by Anne Rice
“She’ll be good looking—she doesn’t have to be beautiful you understand—and she’ll know how to do what she does . . .”
“Of course.” He nodded patiently. “But tell me . . .” He drew on his pipe, letting the smoke out slowly. “Do you think you’d like to meet the lady in a Victorian bedroom, you know, an old-fashioned setting? I mean in a very ladylike room—lace curtains, a four-poster, that sort of thing?”
“Oooooh, God. Is this really happening to me?”
Up and up the staircase, through one lovely layer of dream after another.
And now, half a year later, where was I headed? The Club.
“It’s just what I want,” I had said. I had driven over as soon as I finished reading the rules and regulations, waiting an hour to see him in the little waiting room, glancing again and again at my watch. “Why didn’t you tell me about this place before?”
“You have to be ready for The Club, Elliott.”
“Well, I’m ready for it now. The full two-year contract, that is exactly what I want.” I was steaming as I paced the floor. “How long will it take to get me in there, Martin? I could be ready day after tomorrow. I could be ready this afternoon.”
“The two-year contract?” he had asked, weighing each word equally as he spoke. “I want you to sit down, have a drink. I think we should talk a little more about what happened in El Salvador, Elliott. What happened there with the death squad and all of that.”
“You don’t understand, Martin. I’m not running from anything that happened there. I learned something there about violence, that it didn’t have to be literal for it to work.”
He was listening very intently.
“When a man seeks out violence,” I said, “be it war, sports, adventure, he wants it to be symbolic and most of the time he believes it really is. And then comes that moment when somebody literally puts a gun to your head. And you literally almost die. Then you realize that you’ve been confusing the literal and the symbolic all along. Well, El Salvador is the place where I learned that, Martin. I’m not running from it. It’s merely the reason I’m here. I want violence just as I always have. A sense of danger, Martin. I love it. I think I even want to be annihilated by it all. But I don’t really want to be hurt and I certainly don’t want to die.”
“I understand,” he had said. “And I think you put it very well. But for some of us, Elliott, sado-masochism may only be a phase. It may be part of a search for something else . . .”
“So it’s a two-year phase for me, Martin. So The Club is the perfect landscape for my search.”
“I’m not so sure, Elliott.”
“It’s too much like the boyhood fantasy I had, don’t you see? Being sold to the Greek master for a period of years. It’s too perfect . . .”
“Time doesn’t mean much in a fantasy . . .” he objected.
“Martin, the die was cast when you told me about the place. Now if you won’t sign the papers, I’ll find some other way . . .”
“Don’t get angry.” He had cooled me off at once with that easy smile. “I’ll sign the papers. And for the full two years if that’s what you want. But let me remind you that there were a lot of elements in that boyhood fantasy you told me.”
“This is too beautiful!” I said.
“You may be searching for a person rather than a system,” he went on. “And when you go to The Club, Elliott, the system—in all its remarkable splendor—is exactly what you get!”
“I want the system,” I’d said. “I can’t turn away from this! If it’s half as good as what you’ve described, I wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.”
So the contract for two years at The Club with its male and female slaves, its male and female guests, its male and female handlers, trainers, staff. All right.
Okay. That’s exactly what I want. I don’t think I can stand it. How could anyone stand it? It is just exactly what I want.
No good to think of all that while trying to refrain.
After six days at sea I was like a male dog tormented by a bitch in heat when I finally heard a key in the door.
It was afternoon and I was just coming out of the bathroom, showered and shaved after a really late sleep. Maybe they knew that. Saved them work.
It was the young blond-haired kid with the deep-bitten suntan and the white sleeves rolled halfway up his arms.
He came in smiling again.
“All right, Elliott,” he said. “We’re eighteen hours away from port. You’re not to speak at all unless you’re spoken to. And just do as you’re told.”
There were two other men with him, but I didn’t really see them. Instantly, they had swung me around, pinning my hands behind my back. I got a glimpse of a white leather blindfold before it was slipped into place. Secret panic. If only they wouldn’t use the damned blindfold. I felt my pants being unsnapped, and the shoes being pulled off my feet.
It was all beginning, really happening. My cock was immediately hard. But it was hell, absolute hell, not being able to see.
I waited for the gag to come but it didn’t, and as soon as I was stripped, my wrists were being shackled with leather cuffs and lifted over my head. Not too awful. Nothing as awful as being tied up tight.
I was led into the corridor, and in spite of all the training I’d had, I was sort of stunned.
But it was like an aphrodisiac had been pumped into me. When they hung my wrists up on a hook above me I was sorry I’d played by the rules all those nights in the cabin when I was alone.
I didn’t know where I’d been taken, except that for some reason it sounded like a large room. I could feel the presence of others there. I could hear them making small sounds. I could hear a sort of whimpering as though one of the slaves nearby was about to cry. I realized it was a woman slave.
So we really were mixed together, males and females, just like they’d said we’d be. I couldn’t picture it. And the sound of the woman confused me. Maybe I felt more powerless because I couldn’t protect her. Or it tantalized me to know I was suffering silently in the same manner that she was suffering. I just couldn’t tell.
