The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  Marciana and Raoul entered into enthusiastic conversation about aspects of singers for whom they nursed a corresponding passion. They spoke of Nina Simone, Jacques Brel, Scott Walker, Barbara, and of Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley. Marciana was a completist, and was exceedingly knowledgable about bootlegs, rarities, collaborations, and all the items of an artist's work that go to form a complete collection. Marciana also collected memorabilia, and was proud to own black silk panties worn by Billie Holiday, a cache of postcards that Elvis had scribbled to friends during his army years, negligees worn by Brigitte Bardot, stockings that had breathed on Monroe's legs, sunglasses that had belonged to Scott Walker, and a whole wealth of memorabilia.

  Marciana told Raoul of how sometimes she would put on a pair of Billie's black panties, listen to her late night music, and have Nina undress her with her teeth over a period of hours. By that time, she told Raoul, her panties were so wet that Jacques had to be called for to fuck her to the point of screaming.

  Raoul expressed his own fetish for drag-clubs, and thick cocks under tight little skirts. He asked Marciana if she could procure him a pair of Elvis Presley's Y-fronts, a trophy for which he was willing to pay a lot of money.

  Marciana maintained an animated front of conversation with Raoul, and then with Leanda and Nicole, in the hope of excluding the weirdo with silver eyes who would periodically spook her by directing his eyes at her body. She sensed it wasn't the sexual stare of a man appraising her curves through a transparent dress, but more the detached scrutiny of someone observing her as a cryogenic exhibit. Marciana had the feeling that the man saw right through her into the archetypal contents of her psyche. He appeared unnatural to her, to the point of being a walk-in — one of the many extraterrestrial infiltrators who touched down in order to transmit data back to their particular planets. She knew intuitively that his sort of sex would be head-games. She drew up a picture of him as a mind-fucker, a being that would sensitise the limbic area of the brain, and orgasm in his head like an adept of Kundalini.

  Wine was being poured as a postscript to the lethal corpse revivers, and at the far end of the table, a woman dressed in a red micro-skirt was down on her hands and knees ingesting her partner's cock. She played with it like soluble asparagus, letting the heavy head rest on her lower lip, while her tongue circumambulated the triggered girth.

  Marciana pointed out to the interested midget, that this woman, called Lorraine, actually ran a smart school in fellatio. Pupils were taught how to suck cock, and comprised both women and gay men. Taught initially to suck on dildos, pupils then graduated to the real thing, and enlisted models lay prostrate on beds, sporting huge erections, and verbally encouraging the pupils in the arts of deep-throat, cheek repository, lapping, licking, tonguing the frenulum, and other forms of cocksucking extravaganza.

  Marciana informed Raoul that Lorraine's clients included everyone from princesses to prostitutes. They were educated in how to play the cock like a wind instrument. The erectile nerves, Marciana explained, were treated like finger-stops, and the anatomy of the penis was studied as an aid to understanding its potential for pleasure. Alumni of the School of Fellatio, like Lorraine, were considered to be so expert that they could blow a man if need be in two seconds, or over two dilatory days.

  According to Marciana, Lorraine was soon intending to widen the academy's study to take in cunnilingus as a complementary subject. At dinner parties Lorraine liked to dress and cock-suck like a scarlet slut. She would eventually, Marciana warned, make a circuit of the entire table, and reward all the men present with the tormenting expertise of her deep-throating prowess.

  Having unsatisfactorily picked at a quail's wing, Donatien declared himself ready for a first go at the exhibits on the cake-stand. At a peremptory sign, the young French girl he had chosen, presented her bottom to the divine Marquis, and he, without removing his gloves, appraised its curves. He appeared to be weighing her buttocks in his hands, and then polishing them, like a masseur rubbing oils into the body.

  He did no more than that, certain in his mind, that he had claimed his first sodomitical prize for the night. He liked to be excited by a variety of bottoms, before he fully entered the mystic rites of his sister's passage.

  The assembled guests eagerly awaited a second course which was described in the personal menu as Soles In Coffins. A melange of jacket potatoes in béchamel sauce, two fillets of sole per person, plus half a lobster cut into half-inch pieces, the latter having been poached in white wine, was to be served with the potatoes cut into coffin-shapes.

