by Eden Night
Carrion
A tale of Passion
by
EDEN NIGHT
www.edennight.weebly.com
A Note for the Reader
The events and characters in this book are entirely fictional.
The activities that take place between Charlotte and Alexander are
an aesthetic, fictionalised account of role play situations and
are not suggested as real event situations.
This work is suitable for readers 18+ and deals in mature themes of
sex, erotica and some aspects of S&M, which some readers may find offensive.
Chapter One: London 2014
Tonight he has dressed me as Marie Antoinette; carefully applying the fantasy layer by layer. I am a collage of sensations; a montage of myself. He looks out of the window and sighs. It is raining. It has been a winter of rain. Below us, the concrete maze is waiting. I think about the half-demented lab rats forced to run around and wonder if they search for anything beyond the simple sating of their hunger. My lover is King of the Rats.
He is dressed in a red military coat, which he brought at Camden market and a pair of black skinny jeans. He has smoothed back his black curls into a slick wave. He dresses with precision. Precision is his thing, in all things.
"I wanted to take the bus," he says, "but the rain will ruin our dress."
"Oh," I say, looking into the mirror to check out his creation.
He closes the wooden shutters against the night. "I guess we'll have to get a cab."
"Okay." I free a lose hair, trapped by the glue of the false lashes.
He rummages around the flat looking for his wallet, and retrieving the tickets from the mantelpiece. The last thing he picks up is his black satin mask.
We have drunk the best part of a bottle of champagne whilst dressing and already the world is beginning to slide. He stops behind me and checks our reflected portrait. He smiles.
My God sees that it is good.
His hand curls around my waist and he pulls me into him. He watches us in the mirror and his eyes sparkle with a suspended promise. He kisses my neck and whispers, "You look magnificent!"
I turn my head and smile. I look back into the mirror and see that he is holding a small capsule of white powder between his thumb and finger. A wicked smile ripples across his lips.
"One for the road?" he asks.
I used to be a good girl? Such a good girl.
He sees me hesitate. The slight wrinkle of my forehead, the twitch of my lips. Aside from the odd smoke or two at uni, I've never touched drugs. "What is it?" I ask, coyly.
His voice is low, like the hiss of the serpent tempting Eve. "It’s Molly."
I'm non the wiser. I shrug and smile apologetically.
He nuzzles my neck, plays with my pearl earring with the tip of his tongue, sending shivers of desire down my nerve endings. "Trust me."
I nod.
He reaches over and takes the champagne bowl from my hand. He slides his finger in and runs the last droplets of champagne around the rim of the glass, before moving me to the side. He has serious work to do. Carefully he opens the pill case and pours the powder into the palm of his hand, using his finger he coats the rim of the glass before pouring in remaining champagne and emptying the plastic capsule. He hands me the bowl and smiles. In the low candlelight, the crystal dazzles, sending out shards of dancing light. I stare at the glass.
What if I die? Some people do. I’ve read about it in the papers. It’s wholly irresponsible, but then I am discovering the paradox of truly living involves courting death.
He raises the glass to my lips. "Drink!"
It's a command, and with it I am freed from the responsibility of my own welfare. I part my lips; feel the hard glass and the dry powder that fizzes as the champagne washes over it. He watches me intensely, turning the glass every so often until the whole rim has been consumed and the glass is empty.
Satisfied, he mixes his own cocktail and drinks it down in one long kiss, running his tongue around the rim as a final act of surrender. I head towards the door; thankful I've made the effort to track down an old velvet opera cloak on e-Bay. I'm not sure I’m ready for the world to see me as I am. I know it is ridiculous to worry about such things here in the city; as soon as dark hits night in London, no one seems to think anything is out of the ordinary. We are well into the dark.
"What time does it start?" I ask as we shuffle through the door.
"Doors open at eleven for the banquet."
"There'll be food?" I ask, surprised.
"Of course."
"Oh."
This isn't the first time Alexander has been to one of the Lost Souls Society Balls. He's been a member of the society since his university days. The Lost Souls is just one of the not-so-secret, secret societies that play out after dark in the playground of the Metropolis.