I hated the blindfold. Couldn’t stop hating it. I rubbed my face against my arm trying to get it off but that was useless. And I had to make myself quit.
And it crossed my mind as it would a hundred times that maybe Martin was right and I’d made an awful mistake. Training in Martin’s house in San Francisco, what was that? And the brief stays at the country place, scary as they were, what had they been compared to this? But with the strongest, sweetest sensation of relief, I thought: “It’s too late now, Elliott. Can’t say, ‘Let’s call it quits now, gang, and all go out for a steak dinner and a couple of beers.’” I mean it’s over because it’s begun. That’s the beauty of it. It’s for real, as Martin had said.
There was this glorious sense suddenly of really being in it for the first time over my head. I’d done this inalterable violence to my own life, and this was exhilaration, this feeling. I wouldn’t have gone back then for anything in the world.
The sounds I heard undoubtedly meant that more and more slaves were being brought in. I heard the pat of their bare feet and the click of the heels of the handlers. I heard a groan here and there, the creak of a chain or the chink of the metal of the buckle sliding over the hook. The leather cuffs were tight around my wrists.
There were mostly small sighs, moans. Both male and female noises. And it seemed some of these cries came from behind gags.
I was sure that some distance away someone, a man, was struggling, and a scolding voice confirmed this immediately, calling him by name and telling him to “behave.” It was almost cajoling. The “you know better than that” tone of voice. The sharp crack of a strap sounded and I heard a loud moan. Then came a real thrashing, sounds so keen they were like fingers stroking my skin.
I was trembling. It would be awful to be punished like that for bad behavior. It wasn’t like being humiliated for someone’s pleasure, being an
exotic champion of pain. No, it was being a failure down here in the hold of the ship, a bad slave.
The thrashing seemed to go on forever. Then I heard random cracks of the belt drawing nearer, grunts, groans. I could feel movement around me. And the belt caught me on the thighs and then on the butt, but I stood very still and didn’t make a sound.
Hours passed.
My arms and legs ached. I’d doze for a while and then awaken, feeling naked all over, the passion in me like a knot.
Once I woke up and found myself writhing as if trying to touch another body, the desire was so keen, and I felt a whack from a thick belt.
“Stand straight, Elliott,” said a voice, and with a flush of embarrassment I realized it was the young blond one with the pretty teeth.
Then I felt his large, cool hand open against the flesh he had just struck. He squeezed it hard. “Only six hours to go, and they want you in prime form.” And I felt his thumb on my lips telling me to be quiet, as if I had dared to speak.
The sweat broke out all over me. I couldn’t tell whether he’d moved away or he was right beside me. It was awful to me that I hadn’t been perfect, and yet I was so aroused it was exquisite, that perfect stab in the loins of pleasure and pain.
When I awoke again, I knew it was deep night.
Some inner clock told me and also the dead quiet of the ship, though what the noises on board had been before I couldn’t have told.
It was just quieter now, that’s all.
Unwelcome flash of home, the last weekend with my father in Sonoma, the blaze of the log fire in the game room, him standing opposite me across the green felt of the pool table, getting ready to call his shot. Last rain of the season washing down the windows over the olive-green hills, and a wholly unexpected rebelliousness rising in me, something that too sadly resembled malice. You think you are so very sophisticated, you think you have always anticipated everything, understood every little twist and turn, analyzing and evaluating and predicting the eventual pattern of every “phase” before it even began, handing me the treatises on masturbation, and the Penthouse and the Playboy magazines when I was fourteen, and the pair of two-hundred-dollar call girls in Las Vegas on my sixteenth birthday—not one but two, goddamn it, two call girls—and then that brothel, that gorgeous brothel full of black-eyed smiling little boys in Tangier. All the sophisticated blather about the health of it, the unwholesomeness of Mother’s ideas, the necessity of the word being made flesh again, the poetry of the expanded vision, well, I have something to tell you now that will scorch your balls off, Dad, do you know what your son really wants!
“You cannot be serious. You are not going to such a place for two years!”
The last time I spoke to him on the phone, he said: “You’re not going to do this. I want you to tell me who these people are. I’m driving down to Berkeley tonight.”
“Dad, give up, will you? Write to me at the New York address I sent you. The letters will be opened but I will get them. And don’t try anything dramatic, Dad. Don’t hire any Philip Marlowes or Lew Archers to track me down, okay?”
“Elliott, do you realize I could have you committed for this? I could have you put in the state asylum in Napa. Why are you doing this, Elliott?”
“Come on, Dad. I’m doing it for pleasure, the word made flesh (just like the call girls and the Arab boys), for pleasure, pure and simple, this is going all the way to the moon.” And it is something else too that even I cant grasp, some harrowing of the soul, some exploration, some refusal to live on the outside of a dark and heated inner world that exists behind the civilized face I see in the mirror. It goes way, way back.
“I’m scared shitless over this. Do you hear what I’m saying? The Middle East thing I could put up with. I had you out of El Salvador in less than two hours after you called. But this thing, Elliott, this sex club, this place . . .”
“Dad, it’s a hell of a lot safer than El Salvador. There are no guns or bombs where I’m going. The violence is make-believe. I thought that a man of your sophistication would be the last one to . . .”
