Dominion

by Bentley Little

  Couples—men and women, women and women, men and men—were fornicating furiously on the soft grass.

  He raced into the center of the meadow. “I am here!” he announced. His voice was loud, booming, echoing over the hills and back.

  The people gathered around him. He had been planning to join in the festivities, but he realized that the celebration was in honor of himself. A huge goblet of wine was thrust into his hand, and he swallowed its entirety. The goblet was immediately replaced with another, and that with another, until he had drunk ten such draughts and his thirst was quenched.

  He felt good, he felt primed, ready to satisfy his other hunger.

  The smell of arousal was all about him, entwined with the fragrance of the wine, the heavy musk of the women, the lighter scent of the men.

  He scanned the faces before him. He wanted two today.

  His eyes alighted on the robed figures of a woman and her young daughter. He nodded, and both removed their clothes. The woman’s breasts were full, milky, her thatch thick. The daughter was hairless and only just ripe. With one easy movement he stepped out of his own garb. The eyes of the two females widened with awe and lust at the sight of his enormous organ.

  He took the woman first, bending her over a log and taking her from behind as the other celebrants cheered. She screamed with agony and joy and hot ecstasy, and he became wilder, more feverish in his movements as the wine was poured over them and the woman began to buck. His time was about to come, and he grabbed her head, smashing it against the log with each thrust as his seed shot deep into her body.

  She had stopped breathing long before he was through, though the blood continued to pump from her gashed head.

  Afterward, the daughter sat on his lap and rode him as he impaled her, tore her apart. His satisfaction came at the precise moment of her death, and he leaped to his feet as he gave a cry and around him the carnage began. Screams of pleasure and screams of pain blended, harmonized, created a music beautiful to his ears. He breathed in the blood and sex and death, looking proudly down at the broken, used, and twisted bodies of the mother and her daughter, bathed in liquid red and white.

  They were dead, but the life force had not yet fled entirely, and their legs were still twitching in remembrance of ecstasy.

  Dion awoke suddenly, his head jerking up from the pillow. The final image was still in his mind, the young girl and her mother covered in blood and semen, twitching. He was disgusted by the image, nauseated, frightened by it. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, opened his eyes.

  His room seemed far too dark, its night shadows much more threatening than usual, and he was sweating, drenched with the aftermath of fear.

  He also had an erection.

  “So did you feed her some sausage?”

  Dion slammed shut his locker, ignoring the question.

  Kevin grinned. “Come on, man. You can tell me. I’d tell you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about Penelope like that.”

  “Whoa, it’s love and not just lust!” Kevin reached out to grab a passerby and make some crude remark about the situation, but Dion stopped his hand.

  “Hey, I’m serious.”

  Kevin’s smile faded. “I’m sorry. I was just joking.”

  “No,” Dion apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so defensive.”

  “You must be pretty serious about her, huh?”

  Dion shrugged. “I don’t know.” He shifted the books uncomfortably in his hand.

  “You are. I can tell.”

  “Bell’s going to ring,” Dion said, changing the subject.

  The two of them started walking. “You coming with us Friday?” Kevin asked. “We’re going to cruise up to Lake Berryessa, see if we can’t scare-us some campers.”

  “Sorry. I hope to have a date that night.”

  “Hope to? You mean you don’t know? You haven’t asked yet?”

  “No,” Dion admitted.

  “Don’t be such a wimp. Use your balls. You do have balls, right?”

  Dion laughed. “Your sister says I do.”

  “Ask her out, then. I mean, shit, how much more encouragement do you need? You expect her to come out and say she’s madly in love with you before you ask her out on a simple date? Be serious. No offense, but if Pussy-Eating Penelope invites you over to her damn winery and introduces you to her mom, that would seem to be a pretty good indication that she likes you. As far as I know, you’re the only guy who’s ever made it past those gates.”

  Dion raised his eyebrows. ” ‘Pussy-Eating Penelope?’ “

  Kevin held up his hands in an expression of innocence. “I didn’t make it up.”

  The two of them turned toward the east wing.

  “So are you going to make your move?” Kevin asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  “So that means you’ll be coming out with us Friday?”

  “Hopefully not.”

  ” ‘Hopefully’?”

  “Probably.”

  “Have some guts, dude.”

  “Okay, I’m not coming with you. I’m going out on a date.”

  “That’s the way it always is,” Kevin complained. “A guy finds himself a girl, forgets about his buddies—”

  Dion laughed. “I could set you up with her friend Vella.”

  “J could get a rubber woman with more life.”

  Around them, the crowd suddenly thinned as students hurried into classes. “I guess that means it’s time.” Kevin hurried down the hall.

  “See you in Mythology.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Kevin laughed. “I know you will.”

  Dion and Penelope walked slowly through the vineyard, the late summer sun streaming down on their heads. Penelope talked about grapes as they walked, about hybrids and planting techniques. Dion listened to what she had to say, looked at the examples she showed him. Close up, the vines looked different than he’d thought they would. The plants were not as leafy as he’d expected, and the stalks seemed dry and twisted, strangely grizzled. Even the grapes did not match the image in his mind. The bunches were full and plentiful, outnumbering the leaves on some of the vines, but the grapes themselves were much smaller than ordinary table grapes.