Last week, he took me to one of their lectures on cannibalism. It was at a reading room in Soho; the sort of place you have to ring a brass bell and present a ticket. It was called, ‘How to Win Friends and Fricassee Them’.
Next month we are attending a master-class in taxidermy. Dates with Alexander are a far cry from my previous romantic outings, which have mainly happened in places such as Starbucks, London Zoo, Kew Gardens, or other quaint tourist attractions chosen with minor attempts at cute Londoner irony.
Alexander’s flat is on the third floor of a typical four-story Georgian number. My progress down the three flights of stairs in my ridiculously high-heeled shoes, and over large skirt panniers, is the first challenge of eighteenth century dress in twenty-first century housing conditions. Thankfully, the design of a London cab is perfect for such dress and I understand why there is a trend for London brides to use them. Alexander gives the details to the cabbie and sits back down, placing a hand on my knee.
"Excited?" he asks.
I nod. I wonder how long it will take for the effects of the Molly to start. In a way I have been disappointed by the apparent lack of any kind of hit. Disappointed, and yet grateful that I’m not dead! I am turning with contradictions – I have been for the month that I have been with Alexander. I haven't been back to my own flat since our first date, which took place in Highgate Cemetery.
We had walked amongst the weeping angels and played the stone piano. His fingers had brushed mine and they’d lingered, but he hadn’t held my hand. I thought about how lonely death must be: how horribly long the hours. Everywhere we’d looked, we saw decay, and I tried to work out how death, so ugly close up, could be so beautiful from a distance. Time turns us all into monuments.
I turn and look out of the cab window and watch the comet tails of orange streetlights pass by. I passingly wonder if Alexander has kidnapped me and is holding me hostage but I just haven't accepted it. Maybe I am suffering some form of Stockholm Syndrome. Inside, I laugh at the idea. I may not have been home, but I have continued the weekly routine of work. We leave his flat together dressed in our neat office wear, our laptop bags and season travel ticket wallets in hand. We share the same tube to the same stop. We work in facing office blocks. It is because of this that we met. He was sat on the tube opposite me reading a copy of Huysman’s 'A Rebours' and I was not. He looked up at me with a look of complete surprise, as if it was as ludicrous for me to be sitting on a tube not reading French Aesthetic literature as being out in the snow in nothing more than a top hat.
Through the ornate screen of suited legs, he began a conversation that ended in him scribbling down his mobile number into the front of the book and handing it to me. The tube pulled into our stop and a swirling current of people parted us.
The book had sat in my laptop bag for three days before I event
ually faced it. Sitting in the coffee shop during my lunch break, I had flicked through the well-worn pages, and landed on a page that had once had the corner turned down. The spine was broken, making it floppy. I scanned over Huysman’s dense description, and quickly gathered that the story was about a self-absorbed, and very bored, man with a very warped ego, who delights himself by adorning his tortoise with precious stones. The animal dies, “unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it.” I’d snapped the book shut, with no intention of reading more of it. I do not like the protagonist.
My nerves are sprung. My feet dance against the floor of the cab. My heartbeat is rapid, leaving me slightly breathless. A rolling wave of pleasure tumbles over me. I slide into the sensations of taut suspenders,
lace, velvets,
water-satins, feathers,
diamonds, silk, stiff-bones...
I whimper - bliss on my lips. Alexander glances at me and smiles. I tip my head back against the seat, look out across the bridge and up at the illuminated shaft of The Shard that penetrates the cloud-stained sky.
"What are you thinking about?" he asks.
"Penetration."
"Ah." He nods his head and turns his attention towards the river.
“You?” I ask from a world far away.
“Drowning – I am thinking what a horrible way it must be to end it.”
I steal a look at the indigo swirling currents and imagine the kiss of the cold river water.
“There are worse ways,” I say.
He nods. “Yes, there are worse ways.”
