Sensation

by Thea Devine

  And it was quick. Five hard thrusts and he was gone, almost as if his spunk was so pent up, he couldn't wait to expel it. And that on top of emptying himself in a flood into the first whore*

  He wondered if they measured the amount of semen produced in any given night by any given patron, and if that were some kind of test.

  He wondered if tonight, he were being tested ...

  Because this kind of camaraderie was too much, too soon, even with him being Lujan's brother.

  God, he wanted to get out of there. No more anonymous naked bodies. No more slick meaningless couplings with slick meaningless whores ...

  Four women slipped into the room, each one of them veiled,

  '

  shaved, and with the ubiquitous black leather rose around her neck. They surrounded him. They reached for him. They took him as he stood, one after the other, hands, mouths, tongues, all over him, in every valley, every cleft, every opening, every inch of his skin, fondled, licked, nipped, between his legs and down to his feet, at which point he had sunk to the floor, and they were all over him.

  One at his mouth, two at his penis and balls, and one, some­how, deep between his legs. No words needed to be exchanged. He was their king; anything he wanted, they would provide. And more. They held his hands, his legs; they kept him immobile while they prodded him, played with him, and sucked at his penis and scrotum.

  He came. A man had to be inhuman not to sink into the voluptuous handling of four beautiful women whose sole func­tion was to fuck him. He came in a spume of hot semen spraying high and hot all over him, all over them, and they took it and rubbed it all over their breasts and nipples and rubbed it all over him, and licked it like it was vanilla cream, and they made him shoot off even more to massage into his skin, and between their

  legs-He felt boneless, as if he would never move again. His body felt sapped and drawn, as if they had taken his lifeblood as well as his semen.

  And they were still at him, with their hands, their mouths. They were expert, these faceless courtesans, and they acted as if they were enjoying every nip and bite as they roamed up and down his body, devouring him, inch by inch, eating his penis inch by inch until it hardened into a stiff iron bar of penetration.

  And then, one by one, they sat on him. Just eased themselves over him, their legs spread wide to give him the best view of their bare raw nakedness, and they took him, slowly, grindingly, ago­nizingly, one by one, wringing from his penis every last spurt and drop after he had come three separate times inside them.

  And then silently, they left, slinking out like ghosts, leaving him sprawled on the satin sheets soaked with his rich warm semen, and the scent of lust still thick, hot, and arousing perme­ating the air.

  He fell into a deep, exhausted sleep in the thick ensuing si-

  lence, A strange sonorous silence, from which he awakened with a jolt, suddenly aware.

  It was too quiet. Too dissonant, as if there were a presence in the room. Or the watchers ...

  He swung out of the bed. No one in the room.

  The four hungry houris had not returned. Odd.

  Everything was odd tonight.

  He prowled the room, every instinct on the alert.

  Too fast, too soon ... he couldn't shake the feeling. Hackford had brought him along too quickly for a few days' acquaintance. Even with the losses at the card table. Even with the use of Lujan's name.

  Shit. He moved to the door. Thought better of it. They were watching.

  Were they watching?

  He cracked open the door. Not a soul. Too odd. Not the usual Bullhead menu of on-the-hour pleasure and pain. Or maybe not this night for him. Why?

  He eased out into the hallway, naked. No hindrances tonight. No clothes. No chocolate virgins to slow him down and impede his progress. No sevens, signs, symbols, or omens. He wasn't so certain about the moving walls. The hallway was no different than the one with which he'd been trapped on the lower floor. The dim lighting, the long swath of thick carpeting, the mahogany walls incised like panels, the fitted doors with the brass pulls.

  What was different besides the opulence of the rooms? The ominous silence? As if things were going on behind closed doors? Things were, things no decent man wanted to know about. Or be part of.

  Jesus ... he was getting nowhere. The hallway ended at an in­tersecting corridor, nothing different from the floor below. The smooth walls, the ringing silence, the feeling of walking down the road to Sodom ... nothing he hadn't experienced on his previous visits.