  They continued to walk. The picking had stopped for a few days, until some of the remaining grapes had ripened, and they had the field entirely to themselves. They strode side by side as they moved farther away from the drive. The ground here was rough, furrowed, and it was impossible to step in a straight line. More than once the backs of their hands accidentally brushed, and Dion felt tingles of anticipatory excitement pass through him. He wanted desperately to breach the inches between them and hold her hand. It seemed natural, right, and though he thought he sensed a similar desire on her part, he was not experienced enough at these things to know for sure. He might be misreading the signs, and he did not have the courage to act on his instincts. He needed more than a hint, more than a promise; he needed assurance that she felt the same way he did before he attempted to make a move.

  They stopped for a moment at the end of a row. Dion leaned his foot against a long, wheeled pipe sprinkler and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he looked around. “What’s there?” he asked. “Behind the wall?” He pointed toward the stone fence which ran the length of the field, disappearing in back of the house and winery buildings.

  “I don’t know,” she said quickly.

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on, you can tell me.” He grinned mischievously. “I won’t sell your family secrets.”

  Penelope did not smile. “I’m forbidden to go back there.”

  “Forbidden? Why?”

  She turned toward him. “Do you want to see how it’s done?” she asked.

  “Do you want to see how we make the wine?”

  “Uh, sure,” he said, frowning.

  “Let’s go, then.” Without waiting for an answer, she began hiking
back down the row the way they’d come, her arms swinging in a carefree manner that was too studied and too perfect to be real.

  He looked toward the fence and wondered what it was about the forbidden area, behind it that had triggered this reaction. She was obviously afraid of the place and didn’t want to talk about it, but her unexpectedly strong response had intensified what had before been only idle curiosity. He would definitely have to ask her about. the place sometime when he knew her a little better, when she wasn’t so freaked.

  She stopped, turned around, motioned him forward. “Come on!”

  He hurried down the row toward her, and she began to run. Laughing, they raced over the rough ground all the way to the drive. Dion stopped first. “I give up,” he said, breathing heavily. He bent down, putting his hands on his knees. “Whoo!”

  “I take it you’re not used to exercising?”

  “I walk to school and back.”

  “A whole three blocks!”

  “More like six.”

  Penelope laughed. “Another Arnold Schwartzenegger.”

  Dion stood, straightened, catching his breath. He smiled at her, acknowledging the joke, but he couldn’t help feeling a little hurt by it. She hadn’t meant it to be insulting—her tone of voice was light and completely innocent—but he vowed nonetheless to start exercising.

  She looked toward him. “Ready?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  They walked together up the drive and entered the main building through a tinted glass side door. Dion had expected the inside of the winery to be dark and rustic, filled with floor to ceiling oak casks, dimly lit by bare bulbs, the Hollywood conception of a winery. But the long room outside the small glass-walled office into which they’d entered was antiseptically white, with a checkerboard tile floor and a row of gleaming stainless steel tanks along the north wall. He could see a curled hose lying next to one of the tanks, and a drain in the center of the floor.

  Penelope nodded to a middle-aged woman sitting at a computer terminal.

  “I’m just showing my friend around,” she explained.

  The woman smiled. “Go right ahead.”

  The two of them walked through the open doorway. “We’re kind of taking the backward tour,” Penelope said. “Or the sideways tour.” She pointed at the row of tanks. “These are used for fermenting. Wineries used to do all of their fermenting in wooden casks, but that’s not really an efficient method these days. What we do is allow the wine to ferment here, and then for certain blends we move it into the wooden barrels for final aging.”

  “Why?” Dion asked.

  “Because the wood actually adds flavor to the wine. Redwood will add a slight, barely detectable flavor; oak has a fairly strong effect. So what we do depends on the type and vintage. Whites and roses we ferment and age completely in here. Certain reds we age in the oak barrels.”

  He shook his head. “It’s weird hearing someone my age talk about wines like this. I mean, you’re not even old enough to drink, and you act like an expert.”

  “What do you expect? I grew up here.”

  “I guess,” He looked around the room. “Do you ever help out?”

  “Not really. I hang around sometimes, but they never wanted me to actually do any of the work. I never wanted to either.”

  “Does your mother ever let you try any of the wines? In France, even little kids drink it. They have it with every meal. Do you guys do that?”

  “No,” Penelope said simply. “I don’t drink.”

  Dion was glad of that.

  “Come on, let’s go into the pressing room.”

  Their tennis shoes sounded loud and absurdly squeaky on the silent tile.

  Penelope led the way down the row of tanks and pushed open the white door at the far end. They passed through another, identical room filled with large, closed metal tanks, where Penelope nodded to two workers, then into the pressing room.

