by Jeremy Reed
That afternoon, three naked men wearing rhinestone crowns had dragged the youths there in a handcart. The men had been whipped up the slope to the château by one of his personal slaves. Donatien savoured the memory of having had the room in which sex took place sealed up during the time of the activities. Molten lead had been poured into the locks of the fortified door, so that there was no way in or out.
He saw himself again, dressed in purple leather thigh-boots, a purple rinse in his hair, knouting a whip-handle studded with sapphires. He had left supplicant bottoms ridged like tyre-treads. He had waded into the willing in an orgiastic rite in which he had poured bottle after bottle of Chanel No 5 over used flesh. The dungeon had smelt like a bonfire of scent. Increasingly overcome by a volatile satyriasis, he had carried on whipping until his instruments broke under the strain. The broken handles served as dildos in the ensuing geometry of bodies driven to exacerbation by aphrodisiacs.
As Donatien recalled the brutality of that afternoon, so he reactivated his member in Marciana's subterranean orifice. He dug in deeper. He felt he was releasing stars in her depths that in turn would swim into her eyes. Marciana was the mystic receptacle that gave him life, and he began swimming in rippling undulations along her back. He asserted himself with a lord of the underworld's authority. Marciana moaned as she entered an ecstatic spasm. Donatien pointed in deeper, as Jacques laid a single hot lash across his buttocks. He went deeper still, raiding the vaults of her inner sanctum.
It was Jacques's task to make a liturgical recital of certain passages from The 120 Days Of Sodom as the fucking entered continuous deep motion. Donatien was still a long way from generating the eight-pointed star that burst into Marciana's vision at the moment of orgasm. This Sadean manifestation of a supernova was the miraculous sign engendered by their incestuous pact. It brought the three magi back to the château, and so often he found himself the recipient of their presents: a gold Cadillac, a consignment of perfume, or three thousand scarlet roses left in a drift by the main door.
Donatien thrust furiously into Marciana's cleft for a number of tormenting minutes, and then let up for another period of respite. He felt that contained within him was a ferocity in the sexual act that could lead to psychosis. He sensed that if he let himself go he would end up mad at the point of orgasm. He would, like Jim Morrison, break on through to the other side, but Marciana would never survive the ordeal. She would be left dead on the black silk cushions, and he would be faced with having to bury her under a tall oak in the château's grounds.
Excited by the morbid prospect of necrophilic love, Donatien crawled like a grappling combat-creature over the blind side of his sister's body. He wanted to impress on her the inexorability of their union. Nothing could ever break that occult bond. Marciana lived to be punished by his sexual dynamic, and to undergo the vision of an eight-pointed star as she screamed her way to hysterical orgasm.
Donatien worked himself deeper and deeper into his sister's backside, but he was still haunted by flashbacks that had him backtrack to past conquests. His mind was suddenly invaded by Marguerite Coste and Marianne Laverne, two of the women who had brought legal complaints against him for the administration of aphrodisiacs, and deviant sexual practises. It had been pastilles of Cantharides flies that got him into trouble. He had insisted that the women ate a quantity that had resulted in vesical lesions. The trouble that had visited him as a consequence was as big as Africa. He had never succeeded in clearing himself of the charges of poisoning and sodomy. He had been busy at the time supervising rehearsals of Adélaïde du Guesclin and L'Amant Auteur for performance at La Coste. He freeze-framed his distress in those weeks. It had been the first serious opposition he had known to his despotic ego, and he had flamed with vengeance for the women who had dared obstruct his libertine propensities.
He saw himself again in headlong flight for Venice in the company of his valet Latour. His romantic interlude with his pretty sister-in-law Anne Prospère had been calculated to incinerate any last vestige of remaining tolerance extended to him by his mother-in-law.
As he thought of the outrages he had perpetrated on Anne Prospère, so he deepened his hold on Marciana. Nina intercepted Donatien's wishes by fitting a pair of silk stockings over her fingers and drawing them up her arms. With the expertise of her silk fingers she now began tickling Donatien's balls and the crack of his bottom with her cushioned fingertips. At a sign from him she would have to be ready to pump him with a leopard-spotted dildo, while Jacques in turn sodomized her as part of a deviant triumvirate of fuckers.
