by Anne Rice
“Come on, Elliott, down the ramp,” said the master of ceremonies, in a nice pampering lunatic tone, his hand over the mike. And from the front-row spectators on the grass there came a chorus of whistles and cajoling shouts. It seemed to me that I was going to back up, to get off the stage as fast as possible, but what I did was put one foot in front of the other and start walking down the ramp.
My brain had gone to the moon—this was beyond humiliation; it was execution, it was walking the damned plank. The sweat had broken out all over me again, yet I was as hard as I’d ever been.
But I started seeing everything again, the eyes working me over, and I started to hear the clapping and the little comments that were all tone and no words. The system—in all its remarkable splendor. I deliberately slowed my pace. I belonged to these people, and it was a feeling halfway to orgasm. I took a deep breath.
Turning around and coming back was just a shade easier, so why the hell did I force myself to look right at those watching me, look into their eyes? Smiles, nods, little whistles of approval. You bastards, you.
Don’t do anything smart, Elliott. Don’t do it. But I could feel the smile spreading on my face. I stopped, folded my arms, and deliberately winked at the lovely dark-skinned lady who was grinning under her white hat. A roar went up from the front rows. Loud clapping. Hell, don’t just smile and look out of the corner of your eye at all the others. Blow a little kiss to the little brunette in the white culottes. In fact, why don’t you smile at all the pretty girls, give them all a wink and a little kiss?
Laughter and cheering from all sides. I had a real rooting section spreading all the way back to the trees. I was getting kisses from everywhere, “right on” fists from the men. Why not make a little fashion model pivot, nothing camp, you understand, just taking my time, looking them over, what the hell?
Then I was staring straight down the ramp at a gang of the angriest-looking guys I’d ever laid eyes on, the crowd you don’t want to meet in a dark alley, all of them glowering at me while the master of ceremonies just sort of gaped.
“The show’s over, Elliott!” one of them said in a stage whisper between clenched teeth. “Come on, Elliott, now!”
I froze. But there was nothing to do but wave good-bye to my fans and walk right into it. I wasn’t going to let them drag me off.
I bowed my head and moved towards them like I hadn’t seen them, was just being a good boy again, and in two seconds they took hold of both my arms and threw me right down the steps and onto my hands and knees in the grass.
“Okay, Mr. Personality,” I heard one of them say in a voice vibrating with anger. Another pushed me forward with his knee.
All I could see in front of me was a pair of white boots as my head was pushed down so that my lips touched the leather whether I liked it or not.
Then I felt a hand on my hair, and my head was pulled up until I was looking into a pair of very dark brown eyes. Pretty terrific looking, like all the rest of them, and I sensed that it was going to be part of the sweetness and torture, that even the pastry cooks in this place could bring your blood to a simmer against your will.
But this one had a voice that could throttle your soul.
“Oh, you’re really clever, aren’t you, Elliott?” he asked with a kind of chilling outrage. “You’ve got a lot of tricks up your sleeve.”
And no sleeve, I thought but I didn’t say it. Things were bad enough. In fact, they were awful and 1 didn’t really understand how they could have gotten that way so fast. In fact, I couldn’t believe what I’d just pulled.
The other handlers closed in as if I were a dangerous animal, and the slave show was continuing against the tidal wave of noise from the crowd as before.
Impossible to analyze this sense of shame, this sense of disaster. I’d blundered already, goddamn it, I’d panicked up there, and I’d failed.
I tried to look submissive, knowing the worst thing was to try to speak in my defense.
“That was a first for us, Elliott,” the brown-eyed guy said, “that little number you just did. You really made your mark.”
Fine face, and disturbingly resonant voice. His chest was almost bursting out of his shirt.
“What do you think the Master of Postulants is going to do with you, Elliott,” he asked, “after he hears about that little stunt?”
He held something before my eyes and I saw it was a broad grease pen.
I think I said shit or hell under my breath.
“Don’t make a sound,” he threatened. “Unless you want to be gagged, too.”
I felt the pressure of the grease pen against my back and heard him spell out what he was obviously writing, the words “Proud Slave.”
I was pulled up onto my feet. And somehow standing up was worse. I felt the wallop of one of the handler’s straps. And then a nice little hail of blows that made me wince.
“Keep your eyes down, Elliott,” said the handler. “And your hands behind your neck.” He touched the grease pen to my chest, and I tried not to grit my teeth as he wrote the same words, spelling them very deliberately again. I couldn’t figure why a little thing like that was so mortifying, and the sense of regret in me was turning into panic again.
“Why not the whipping post?” one of the others asked. “That would soften him up for the receiving hall awfully well.”
Really, guys, I’m just the new kid on the block.
“No, we’ll keep him fresh for the Master of Postulants,” said the first one, “and for whatever the Master of Postulants decides.”
He lifted my chin with the tip of the pen.
“Don’t try anything else, blue eyes,” he said. “You don’t know what trouble you’re in.”
I glanced back at the “good little boys and girls” as I was shoved to the side and told to stand still.