  Marciana could hear Nicole and Leanda eagerly discussing what they called an itchy-panties technique of excitation, with a vampish diva, whose mouth was bruised by a definitive black lipstick. Nicole was describing how she would fill a pair of Leanda's favourite see-through panties with a deliciously ticklish irritant, and Leanda would go through minutes of wrigglish ecstasy, before a rapaciously tormented schoolboy was introduced into her bed. He had first to remove her ticklish panties, place some of the aphrodisiacal irritant on his prepuce, and then begin the solid fucking for which Leanda was by this time, desperate.

  For all her initial aversion to the weirdo with silver eyes, Marciana knew deep down in herself that an encounter with the man was inevitable. She had ascertained from Nicole that this figure was indeed the redoubtable guru XZ, whose teachings had brought to their Pleasure Château, the knowledge that there was no need to die.

  Marciana assumed that XZ would be anxious to psychically decode Donatien's knowledge of cryogenics. Both châteaux were in possession of the secrets of virtual biology, and Marciana wondered if their medical data intersected. She was already aware that any attempt to seduce XZ would prove impossible, and that contact with him could only exist on a mental level. She fixed her eyes on him, and instead of averting his as a signal of non-aggression, he continued to stare at her with imperturbable menace.

  Donatien idled with the second course. He offered a forkful of sole in béchamel sauce to a redhead from Bordeaux, sitting open-legged on the second tier of the cake-stand. She nibbled at it, letting her saliva escape into suggestive tears. But Donatien wasn't sufficiently aroused to want to bugger her. He fed her a second forkful, and then sat looking at the lobster on his plate with the disinterest of a man surveying a mortuary. He segmented the perfumed flakes, and let them individually settle on his tongue, but he still lacked any form of focused appetite. All he could think of was his sister in her transparent dress, and his inordinate desire to re-enter her sphincter.

  Marciana was feeling correspondingly in need of being fucked. It was only with her brother's insatiable penis rooted in her interior, that she felt complete. She savoured her food with the appetite of an adept at French kissing. Her eyes were like a cat's, as she delayed the passage of lobster into her throat. When she lifted her wineglass, it was as someone who tasted the centuries in the sensual fermentation of the grape.

  A lively conversation had opened up between XZ and his patrons, Leanda and Nicole. XZ was discussing the reality of spacecraft being fuelled by solar-powered xenon-ion propulsion, a means of efficiency he was describing as specific impulse, compared with brute force chemical rockets. He was imparting to Nicole the technological infrastructure of why chemical rockets used thousands of pounds of propellants, whereas the ion engines consumed no more than 80Ib of xenon.

  XZ had estimated that such a craft would enter a 200-mile by 22,000-mile geostationary transfer orbit around Earth, and that the weight saving would allow the craft to be used to carry a bigger scientific payload or to give the spacecraft a longer life. Firing continuously for 4,000 to 5,000 hours, he explained, would increase the craft's velocity gradually to 25,000 mph, the escape velocity needed to overcome Earth's gravitational influence and travel out into the solar system and into deep space at high speed.

  Marciana was aware immediately of XZ's formidable knowledge of space travel and of interplanetary communications. She could feel a schizoid happening in he
r erogenous zones. While her anus remained the sacred prerogative of her brother's, her pussy felt intimations of arousal at XZ's weirdness. Marciana liked his slim body, and the impression he gave of expansive cerebration. She found herself wondering about the possibilities of his possessing a penis. She couldn't quite decide if he, as an android, would be devoid of genitalia, or equipped with a formidable prosthetic device.

  Marciana found herself shivering each time Leanda or Nicole arranged a silk-stockinged leg. The ripple ran through her like wind imparting filigree to a lake's still surface.

  An androgynous young man a few places away from Marciana, had taken up a long pink feather, and was busy imparting ecstasy to one of the crotchless-pantied girls on the cake-stand. The girl had succeeded in somersaulting her legs backwards over her head, and was purring with pre-orgasmic pleasure. The exhibit was miked-up, so that the guttural vocables which escaped the girls would be relayed around the hall. The girl ascended a scale of pleasure that deepened to hoarse entreaties. The young man continued to pick at his sole and lobster with the fork in his right hand, and administered his teasing measures with the other.