  The pressing room was just as modern but not nearly as antiseptic and was the size of a small grocery store. The air here smelled of grape, and there were purple stains on the raised wood-slatted floor. Machines of various shapes and sizes were grouped according to type. Along the opposite wall were what looked like two electrical generators.

  “As you can see, we don’t all stand barefoot in a big barrel and stomp around to press the grapes. These are different types of presses. The women of the combine bought several kinds in order to experiment with different techniques. They all still work, and we usually end up using most of them at the height of the season, but we usually stick to these.” She tapped a long metal cylinder suspended in a sturdy frame.

  “Air-pressure presses. They squeeze from the inside out instead of the other way around like the rest of these do. For our purposes, it makes a much better must.”

  “Must?”

  “The grape juice that we make into wine.”

  “Oh.”

  He followed her around the large room as she opened each press type and explained its workings. After that she led the way into a huge, damp, cavelike room in which hundreds of wooden barrels were stacked almost to the ceiling. This was what he’d though a winery would look like.

  “This is just where we age the wines. After this the product is bottled and shipped out. I’d show you our bottling apparatus, but it’s in another building, and it’s closed up right now. The casks you’re looking at now are arranged by year. We have wines in this room going back four, five, six years. My … aunt Sheila does the testing to determine when the wines are ready.”

  Dion took a deep breath. The air was rich, smelling of sweet grape and tart fermentation.

  He thought of his mom.

  What if he and Penelope eventually got married? What would happen if there was a winery in the family? If his mom had unlimited access to alcohol?

  He did not even want to think about it.

  “That’s the basic tour, the non-technical tour. If you want a more in-depth look at the wine-making process, if you want to follow it from step to step, I’m sure I could get one of my aunts to take us around.”

  He shook his head. “No, that was good enough.” He smiled at her. “You’re really an excellent tour guide. Ever think of doing it professionally?”

  “Very funny.”

  They walked out of the room the way they’d come in, but exited the pressing room through a side door which led down a hall. There was only one door in the wall of the hallway. “What’s in there?” Dion asked as they passed.

  “In there? That’s the lab. But we can’t go inside. That’s Mother Sheila’s territory, and she’s very protective. Even I’ve never been in there.”

  “What’s the big secret?”

  “Well, that’s where they come up with new blends, new wines. That’s where the serious brain work is done.”

  They walked outside, squinting against the sudden brightness of the late afternoon sun. “So where is your wine sold?” Dion asked. “I haven’t looked, but Kevin told me your wine’s not sold in stores, that you have to mail-order it?”

  Her face tightened. “Did he call it ‘Lezzie Label Wine’?”

  “No,” Dion lied.

  “Kevin Harte? He didn’t mention the word lesbian in there somewhere?”

  Dion smiled. “Well, yeah, he did.”

  She shook her head. “We produce what are called ‘specialty label’ wines.

  Kevin’s right, they are mostly sold by mail order, but that’s because most of our customers live out of state. Or out of the country.”

  “What’s a ‘specialty label’ wine?”

  “It’s a wine that’s sold primarily to collectors or connoisseurs. It’s the equivalent of, like, a limited-edition book. A lot of the smaller labels like ours couldn’t afford to compete with the big names in the mass market, so we’ve sort of carved out our own niche. We produce the type of wine that it is just not economically feasible for a big winery to produce. Specialty labels usual
ly specialize in wines made from obscure or exotic breeds or new hybrids of grape. Some use archaic or adventurous pressing, fermenting, or distilling techniques on their product.”

  “Sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook.”

  She laughed. “Close. Our sales brochure.”

  “So what do you specialize in?”

  “Basically, we make Greek wine, the type of wine they drank in ancient Greece, in Socrates’ time and the days of Homer. Wine played an important role in the religious and social life of ancient Greece, but the classic techniques of wine making have been virtually abandoned in favor of the European style of wine making. It’s really almost a lost art. The machines you saw in there are all modern, but they’re used to duplicate those processes.” Penelope smiled shyly. “That’s in the brochure too.”

  “That explains the architecture,” Dion said. “And I assume that’s why you’re taking Mythology.”

  She looked surprised. “Not really. In fact, it never even occurred to me. But now that you mention it, yeah, I suppose it did influence me.”

  They walked slowly across the lawn, toward the house. Dion glanced up, saw Penelope’s mother and two of her aunts watching them through a window. They smiled and waved when they saw him, and he waved back, but it made him feel a little creepy. He couldn’t help thinking that he and Penelope were being spied upon.

  “It’s getting late,” Dion said. “I should be getting back.”

  “This early?” Penelope sounded disappointed.

  “My mom expects me home for dinner.”

  Did she really? he wondered. From school he had called his mom at work, explaining that he was going over to Penelope’s, telling her that he would be home by dinnertime. He had assumed that she would be home before he was, would have dinner waiting, but a nagging voice in the back of his mind kept saying that this would give her free time, that she would use this opportunity to do what she wanted and that she would not be home when he got there.

  Stop it, he told himself.

  “You always talk about your mother,” Penelope said. “Your father doesn’t live with you?”