  Yet something was different. It was a different floor of the

  mansion, a different level of services, a different feeling in the air.

  But no different floor plan: at the end of the intersecting corri-

  dor, there was no place to go, no moving walls shifting him into secret rooms with secret symbols and secret men playing chil­dren's games with their secret rituals, secret silence and their predilection for the prurient.

  That was all it had been, what he and the chocolate virgin had seen, he thought suddenly. Just another component of Bullhead's menu of services for the profanely wealthy. This scene, had they watched it play out, would have been the sacrifice of a virgin, per­haps, who would have been placed on that bier, her naked inno­cence at a convenient height for easy, hard penetration by all the participants in what had probably turned into an obscenity of a passion play.

  Enough of that. These voluptuaries lived to spend their seed, in secret and behind closed doors, and the more they expelled, the more they needed the experience heightened by the forbidden pretense of the pornographic.

  And the women, the whores, were complicit, everything was consensual, and that was the whole of what the Bullhead was about.

  His sensibilities were tame by comparison. He couldn't even imagine what Hackford and his friends were up to tonight. He didn't want to know, nor could he explore any further; he'd been away from his room for far too long, long enough to arouse the suspicions of the watchers or ... what if Hackford had come looking for him?

  It took him two minutes and he was back lolling on the sex-scented satin sheets. Fooling no one, probably. But not a moment too soon because he heard a soft scratch at the door, and Hackford's voice, calling to him.

  "Galliard. Come. Mistress Nipples is performing for us."

  No time to grab any clothes; Hackford was buck naked in any event, and grasped his arm and pulled him the opposite way down the hall and into a doorway that was marked by a shiny black disc just over the opening.

  Inside, the scent of ejaculate and sex was thick and overpower­ing. There were a dozen other men already there, all naked, all with protuberant erections being attended to either by one of the two veiled courtesans dressed in the leather necklaces with the black roses, or by their own hand.

  On a dais in front of them, the courtesan Hackford had named Mistress Nipples was tied by her wrists to a piece of furniture that looked like an ornate hall tree with openwork on the upper half that allowed for her silken bonds to be threaded through, and a seat with crosspieces, which gave the mistress purchase to drape her legs over to give full widespread access to her lush shaved cunt. There was a soft pillow just in front of this where her supplicants could kneel, worship her sex and spill their seed in adoration.

  Beside her, there were two men dressed—eunuchs?—in loin­cloths, each of whom was responsible for fondling one nipple which sent the mistress into a continual writhing belly dance of pleasure as it sent her audience into convulsive ongoing orgasms. And whenever they felt like it, any of the guests could lick, suck, poke or fuck anywhere on the mistress they were moved to, so that there was also an ongoing pageant of two to three men at her body at any given moment. When any of them wished to suck her nipples, the eunuchs held her breasts and made certain the nipple was tight, prominent, and succulently rigid.

  When any of them wished to suck between her legs, the eu­nuchs lifted her hips to provide the perfect opening for an avid poking hot
wet tongue.

  If any of them wanted to fuck her, they canted her body at the perfect angle for penetration.

  Sometimes there were three at a time working her body; some­times it was just her sensual fuck-me dance with the eunuchs stroking and squeezing her bulbous nipples. Sometimes there were two sucking her nipples and one kneeling at her cunt.

  At all times, the voyeurs stroked and pumped themselves to the rhythm of whatever was going on in the tableau, and coming one after the other or in unison.

  "We're keeping score—" Hackford whispered. "How many comes. Look at Armitage. Five by my count, and he's still poling himself. Stupid ass. Obvious stuff. Stupid nipples. You and I... we like it just a little bit more refined, just a little bit more ... of everything. I mean, how different is one naked cunt from the next?"