  Marciana was beginning to decipher the names of other guests at the table who had been invited from the Pleasure Château. There was a man with green lenses, who appeared to be inseparable from an imperturbably reserved individual with steel-blue hair, who she noted was called John. The two men preserved an intimacy and confidence that worked to exclude the rest of the company. Both men spoke quietly, a habit accentuated by their manner of leaning towards each other when speaking, as though they had reason to further exclude the chances of being overheard.

  Marciana felt marginally disquieted by this couple. While she readily warmed to the feline eroticism emitted by both Leanda and Nicole, she instinctively withdrew from the quasi-human qualities that seemed to belong to the male inhabitants of the Pleasure Château. She could envisage herself eating a cocktail cherry from Nicole's pudenda, or being licked on all fours by Leanda, but her libido went cold at the idea of fellatio with the midget or XZ.

  The midget was attempting to entertain his immediate neighbours with a coarse repertory of erotic stories. He was, in between pyramidal stackings of his fork, telling the story of a man who could only come if he was dressed in a frou-frou, and spanked with a pink ballet shoe. According to the midget, the man was over another's lap, receiving his delicious punishment, when the mistress of the house returned, Her jars of expensive moisturisers were scattered across the sofa, having been used as part of the fetish, to give a beauty treatment to the man's bottom.

  The mistress of the house, claimed the midget, who professed to have observed the whole scene, was dressed in leather hotpants, and feeling frustrated by the failure of her boyfriend to keep an afternoon rendezvous at the Ritz. She apparently said nothing, stripped to her black silk panties, and demanded that her bottom be given a facial. Both men had worked oils into the curvature of her cheeks, before she had demanded from the man whose bottom was already oiled, a cheek-rubbing orgasm. Bringing her bottom into friction with another, by rotating it on the oiled surface, had driven her to a rapturous climax.

  Marciana connected with fragments of another narrative, in which the midget was relating the story of a wealthy countess in whose service he had been, prior to taking up his position at the Pleasure Château. The Countess, according to what Marciana could construe of the midget's raucous tale, had a predilection for garage mechanics. She liked their hands and faces to be blackened with oil, and demanded that they shouldn't wash after finishing at the garage. Her powdered body would be arranged, legs open, on white silk sheets, her skin rippling to engage with the oil-blackened youths that she so desired.

  The midget, who was into his second plate of lobster and soles, was unable to articulate the whole story, so preoccupied was he with cramming delicate food into his mouth.

  Donatien, who was still holding off from the exhibits in their crotchless panties, was beginning to engage in a tentative discussion of cryonics with an equally hesitant XZ. The imperiously aristocratic and the invincibly transcendent met as the differing energies in the two men, in something solid like a columnar flame.

  XZ was telling Donatien of high-tech gadgets that enhanced awareness of dreaming. He was talking of the NovaDreamer, a combination of eye-mask and circuitry designed to help the individual monitor his dreams. The wireless NovaDreamer, XZ was explaining, determines when you are in REM sleep, by scanning the patterns of your eye movement. When the gadget judges that you are about to enter REM sleep, XZ pronounced, then it gives you a variable light-and-sound cue that acts as a mental alert to tell you that you are dreaming — without actually waking you. Marciana could hear him expounding on the high-tech aspects of the NovaDreamer, and how it featured a built-in dream alarm that wakes you five minutes after each dream so you can write it down with practice, he was saying, you can begin to control the autonomy of your dreams.

  Donatien expressed some minor interest in the US-designed Zyberfantasy Sex Machine, equipped with a VR headset and tactile sensors, in which visits to a model in a selective sexual orientation offered auto-erotic gratification.