The raindrops run down the cab windows like citrine cabochons. I run my hand across my corseted stomach, letting my fingers trip over the bones. The shimmering glass buildings of the financial district lessen, replaced by heavy squatting brick and concrete. Streets narrow. Traffic thins. People disappear one by one as if plucked away by some unkindly god. Our cab transforms into a black stag beetle and scurries down small interconnecting streets, stopping outside a set of railway arches. A queue is held back behind a red cord.
"Come on, we're here." He takes my hand and helps me out of the cab. In the cool autumn air I feel diaphanous: ethereal. I feel like a heavenly host. He leads me past the queue and up to the bouncer, handing him the gold edged tickets that allow us V.I.P entry. At some point Alexander has tied on his black, silk ball-mask and now he is an awesome stranger.
"Hold up your mask,” he warns. “There's a photographer on the door."
The world is narrowed.
We travel down a tunnel of Chinese lanterns and red velvet, past the golden nudes holding red balloons. They bow as we pass. One of the double doors to our left opens, and the sounds of a Venetian Waltz blend with techno-house beats. The sound swarms and then passes.
Somebody knocks my shoulder as they stumble and I turn to face the painted mask of a drag queen – her hair piled high and pinned with plastic fruit, flowers and decapitated doll’s heads; their eyes roll backwards and forwards as she moves.
"Excuse me, darling.” Her hand flies to her chest and she laughs. “These shoes are a total mare!"
I glance down to see her feet strapped to some strange sculptural-mash of Parisian tropes. I smile and feel Alexander tug my hand, pulling me forward. I mouth at her, "They're wondrous!" and I am not lying.
We head into the ballroom, which is already a heaving mass of masked dancers. Some are naked except for a few carefully placed accessories, others, like us, wear full period costume. More naked and painted male hosts swerve through the crowds, handing out delicacies on silver trays. I smile and shake my head when one offers me a chocolate dipped strawberry.
Alexander turns and mouths, "Hungry?"
I'm not but I am curious to see the banquet. A pink neon arrow with the word, ‘NOSH’ flashes us to our destination. Female hosts dressed in Austrian shepherdess costumes, pull back the curtains and offer us welcome. The room is long and narrow, dominated by a table a hundred meters long. Here, the music is provided by a string quartet dressed as Ancient Greeks. The table groans with candelabras, peacock feathers, golden fruit, and women who recline nude amongst the cornucopia. The coloured disco-lights slide over their breasts like blooming flowers. Eyes, deeply coloured, peer out from inside their masks – they flash like glass. Beguiling smiles challenge you to reach out your hand and touch their doeskin. Ice fountains flow with water and Alexander hands me a glass that tastes like liquid metal. The cold stabs at the luxuriant warmth of my body and feels good.
Outside this place, the world is fixed.
Outside this place I am constructed, moulded.
Outside this place I am the words of politic.
Here... I am a living vessel of nerves and beauty.
I look around and I want to hold them all. Sweep them into my arms and love each one of them.
I look at Alexander and I know that he has sold me a rare and precious thing. We dance until the grey dawns. We wake in the gloomy mid-morning light, and we are not alone.
We are a tangle of limbs and flesh, of warm sleep and deep breath, still dressed in remnants. Lazy hands sweep over my breasts. The sound of a police siren screams by the window. The back plate of a delivery van clatters against the gum-stained pavement below. I untangle my arm from the glorious curved body spooned into me and let my eyes travel over the contours of her shoulders and hips. Dark auburn hair falls in ringlets. I don't need to see her face to know that she is beautiful. I hold my hand out curiously, daring myself to touch her. This is the first time I have ever been so close to a woman.
"Don't be shy!" Alexander mumbles into my ear. "It's nothing you haven’t done before."
Memories of the night swim lazily around. There is no narrative and so it is pointless searching for comprehension. I give my hand permission to touch her. I stroke her from shoulder to thigh. My touch disturbs her and she stirs. I go to snatch my hand away but, despite her half-sleeping state, her reflexes are quick and she grasps it, holding it against her warm skin.
