Balustrade (5 page)

Hilary
felt a flush rise to her cheeks and Jack's cock twitch at her hip as he held her. She couldn't deny he'd turned her on to a degree she wouldn't have believed possible just a few short months ago, or even as recently as the drive through the bible beater gauntlet.

But
he had. He really had.

She sighed but acquiesced. She woul
d play along. “But I'm not comfortable doing the kinds of things we saw in those other rooms with someone watching. I just don't think I can do that. I'm not sure I want to, or would ever want to.”

He nodded empathetically.
“Yeah, that’s probably a stretch. I get that. Let's just see how this pans out. How the indoctrination ceremony goes, and we'll go from there. Just go as far as we're both comfortable with.”

Hilary
relaxed into Jack's embrace and tried to clear her mind of the meddling voice of reason telling her to bolt, to leave Jack standing here in this glass walled cell, hard-on and all and march right back to the car and...

And what? Exactly?

Drive it into the wilderness, seek refuge in the arms of the grim minister and her flock of sodomite shamers? No. That seemed an even more dangerous route. They'd agreed to this without coercion and she was aware of her hang-ups to a large extent. Was it possible that this could be a good experience? She wouldn't turn away a few more of those orgasms, that was for sure. And Jack had been blisteringly hot; she couldn't lie to herself about that. His youthful exuberance was refreshing. If he'd expressed that kind of enthusiasm at home, she might not have become so bored with their sex life.

So complacent. So...complicit.

After gorging on a delicious Thai curry with eggp
lant and steamed rice—delivered without being ordered, but in no means unwelcome—Hilary sipped her steaming chai and took an unnatural interest in Jack’s easy slumber. He lay sprawled on the bed, nude, his plate scraped clean beside him, his teacup on its side and empty. There was such peace in his expression that she wondered whether he might have taken something.

             
A Xanax.

             
She took another sip of the tea. So sweet and spicy with a hint of cardamom. The froth swirled like seafoam caught in a caramel jetty. On closer inspection, there was something floating in it. Something white, bony. Hilary squinted, turning the cup toward the table lamp, but under the glare it looked perfectly normal. The steam lifted off the surface in lacey filigree bringing with it the smells of foreign lands. She took solace in the moment, soothed for the first time since they arrived.

H
er eyelids began to flutter.

Hilary snapped awake in Chantal’s office. Papers lay strewn ever
ywhere, contracts scattered to the four corners like a massive game of fifty-two-card pick-up.

“
What the hell?” she straightened in the chair, reaching for one of the stray sheets and began to read.

I, Hilary Carson, agree without coercion to let the devil fuck the soul out of me like the hippie whore I am. Actual sex acts may include (but are not limited to): fellatio, cunnilingus, intercourse, and general buggery.

She scanned it again; certain she’d read it wrong, there was an awful lot of Latin and then let it drift to the floor. She snatched another and another, crumbling them after noting that each featured the exact same agreement.

A shoe scuffed on the floor behind her.

Hilary gasped. Spun. Expected to see Chantal slowly shaking her head, but was horrified instead to see the dark figure of the Mother. The zealot’s sun hat covered her face like the black of the moon, her mud-spattered dress grazed the floor as she shambled forward, producing a wrinkled gnarl of a finger from her ruffled sleeve.

Judgment and horror washed over Hilary and she fell from the chair, crawling backward as fast as she could, trying to put the desk between herself and the crazed fanatic.

“But I didn’t know!” she cried.

“
He’ll fuck it out of you. And you’ll let him,” the woman said.

Hilary clambered to her feet and shifted the writing desk around as the woman circled, using it as a shield.
“Oh no. I’m definitely not into devil sex. I swear!”

   But as the
Mother edged toward Hilary, the sunhat began to shift, exposing her jaw. A familiar shape appearing.

“
He’ll do it and you’ll be damned. Damned!”

Hilary opened her mouth to proclaim
her innocence and virtue—she would certainly not be letting the devil fuck her, regardless of any contract, that was insane, not to mention the fact that the devil didn’t exist—when the woman’s hat fell away completely, revealing her face.

“
No!” Hilary screamed.

She clamped her hands to her mouth,
stared at the unimaginable horror before her. Crags of skin, cheeks listing, eyes deep set and hollowed with horror. But it wasn’t the age of the woman that shocked her so, it was her identity. It was Hilary staring back at her, a withered aged version of Hilary, eyes struck wide with a warning, with an insane knowledge.

“
Oh but you will.” The Hilary-thing said and then glanced at her watch hanging limply from her bone-thin wrist. “And soon. Soon.”

***

Hilary woke with a start, her breathing shallow. A dream. A fucking dream. And a ridiculous one, at that. Also terrifying. She couldn’t deny that. But she certainly wasn’t going to take it seriously. She hadn’t believed in demons or the capital d devil since never. A dream wasn’t going to make her see the light on Christianity.

