lit with torches, the heavy red drapes and erotic statues, the permanent smell of night that invaded the rooms, and of course his own obsessive, but magnetizing charisma.