“You’re out too far.”
Too far?
Dad, we have already left the earth’s atmosphere. We are landing on the moon.
I knew it was morning because I heard people stirring all around me. And about an hour later, the ship really came to life. Doors were opened. There was the sound of feet, and my bound wrists were unhooked and the leather cuffs taken off them, and I was told to clasp my hands to the back of my neck.
Take off the damn blindfold! I thought. I was pushed and felt another naked body right in front of me. Hands steadied me when I lost my balance, and moved me a step back.
I was crazy. I could hardly resist the urge to tear off the blindfold myself. But the moment had come and I wasn’t going to freak out. My heart was going in rapid staccato. I realized my mind was going absolutely blank.
Suddenly hands were touching me again and I stiffened. A leather strap was being fitted round the base of my cock. My balls were lifted and pulled forward, the loose skin bound against my cock as the little strap was snapped tight.
And just when I thought I’d go bananas from this, the blindfold was finally pulled off.
For one second my eyes were squeezed shut against the light. Then I glimpsed a narrow corridor over the heads and shoulders in front of me, and a metal ladder that led up to the almost blinding sunlight on the deck.
There was a lot of noise on the deck. Shouts, talking, even laughter, and I saw a slave being forced up the ladder and a handler beside the ladder driving the slave with his belt. It was a woman slave with very fine, full red hair, the kind that looks like a cloud, hovering around her shoulders, and the sight of her nakedness absolutely paralyzed me, and she ran very fast up the ladder and disappeared into the sun. I’ve never been able to make up my mind who is more naked when stripped, a man or a woman. But seeing those full feminine hips and that tiny waist made me even more frantic than before.
But we were all rushing forward.
I felt myself pushed, then lashed. I saw the dreamy blond man for a moment before he ordered me to the ladder.
“Up on deck, Elliott,” he said with that same genial expression, and I felt the smack of his belt. “And keep your hands on the back of your neck.”
As I reached the top of the ladder, I heard the command “Eyes down” and “Forward” and yet I saw the blue water and the white beach.
I saw the island itself.
Lush low trees, roses trellised to the whitewashed stucco walls, and terraces stacked one on top of another, like the hanging gardens of Babylon, broken everywhere with bursts of fluorescent bougainvillea, deep tropical green. There were people at tables on the terraces, hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands. This is it. Really it. The lump in my throat hardened to a rock.
Martin’s many warnings came back, that nothing could really prepare you for a system that worked as well as this one. They could tell you all about it but the sight of it, the size of it, was always an incalculable shock.
The commands were coming sharp and fast. Slaves right in front of me were running across the deck and down a broad gangplank. Perfect bodies, muscles rippling with the exertion, hair flying, the jiggling, prancing movements of the women in sharp contrast to the swift, powerful strides of the men.
I couldn’t accept or rebel against what was happening. And for an odd moment I doubted not the reality of what was going on around me, but the reality of all that had ever happened to me before.
I had the positive sensation as I came down the gangplank with the others that all my comfortable life before had been an illusion, and that I had always been this. I can’t explain how unaccountably real this was. I had always been this.
And I had to keep up with the others, do exactly as I was told. The blond kid appeared again like some kind of demon (I almost said, “You again, you little bastard.”), his suntanned arm flexing as he hit me almost caressingly with his belt.
“Good-bye, Elliott,” he said in the most friendly voice. “Have a good time at The Club.”
I flashed him my most venomous smile, but I was disoriented. Clearing the gangplank, I stared up at the vine-covered walls and that endless stack of terraces, and the soft blue dome of the flawless sky.
Another strong young menace was whipping the slaves up a zigzag path. There was nothing to do but pass him, to take the licks as I ran with the rest.
The handler shouted impatiently for us to pick up speed. And I wondered why we obeyed, why it was so important to do what he said. I mean we’d all been brought here for the pleasure of the thousands up there on the terraces. And why wouldn’t it give them just as much pleasure to see somebody stumble and be singled out for the strap?
But if anybody stumbled, it wasn’t going to be me. That’s the genius of it, I thought. I want to please them. We’re not only acting like slaves, we’re thinking like slaves too.
LISA
Chapter 4
Love at First Sight
It was dizzyingly warm, and the grounds were so crowded I could hear the loud steady hum of conversation even in the empty corridor as I hurried to my room.
There wasn’t time now for that quiet drink, or a walk in the garden, or even to see the slaves driven off the yacht.
They would be in the receiving hall in an hour and I hadn’t even been through the files.
A complete description along with history and commentary is collected on every slave, along with detailed photographs, and I’ve learned to pay as much attention to the file as to the slave.
As soon as I opened the door, I saw Diana waiting for me, unadorned, hair brushed free, the way I like her best. Some trainers think that subtle little adornments make the slave more naked. I don’t agree.
In rooms like our rooms, with the thick wool carpets and antique velvet draperies, and all the little accoutrements of civilization, a naked slave burns like a flame.
Amid the dark flowing colors, and the video screens and the low sculpted furnishings, she is purely animalian and infinitely mysterious the way only the human animal can be.