The red-haired male slave was just making the promenade, with all the appropriate humility, bringing a chorus of whistles from the crowd. And the little blond was staring at me like I was some kind of hero or something. The hell.
What was wrong with me that I started that clowning? I’d been doing okay until I had to look at them, had to smile.
And now I was at odds with the very system that I wanted to be embraced by; fighting it instead of yielding to it, just the way I fought everything outside.
You’re ready for it, Elliott. You can handle what happens there. But is it what you really want?
Yes, goddamn it, Martin. And somehow this little fuck-up had made the discipline and the humiliation seem even more real than before.
LISA
Chapter 6
Business as Usual
Richard was at the window of his office when I came in, sunglasses shoved up into his thick reddish-blond hair, obviously watching the new slaves through the garden below.
He roused himself, and smiled immediately, sauntering towards me in his usual slow graceful manner, his thumbs hooking in his back pockets. He had deep-set eyes, eyebrows a little bushy, and those deep lines in his tanned face that Texans get very early from the hot dry heat there and never seem to lose. I never laid eyes on him that I didn’t think of his nickname at The Club, which was the Wolf.
“Lisa, my darling,” he said. “We missed you. Don’t ask how much, it’ll only make you worry. Give me a kiss.”
At twenty-four, he was the youngest chief administrator and Master of Postulants we’d ever had, and he was one of the tallest trainers in The Club.
I like to believe that the height doesn’t matter, that it’s all in the manner, but when you have the manner of Richard, the height adds a hell of a lot.
He handled the slaves effortlessly, whipped them around, shook them up, and all his gestures were so slow and languid that the power continuously astonished them. And he had a particularly disarming expression in spite of the deep-set, often squinting eyes, an expression of openness, curiosity, an immediate affection for every slave he saw.
He was perfect as Master of Postulants because
he could explain things so well. As an administrator, he was the best. He was forever exhilarated by what he had to do, endlessly absorbed in the essence of The Club. He riveted himself almost painfully to the slaves under his immediate command. He “believed” in The Club, an obvious fact that struck me now with a startling freshness, disconcerting me slightly as I slipped my arm around him, pressed my lips to his cheek.
“I missed you too, all of you,” I said. My voice sounded funny to me. I wasn’t all right yet.
“Little problems, beautiful,” he said.
“Now, when they’re just about ready?” I meant the postulants. “Can’t it wait?”
“I think you can manage it quickly, but it requires your touch.” He slipped behind his desk and pushed a file forward. “New member. Jerry McAllister. Full service for the year. Sponsored by half a dozen other members and they’re all here, talking to him, telling him what to do, but he doesn’t know how to begin.”
Full services meant the man had paid the top membership fee of $250,000 yearly to come and go any time that he wished. He could have lived here year round if he wanted to. But they never do.
The Club works sort of like a bank in that way, depending on the fact that everybody won’t cash in on the same night.
I sat down behind the desk and flipped open the file. Forty-year-old home computer millionaire from California’s Silicon Valley, huge estate in San Mateo County, private Lear jet.
“He’s had several drinks with his friends on the terrace,” Richard explained, “and now he’s in his room waiting for a little help. Wants a young female slave, dark hair, dark skin. I sent Cynthia in, but he sent her back. Says he needs a little guidance, a ‘hands on demonstration’ as they call it in computer world. Thought maybe you could stop in, talk to him, promise to come back this afternoon.”
“Not if I can help it,” I said. I picked up the phone. “Get me Monika right away.” Monika was the only trainer whom I trusted with this sort of thing, and if she wasn’t in, I’d have to go. She was in.
“Hi, Lisa, just on my way down.”
“Detour, will you, Monika?” I gave her the details on Mr. Jerry McAllister—heterosexual, light smoker, light drinker, probably cocaine user, workaholic, et al. “Ask for Deborah to work with. Tell him you’ll be back right after the indoctrination. Deborah can probably take it from there. She could turn Peter Pan into the Marquis de Sade with not a word said.”
“Sure, Lisa, leave him to me.”
“Thanks, Monika. Fifteen minutes. Don’t miss the indoctrination. Promise him we’ll both come in the afternoon.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Richard.
“Okay?”
“Sure. I just thought you’d want to handle it yourself. We could have held things up for a few minutes . . .”
Same look on his face I’d gotten from Diana and Daniel.
“I’m a little tired from vacation,” I said before he asked the inevitable question. “The plane was late.”
I glanced at the other papers in front of me. The human pony trainer was here from Switzerland, the man who wanted to sell us the slaves all done up in harnesses and bits and reins to pull rickshaws, carts. Hmmmm. Lovely. So why did it give me a headache at once?
“Never mind all that,” Richard said. “We’ll see the lovely little stable tomorrow.” He had settled in the chair on the other side of the desk.
“And what’s this”—I picked up the scribbled phone message— “about some kid claiming he was coerced?”
“A lot of nonsense. Handsome young faun, strictly the Persian Boy type, told the boys on the yacht last night he’s a captive, that he was kidnapped in Istanbul no less. He’s lying. He came from New Orleans and he’s got cold feet.”