  But Marciana could hear XZ enforcing the notion that spirituality was an essential part of all psychological development. He was talking of the strict meditational practises employed by his deathless cult, and of the need to fuse bioengineering with enhanced psychic awareness. Donatien, who maintained the glacial hauteur associated with his mystic and depraved lineage, was busy advancing the idea of physiological sites in the brain for longevity implants. Like XZ, he was as yet prepared to give no ideas away about his discoveries relating to DNA, and cryonics. He discussed with XZ the neuroscientific claims of the brain being divided into three segments. Donatien was reminding XZ of the reptilian brain as the site of survival behaviour, the palaeomammalian which corresponds to the limbic system, and the neomammalian which resides in the neocortex. The complex interaction between the three brains, allowed Donatien to believe in locating a channel in the limbic system that would provide uninterrupted sexual fantasy. It would, lie claimed, be like watching a mini-TV screen activated by nerve-cell connections in various psychomotor regions.

  On a different plane, Raoul was telling several admirers about the vicissitudes he had encountered on a tour of the major Russian states. He was talking of the absence of vegetarian food in depleted restaurants, and of the primitive technological facilities in the theatres at which he had played. He had carried his own suitcases on to planes, been hassled by border police, but adored by his audience. He had, he said, taken sequins to the Soviets, and intended to do so again.

  Marciana saw a switch come on in Donatien's brain, as he abruptly got up from his seat, took his redoubtable bullwhip in hand, and approached the cake-stand. The girls were quick to present their erotically vocabularized bottoms, and Nina, anticipating Donatien's intent, quickly placed the head of a rose in the most inviting cleft. Donatien's aim was rapid like the cast of a fly fisherman. A whistling sizzle, amplified by the mikes, resounded savagely through the immediately silenced hall. Nearly all of the assembled company knew of Donatien's legendary status as a whipper, but none could have imagined the ferocity of his hand. He whipped with the peremptory finesse of an undisputed master. A second and a third cut followed like machine-gun fire, and abruptly as he had risen, so the Marquis sat down and resumed his conversation.

  XZ was visibly disconcerted by Donatien's brain-stormed behaviour, and he noticed the speed at which the Marquis resumed his impeccably formal demeanour. It was as though Donatien had dissociated himself so entirely from the incident that it might never have occurred.

  It was Nina's task to climb on the stand and rub emollients into the bottom of the girl who had been so unsparingly thrashed. Donatien busied himself with drinking a glass of vintage to celebrate his unparalleled expertise as a whipper.

  The company were so visibly shaken that it was a time before they resumed conversation. Th
e girls reverted to their open legs position, and slowly the hall came alive with the bee-simmer of animated discourse.

  Marciana surmised that this halcyon interlude would soon be destroyed by Donatien's insatiable thirst for the whip. She knew only too well, that once her brother's impulses were lit, he was unlikely to be contained by this one outbreak. The exhibitionist in him demanded attention, and the confrontation between a bullwhip and soft flesh, was his assured way of attracting a spellbound audience. Conversation was suspended by four of the kitchen stall transporting an open coffin through the hall. Steam could be seen escaping from the interior; and the menu prepared for each guest told them that they would on the coffin's arrival be listening to music from Cantio Ad Laudem Cantoris, from the liturgical chants of the Aquitainian repertory. This in turn was to be followed by an adaption from the anonymous composer of Le Recueil Des Plus Belles Et Excellentes Chansons En Forme De Voix De Ville.

  The black majuscule lettering in the menu stated: 'We will be eating the body of Jean Testaniere, formerly in employ at La Coste, and born at Oppede. The course is optional. The body is glazed in a sauce of blackcurrants and Armagnac'.

  The coffin was deposited with great ceremony, but none of the guests apart from Donatien and the midget expressed any interest in the notion of cannibalism. They concentrated on the Vaucluse wines from the Sade vine-yards, and the autumnal tang contained in their mellow notes.

  The girls on the cake-stand were being fed delicacies by the guests at table. John, and his friend with the green lenses, could be seen offering black grapes to a kittenish redhead from Marseilles, whose small, button-like mouth promised the constrictive ecstasies of fellatio. She would lick the escaped grape juice from the corners of her scarlet lips with the prehensile dabbings of her explorative tongue. Another girl was having the soles of her feet tickled by a pink feather.

  Donatien had the glazed corpse removed from the table. Neither he nor the midget had done anything but test the blackcurrant veneer with a fork. The Marquis had other things on his mind, like arresting the secret from XZ that contributed to longevity at the Pleasure Château, and of proving his whip hand in the orgy that would follow on from the banquet.