Donatien was starting to burn on a slow orgasmic fuse. He imagined angels setting fire to the building, and the ceiling dropping on the sexual participants. He fantasized how they would continue their orgiastic excesses on a flaming pyre. Nothing could ever liberate him from Marciana's bottom. The fascination it had asserted over him for three centuries was inexorable. And each time he entered it he discovered still another concealed passage leading to the big room in which kings and queens sat reading a book of wonders. He fucked harder in the hope of penetrating this mystery. As he did so he felt Nina enter him with a dildo, and knew from her short exclamatory cry that Jacques had correspondingly penetrated her sphincter. The momentum communicated by Jacques to Nina and from Nina to himself inspired him to accommodate Marciana with the vigorous activity for which she was pleading. Marciana had contrived to raise herself on her haunches, so that her brother could view the lugubrious animality of her rotating cheeks. His speed now was vicious as Donatien animated his pelvic thrusts to that of an attacking snake. Nina moved in rhythm with Donatien's salient lead, and Jacques drew cries of pleasure from Nina as he inserted a finger into her vulva.
Donatien fed on the power of dominating the collective sexual thrust. If he stopped abruptly, transfixing Marciana on his bloated need, then he denied Nina the orgasm that Jacques seemed about to activate. It was something he would do with vicious spite. He would have Nina burst into tears with frustration, as he held off from opening still another door to Marciana's interior. Jacques too would be prevented imminent ejaculation by Donatien's bringing his own ascendant to a peremptory halt.
Donatien was beginning to invoke the gypsies of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, who had brought a star with eight golden rays from the East. He called on the princes of Les Baux, and on Balthasar, one of the three magi, commanding that they should be present in his sperm when he came. He hammered hard at Marciana's bottom, who in turn was hoarsely enunciating the extremes of her pleasure.
Donatien could feel the incandescent premonitions of orgasm. It seemed impossible that the pressure in his scrotum would ever find release through the constrictive eye of his penis, And sometimes in the act of coming his pleasure had been indefinitely intensified by what had seemed the impossibility of ever ejaculating his load. Marciana was beginning to communicate the ecstatic trance-state in which she would receive visions. She told Donatien through her exclamatory moans that the first of the eight rays of the golden star were lighting up, and now a second had appeared, and then a third. Donatien coaxed his deep inner penetration to maximum sensitisation. To protract the cataclysmic mutual orgasm that they would soon undergo, he tickled Marciana internally with both his finger and his penis. A fourth and fifth ray had come into Marciana's vision. Donatien was so concentrated now on sexual apocalypse that he was detached from the singularly carnal aspirations that were being lived out by Jacques and Nina as they arrived at renewed orgasm.
At a word from Donatien, Nina withdrew, so as to leave him deliriously pacted with his sister. His thrusts were accelerating to a pitch that was so final that they were irreversible, like a train picking up speed across the French countryside. The always inconclusive dialogue he held with Marciana's bottom was nearing another mystical terminal. Both he and his sister began to speak out loud in lyric discourse. They were like lovers overtaken with visiting fire, and as the star exploded in Marciana's brain, so Donatien experienced the first jabbing intensity of
an orgasm that burnt like supernovae sheeting across deep space. Their united body convulsed in spasms as the House of Sade was rebuilt in her rectum.
When the furious assault has subsided, prayers were offered to Laura, the Laura of Petrarch's Sonnets, who had once been married to Hugues de Sade. It was she who had visited Donatien during his insupportable years of imprisonment, infusing his dreams with white light, and appearing to him as an intermediary in his desperate hours. As a sign that she would never desert him, she had left a white rose on the floor of his cell in the Bastille, a flower that had proved imperishable, and one which Donatien kept close by him at all times.