  Shit, this was going places Kyger did not want to pursue, and

  it was all because of Lujan, and the assumption that he was like Lujan—only better.

  Not that better. He wasn't immune to the atmosphere of lust and lechery. He was as susceptible as the next man, just as hard, just as high at the sight of a woman's well-worked and pleasure-wracked naked body.

  He was a little appalled at the intensity with which he was re­acting to all of this sucking and fucking; and a little leery that the jaded Hackford was going to carry him off to participate in the more refined pleasures of the evening.

  The servicing courtesans came around to him, and he allowed them to stroke and pump him to a satisfactory climax, and he was stunned he had that much spunk in him still.

  An hour or so later, the mistress changed positions—the eu­nuchs brought out a platform with a thin silk-draped mattress into which was cut a curved opening. The mistress was untied and carried to the platform, placed belly down, with her chest po­sitioned in the opening so that her breasts swung free. Her arms were raised above her head and tied to the platform, and her hips were canted upward so that her cunt was readily available for ob­verse penetration.

  In this permutation, her nipples could not be stimulated by the eunuchs, but there was space enough beneath the platform that any of the voyeurs could slip beneath and suck at her teats to his heart's content.

  But the main attraction was the prolonged fucking of the mis­tress from behind by one after another of the onlookers.

  Even that palled after a while. Kyger resisted taking a turn, but he had no clear reason not to. If he were of Lujan's ilk, if he were to be classed as a friend, and among these men for this pur­pose, he could not refuse.

  It was a tricky fine line to walk when he didn't know which way he would fall. Or what he could learn by traveling this road to sinful surcease with them. They were habitues of the manor; they probably came for a nightly dose of debauchery which even he could see was wearing thin.

  What could that precipitate but a still more egregious abuse of the whores in order to whip up the kind of multiorgasmic excite-

  ment they were coming to crave. They probably poked, pried, pinched, and pronged every hole that crossed their paths.

  And this had been Lujan's world.

  "Your turn," Hackford prodded him gleefully, his penis still slick with the mistress's juices.

  Kyger unfolded himself from his seat and made his way down to the dais and the mistress.

  This had been Tony Venable's world. The thought floated up from nowhere; he hadn't considered Venable or his mandate for one moment tonight, and yet here he was at the Bullhead, among those who might have been his cohorts, his supporters, his friends.

  And he was experiencing the same level of luxury and lascivi-ousness as Venable allegedly had done in those last halcyon days before he'd been murdered.

  He had inadvertently stumbled into where he needed to be.

  The disc over the door...

  Signs and symbols, and he wasn't noticing because he was too taken up with resisting what he must embrace.

  Sex and sin.

  He positioned himself precisely behind the mistress. He knew Hackford was watching. They all were watching. Were they the watchers ... ?

  Nothing was exempt from consideration.

  He looked up at the coat tree as he girded himself to take the mistress. And he saw what he missed before—a pattern, an open­work design of circles and triangles... which when looked at closely—resembled...

  Sevens...

  He hadn't been paying attention. Signs and symbols all around him and he hadn't even noticed. They'd surrounded him with smoke and sex to distract him, and now they were all watch­ing, waiting for him to make full bore use of the current distrac- • tion.

  Or was he imagining it? No time to figure it out now. Hellfire.

  And none of those realizations had wilted his ramrod penis. Shit. What the hell was wrong with him? Now he had to perform. He nudged the mistress's bottom, and plunged himself home.

  Kyger crawled back to the room and fell into the freefall slum­ber of the depleted and spent. His endurance was wholly tapped out, his body utterly drained of juice, of vigor, of life.

  He couldn't take any more. Hackford and his group were still going at it, inexhaustible, unceasing, unendingly galvanized by each new erotic transposition of the mistress's malleable and bot­tomless capacity to entice them and fuck them.

  And it was not enough for Hackford; he had as much as said so.

  He slept. The silence was flat and enfolding, verging into the black hole of another ceaselessly carnal night at the Bullhead.