The bed pitches reminding me of a ship far out at sea, and Alexander sits up, muttering something about putting coffee on and going to the bathroom. I turn my head, press my cheek into his pillow, take in his scent and watch him walk out of the room. The girl next to me shivers and pushes her body further into mine, searching for warmth in the cold autumn air. I pull up the layers of sheets and throws. I stroke her hair and she twists her head around until our lips have no choice but to kiss. And whilst we kiss, she pirouettes until her body is over mine. We are a play of light and temperature. She is textures that are as familiar as my own body; an extrinsic embodiment of my own feminine – and yet she is alien.
When Alexander returns, I hold out my arm, inviting him in. A touchstone.
The three of us make love until the coffee burns and the fire alarm goes off.
Our lover leaves mid-afternoon. She has a dinner date. The three of us have spent most of the day sitting at the plastic kitchen table smoking, and drinking coffee. We talked about Paris and Budapest, of the collapse of the country and the oppression of liberty. We talked about how nothing is real except for the unreal, how nothing is sane except for insanity. Alexander is impressed by my knowledge of the Surrealist Manifesto and promises me that we shall visit Paris in the spring.
Our lover recommends that we visit the, Musée de Erotism. I smile at the thought of sending my mother a, ‘Greetings from Paris!’ post-card with a giant dildo on the front.
I notice how the four chairs around the table do not match. Mine is a salvaged chapel chair, the kind with a bible pocket on the back. It is empty, so I guess that if I'm searching for redemption then I'm out of luck. The random pieces of ancestral furniture dotted around Alexander’s flat, belie its slowly decaying state. It is rented and so there's little he wants to do about it. Two of the kitchen wall-cabinets have lost their doors. I tell him that he should take off all the doors and have open shelves, as if it were an actual choice.
Alexander cooks us brioche, scooped
out to accommodate an egg before being put into the oven. He sprinkles them with truffle oil and chopped flat-leaf parsley and serves them on mis-matched crockery. Celia (for we’ve now learned her name) eats it mostly with her fingers, which both Alexander and I approve of, although we do not follow suit. She sits at the table in one of Alexander’s office shirts and her cream French knickers. The sight of her nipples through the fine oxford cotton entrances me. I wonder if she can see mine. The thought makes me feel slightly shy. I’m wearing the silk pyjamas we brought from the boutique around the corner yesterday. This has been Alexander’s solution to my captivity - we have brought as I have needed. His wardrobe now plays host to a small essential (designer labelled) set of clothes. His bathroom now stores my toothbrush, a bottle of my favourite perfume and a Dior compact travel set. There is something liberating about stripping down to the bare materials in life. I apply this new found thinking to my family as well as goods.
I really should really ring my mother.
I sent her text a couple of weeks ago informing her that I was going away for a few weeks. In a way it wasn't a lie.
When Celia leaves us, we split to different parts of the flat. Alexander starts taking down the doors of the kitchen cabinets and I sit, curled up on the end of the large leather Chesterfield, reading a gloomy novel by Camus. He has a very intense taste when it comes to literature. His bookshelf is full of dusty old volumes that he has picked up in charity shops; it’s like a miniature Battersea for dead, miserable and mostly forgotten authors. He doesn't have a television; he streams everything he wants to watch - although I don't get the impression that he wants to watch much. He says, “Fantasy is for living, not for watching.” He says that most television is stupefying: Soma for the masses.” I don’t entirely disagree, but sat in the quiet of the flat with nothing more than Camus or watching raindrops race down the window for entertainment, I crave a bit of Soma.
Every now and then there is a clatter from the kitchen (he's not really the D.I.Y type) I look at him, working in his grey sweats, his naked torso, tightly, precisely defined. He's wearing his hipster Prada glasses so that he can see the screws. His hair is still holding from the amount of oil in it last night. He is irreducible complexity; each component beautiful and singular that should it be removed he would cease to be anything other than ordinary, yet together... he is a rare and pretty specimen. There are some people who walk into a room and everybody instinctively bows to the new emperor – this is Alexander. I am his subject, and I am devoted.