Donatien and Marciana remained prostrate before the torch burning by the bedside. Physically sated, and suspended in a state of post-coital reflection, they appeared in their exhausted awareness to be waiting for a word or a sign. It came in the form of Serge Lama singing L'Esclave', a song that Marciana insisted on alternating with the English version sung by Marc Almond. The lyrics that intimated the story of a slave in a byzantine harem, whose secret desire was to become a woman, comprised the ultimate paean to a transsexual ethos. Marciana never tired of listening to the song's instructive decadence, nor Donatien to the lines about being bitten by a serpent's slow attack.
They lay there a long time, assimilating the contents of their mystico-erotic journey, before Donatien went to join a deeper and darker night in the castle's depths. Marciana heard him go towards his secret destiny. There would be big cats at his feet, and the sound of rains falling through all the autumns of the world would temporarily accompany his passage through the dark.
*
Part II
Torch Song Extravaganza
The theatre had been prepared for the concert. Marciana anticipated Nicole and Leanda's visit to La Coste, and the singer was due to accompany them in their customized leopard-spotted limo.
Ten thousand red roses had been delivered to the château, as decoration for the theatre, and the entire floor-space was ankle-deep in red and pink sequins. Twenty foot black candles, columnar in width were to be lit as an additional histrionic accoutrement to the performance. Open coffins full of lilies, barbiturates and photographs of Marilyn Monroe had been assembled in the orchestra pit. There were black feathered arrows piercing photographic portraits of James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, Judy Garland and a whole pantheon of icons who had died early or with their lives still unfulfilled. Donatien's original manuscripts decorated the walls. A red gown worn by Marlene Dietrich was draped over the Steinway.
There was a throne on stage: its use being optional to the singer. The renowned torch singer had been hired at extravagant cost, and was a favourite of Marciana's to the point of her knowing the words to each of his songs. He had been requested to preview a suite of songs written specifically to celebrate the Sadean mysteries. There were three open coffins on the stage full of wads of paper money and this was to be the singer's payment. The hundreds of empty chairs arranged for an imaginary audience were to be occupied by memorabilia jackets once worn by the great Hollywood stars. Litre size bottles of perfumes by Chanel and Jean Patou were lined up so that the guests could receive exotic oblations. There were whips with jewel-encrusted handles propped against chair-backs, and full-length sequin gowns for the singer's use.
Nicole and Leanda, the occupants of the infamous Pleasure Château, were due to be driven to La Coste by their transvestite chauffeur. They would be accompanied by their midget, who served as an erotic raconteur, supplying Leanda and Nicole with a narrated compendium of perverse erotic experiences.
Marciana looked forward to the fusion of energies promised by the coming together of two notorious châteaux. Donatien would undoubtedly sodomize Leanda's pet midget, and so give birth to the beginnings of a new legend to be cross-fertilized by the respective households. Like the inhabitants of La Caste, those of the Pleasure Château also lived in a time-zone that was permanent autumn. Neither knew any other seasonal occurrence, but that of the dank melancholy of October rains, the ruin of red woods scarved by smoky fog, and the tonic olfactory satisfaction of a world in continuous decay.
Marciana intended to be carried into the theatre in an open coffin by four pallbearers dressed in outrageous drag. She had decided to wear a seam-splitting dress cut from pink sequins, and to adopt Marilyn Monroe's provocative trick of wearing shoes with one heel slightly higher than the other, so as to give prominent display to round buttocks.
Donatien had promised a spectacular entrance in purple velvet. He was to be seated on a black horse decorated with ostrich plumes, and to be ceremoniously led to a throne in front of the stage. Any horse droppings were to be eaten on the spot by his attendants.
Marciana prepared herself for her visitors. She injected herself with a slow-release aphrodisiac, and had Nina paint her three inch false fingernails a gloss indigo. She sat on Nina's lap in her see-through panties, while the latter prepared her body with a beautician's eye for detail. Marciana was to wear an indigo coloured wig, and her black lipstick was glammed with a dusting of blue stars.
Donatien intended the concert to celebrate the marriage of La Coste and The Pleasure Château. A torch lit banquet was to ensue in one of the castle's dungeons. The guests, as Marciana told Nina, were to eat off black-bordered plates, and the main course would be served with indigo sauces derived from squid ink. Marciana, stabbing her tongue into Nina's mouth, withheld knowledge of the courses, but told Nina that dessert would comprise a bottom sculpted out of painted sugar and almond paste and filled with insect jelly.