  Lujan's life. How had he tapered down all that craving for sex to concentrate solely on Jancie? When did the lust for mindless sadistic fucking peter into something more acceptably manage­able and still remain satisfactory for someone like his brother, or someone like Hackford?

  The questions came tumbling up into his dreams, into his con­sciousness, so insistently they woke him.

  Or maybe it was the sound of a low-pitched gong somewhere in the distance.

  What?

  The gong sounded again, barely audible, but the musical note resonated in some unconscious way deep in his gut.

  He bolted upright and grabbed for his trousers. He knew that sound. It was a call to order. A summons of the unholy partici­pants, the hooded figures marching by sevens into the mysterious basement room, the bier, the gong .. .

  He leapt for the door and eased it open. The gong sounded again, reverberating against the smooth mahogany walls. And far down the hallway, at that intersection, he caught a fleeting move­ment, as if someone or something had just rounded the corner.

  He moved, following quick as a cat, down the hallway in three seconds, and then flattening himself against the corner of the wall, listening.

  The gong sounded again.

  He peered around the corner.

  Seven hooded figures were lined up at the end of the corridor, facing the wall. They couldn't go forward; they could only turn

  around and come back toward where he was. They stood mo­tionless, waiting.

  And on the wall, above their heads, there was the same shiny-black disc as the one over the door to the mistress's haven, the same as the one over the door with the symbols in the mysterious basement room.

  Signs and symbols. Hellfire.

  He wasn't up for this right now. He was so tired, so enervated. He wanted to fall on the floor and sleep. He wanted ... to wait, to see.

  He waited. The figures waited. They were waiting for some­thing; he was waiting for something. What?

  The gong sounded again, a deep resonating tone in the silence. The wall moved.

  The wall moved.. . sliding back into itself. The figures moved forward in step, Kyger followed, as close behind as he could as they marched into a black void.

  The wail slid shut behind him. The figures had disappeared up a dark stairway. He crept up the steps after them. He heard chanting in time with their footsteps, but he couldn't make out the words. Not yet.

  But the closer he got, the clearer he heard them:... tion. Preservation. .,.
ation. Retribution ,..

  And again—as if they were reciting a list of rules—or precepts, except that these rules were not what he would have expected to hear, not the precepts of Tony Venable,

  These were something else again; he heard the chant clearly this time': Devotion, Persuasion, Progression, Preservation, Dis­semination, Propagation, Retribution.

  And they were moving upward, instead of down toward that basement room with the bronze doors.

  Up to attics? To places and spaces no one knew about, that were so exclusive a man could hide every vice, aberration and perversion?

  The chant went on: Devotion, Persuasion, Progression, Pres­ervation, Propagation. ..

  The climb was steep. Who knew that when you steeped your­self in sin and salaciousness, you came that much closer to heaven?

  Or hell.

  He was well below the robed seven as they came up onto the landing. Here, he could just see, it was exactly the same as below. The seamless incised mahogany walls, the lush carpet, the dim at­mospheric light, the onyx disc ...

  And someone was there, waiting for them. "Brethren."

  His voice was deep, compelling, almost inviting in its clarity, its sanity. This was a leader, a commander. The most dangerous one of all.

  The robed figures answered him: "We are the brethren sworn of the Sacred Seven. We preach, we promise, we practice the seven disciplines of Khudama: devotion, persuasion, progression, preservation, dissemination, propagation, retribution. We believe in the supremacy of seven, the power of seven, the wisdom of seven. We follow the disciplines, we revere your word, and swear to take the secrets of the Sacred Seven with us to the grave." The commander spread his arms wide. "My brethren. The circle of your vows is unbroken." The seven answered: "Till death, Revered Ancestor." The gong sounded. There was a sliding sound, and suddenly there was an opening behind the one they called Ancestor who bowed, nodded, and disappeared inside.