“You’re positive.”
“We brought him right on in early this morning. Lawrence is working with him now. Ten to one he has already confessed he’s just frightened. If he was captured it was in Darius’s palace right before the invasion of Alexander.”
I reached for the phone.
None of us like to disturb a master with a slave in his private studio, but this had to be settled right away.
The bell that rings is very soft, and it is always interesting how different slaves react to it. For some slaves and masters, the phone breaks the spell completely. With others, it heightens the sense of subservience. The master stops to answer the phone while the suffering slave waits for further examination, ordeal.
Lawrence’s voice was the usual discreet whisper.
“Yes?”
“How’s it going?” I said.
Slow, rich laugh.
“He’s confessed to everything. It was all a lie. He was just panicked. But you should hear the story he made up. I’ll give you the tapes.” He turned his mouth away to give a command to the slave in the room with him. “The best part was about his being drugged,” he said, “stripped naked, and shipped north on the Orient Express. The Orient Express! Now the big question is, do I send him below stairs for three days to thoroughly chastise him, or take him in hand?”
“Take him in hand. If he’s that scared I think it’s important you do that. Punish him for the lying, but you know, not hard labor. He’d be lost.”
“My thinking exactly, but punished he will be.”
“And do give me the tape. I want to hear that story.” I put the receiver down.
A gorgeous scenario flared in my head, something as elaborate as an amusement park ride. That we should have a train on the grounds with a big old-fashioned steam engine and ornate old passenger cars—ship slaves to various parts of the grounds on it, have them auctioned to the members from the platform, have slaves available for little sessions in the sleepers on the train itself.
Not the Orient Express but the Eden Express. I liked that. Could see the gold scrollwork: the Eden Express. Yes, everything very Edwardian on the Eden Express. And maybe when we got bigger, covered the whole island, we’d really need the conveyance. We could lay miles of track . . .
And suddenly I saw the track going on forever, as if land and sea were no longer substantial, and the Eden Express just went steaming ahead, its cyclops eye boring steadily through the nighttime darkness, as it left this little Eden for parts unknown . . .
“My, but you’re getting soft,” Richard said suddenly.
It seemed sudden anyway to me. I had just seen myself in a white dress getting aboard the Eden Express.
“Last year you would have had that boy on hard labor for two weeks.”
“Is that so?” I wore a white hat and I had a white handbag, dressed sort of like that girl the old man remembers in Citizen Kane, the girl he glimpsed years before on the ferry and never forgot. “A white dress she had on . . .” Is that what he says? Sweet madness to think someone could remember me like that. Somewhere in my luggage there was a new white dress, and a white straw hat with long white ribbons. . .
Now how will that go with your black leather watchband, your boots?
“I think you made the right decision, of course,” Richard was saying.
I looked at him, tried to listen.
“Either way it will work,” he went on. “That’s the sublime thing. As long as there is firmness and direction, everything will work.”
“The kid is scared,” I said. He was talking about the kid, wasn’t he?
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Fifteen minutes until they’re in the hall. And don’t tell me whom you have your eye on. Let me tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said, forcing a little smile.
Richard was always right. He could go through the files and match the slaves to the prospective trainers, knowing without fail who would pick whom. Of course the others had to compete for the slaves, haggle with one another. I was first.
“A certain blond-haired gentleman named Elliott Slater,” he teased.
“How do you do it?” My face got warm. I must have been blushing. Ridiculous, when we’d be
en through these games a thousand times before.
“Elliott Slater’s the tough one,” he said. “The one that’s really walking into it. And he’s beautiful, besides.”
“They’re all beautiful,” I said, not wanting to admit anything. “What about the L.A. girl, Kitty Kantwell?”
“Scott’s in love with her already. I’m betting you choose Elliott Slater.”
Scott was the Trainer of Trainers. He and Richard and I made up what the others called “the Holy Trinity” that really ran The Club.
“You mean you want me to for Scott’s sake,” I said. Scott was an artist of a trainer. And whomever he picked would be on show in the trainers’ classroom as a working model half the time. Dazzling experience for a slave.
“Nonsense,” Richard laughed. “Scott’s just as much in love with Slater. But he’s sort of given up, knowing you. And Slater comes from your mentor, Martin Halifax in San Francisco. Halifax sends us geniuses, philosophers, real madmen. How did Martin put it? ‘Reads Russian novels word for word’?”
“Come on, Richard!” I said, trying to sound casual. “Martin’s the romantic. What we get is the flesh and blood.”
The conversation was making me uneasy. That desperate feeling again, like something terribly important was going to be missed. Headache for real. Never should have drunk that gin.
“Lisa loves Elliott!” he sang softly under his breath.
“Knock it off,” I said crossly, surprising both of us. “I mean, you know, let’s see how it goes. You guys are getting too clever for me.”
“Come on, let’s take our time getting down there,” he said. “Get away from these phones before they ring.”
“Good idea.”
The slaves might be assembling already.
“I’m betting you choose Slater. If you don’t I’m out a hundred bucks.”