Nina, who came from a rural village near Roussillon, had heard of such bizarre confections. She slipped a tongue back into Marciana's mouth, prior to making it up, and swam there like fish patrolling the parameters of its tank. She could feel Marciana growing sticky through her transparent panties, as though a snail made tracks on the pink chiffon. Marciana began to grind her crotch into Nina's lap. Nina spread her five fingers teasingly over Marciana's twat, and began to play the frets inside her panties. Marciana threw her head back and responded by convulsing with a paroxysmal cry. It sounded like a nocturnal animal had found its way into her throat, one that had come to slake its thirst in a pool in the hills. Marciana was suddenly nothing but vocables, her scale of pleasure ascending according to the expertise of Nina's caresses. Nina moved her fingers from inside to outside Marciana's panties, find played finger-exercises on the transparent gusset. Marciana sounded in torment, as Nina played a game of administering excruciatingly slow caresses. She worked with three fingers, two fingers, and sometimes one. She polished Marciana's clit as though it was a raspberry she was about to tweak and eat.
Marciana let her head and torso fall back on to the floor, and at the same time her stockinged legs worked their way round Nina's shoulders, and her pussy was presented to Nina's lips. Nina entered it with her tongue like a hummingbird sipping at a flower. She tracked in as a telescoping enquirer, little by little savouring the pepperish glitter flooding Marciana's passage. Marciana was arriving at a state of pre-orgasmic agony. She worked herself harder against Nina's tongue, as though it was the pivot on which she depended. Nina used her tongue like an erect penis to bring Marciana off, the friction invading every centimetre of her erotic core.
Marciana's blue hair poured across the floor as her racked being was consumed by wave after wave of pleasure. Her climax was a hoarse, thrashed out crescendo of throaty entreaties.
The two women relaxed. Nina placed Marciana's wet panties in the chalice, so that they could be offered to Donatien for his ritual gratification. Marciana then slipped on a pair that were as clear as daylight.
Marciana was no sooner zipped into her sheath, than news of the singer's arrival was brought to her room. His dressing-room came replete with black slaves and a variety of wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, St. Emilion and Valdepeñas. There were rose coloured pink champagnes, a massive attack of dark red roses, gifts
of perfumes and shirts and make-up. There was also a surprise for him in the form of a box marked with the word Night. Inside the box, and bound in black satin, was a notebook containing unpublished passages from The 120 Days of Sodom in Donatien's handwriting.
Marciana was told that Leanda and Nicole had been shown into the sumptuous orange velvet sitting-room, where a juniper scented fire had been lit for the arrivals.
When Marciana entered the room, she discovered a midget sitting on the table, cracking walnuts with his teeth, and fuming with ribald obscenities. He was dressed in a scarlet coat blistered with tacky rhinestones. Marciana had an immediate premonition that this was the vermin that Donatien would skewer with his cock on a game platter.
Two stylishly attractive women had arranged themselves like flowers in opposite chairs. The one who introduced herself as Leanda had poppy-red hair, while Nicole was dark and wore black and white Japanese make-up, highlighted by scarlet lipstick.
Both women were so perfectly made up, that Marciana was not surprised to be introduced to Saki, their private make-up artist, a woman whose mask-like face offset a deeply morose sensibility. Sitting poised in a silk micro-skirt and red satin blouse, she had placed a pink carnation in her lap.
Marciana also noticed a monkey sitting in an armchair, and the midget directed his raucous verbiage at the seated creature. To Marciana's amazement the creature was smoking a cannabis joint, and punctuating its inhalations with the reflective pauses of an inveterate smoker.
Marciana felt an immediate sexual attraction to the poppy-haired Leanda, and knew instantly that it was she whose legs she would like to open in an exacting V in one of the castle's decaying attics. It was there, she decided, that she would give Leanda the one hundred orgasms that resulted from Sadean cunnilingus.