It took her a moment to settle her breathing, her racing heart.

She glanced at the bed to see Jack still sleeping, coiled in the sheet like an aerialist who’d fallen to his death. Beside her chair lay the teacup, a fresh beige stain drying on the carpet.

             
Jesus. How long had she been asleep?

             
Morning light streamed in from the courtyard and she stood achily and stumbled into the bathroom, searching for an ibuprofen or six. She scrambled inside her toiletry bag, fumbling for the correct bottle.

“
I’m sure I packed it,” she said aloud, finally dumping the bag onto the counter. Creams, solutions, pastes scattered but not even a stray Tylenol rolled around the marble surface. “Goddamn it.”

As she drew a brush through her hair, a shuffling sound drew her out of the bathroom.

Suggestives dragged their feet sleepily past the room—a long night for them, no doubt.  A bell dinged once, followed by Chantal's French-inflected English, “It's time, travelers. Take a break from your pleasures or slumber and join us around the Balustrade for a light breakfast social. The Indoctrination follows!”

“
She sounds awfully chipper,” Hilary muttered.

Jack staggered around the corner, yawning and hunting for the toilet. He kissed her cheek as he passed.
“Mornin’.”

“
Mmhmm,” Hilary leaned against the wall, watching the suggestives.

E
ach seemed blander and grayer than the one shuffling along before them and were followed with some immediacy by the groggy, the disheveled, and the recently fucked, their hair mussed, some walking open-robed, genitalia swinging, arousal glistening on pubic hair. Others, like her, curious and forlorn, dirged forward, terry cloth tightly drawn around their bodies, wearing frightened suspicion like armor.

“
I guess we better grab a Danish,” she said over her shoulder before returning her gaze to the front window.

Hilary
made a note to remember those dubious faces, in particular. She needed to make some sort of a connection to like-minded people to get a read on the experience. Jack was so on-board he'd be open to anything, so she’d lost a sounding board there. And what that anything could mean frightened the shit out of her.

Jack's hand slipped into hers, fingers threading and pulling her toward the door.

“Exciting, huh?”

“
Yeah,” she said. “That's a word.”

“
That's
the
word.”

Hilary
followed Jack out onto the balcony and when she turned toward the stairs, nearly ran smack into Glynnis, leaning casually against the window of the next room and snickering lightly. Hilary pivoted as she passed and poked the woman between her tits.

“
Back off. I don't want to see you again.”

Glynnis stared at her with that same hangdog expression, unimpressed.

Beneath them the courtyard began to flood with people, so many robes you’d think they’d pulled a fire drill, if you didn’t know better or had morals. They filed in and circled the black cage in the center of the floor. Just looking at it brought back the stitch in the pit of her stomach. Whatever was down there wasn’t right. The staircase led to something dark, somewhere dark—to call it a basement might have been an over-simplification. 

The people in the crowd seemed to fall into one of three groups, the overly sincere about mending fractured relationships (lingering eye contact, firmly-threaded hand-holding), the obviously horny (boners and nipple pops were prevalent), and the suspicious and more
than slightly terrified (her scoffing neighbor). Jack's stunt in the steam room had Hilary teeter tottering between those last two, though suspicious was a much more comfortable box to check.

Hilary slipped in next to the frightened woman she'd seen earlier. Her name was Claire and she had the jittery eyes and frayed nerves of a war vet, if that war involved repeated viewings of
Cracked
on cable television—you know the show, the one where a seemingly normal woman suddenly cracks up and kills her cheating no good husband with an ax, corkscrew or broken wine glass shard.

“
There's something not right about this place,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

Hilary blanched.
“You think? What was your first clue?”

Claire's eyes grew wild.
“You didn't see the religious fanatics on the way here? Creepy.”

“
Yes, obviously. They were everywhere. I was being facetious.”

Claire’s hand fluttered to her chest, oddly offended considering the jutting boomerang of an erection her husband sported.
“Well, I don't see how this is an appropriate time for that.”

“
I apologize. There's just so much wrong with Balustrade, it seemed a comic understatement. I see now that you weren't...funny.”

Claire glowered at her and Hilary felt as though she may have lost an ally...before even gaining one. It was par for the course in terms of her relationships with women, it seemed.
The workplace wasn’t much different, particularly among the management.

“
Well, you can joke, but I've heard some things that would knock that grin off your face.”

“
Oh yeah? Like what?”

“
I heard our suggestive arguing with that filthy Montenegrin, that's what.” Her words dropped to a whisper as a surrogate—red sash loosely knotted and indicating her more…active role—sauntered by with a grin and a tray of iced tea of some sort. Claire snatched a glass while the cute young woman smirked and selected a beverage from the opposite side of the tray for Hilary.

“
This one’s the best,” she winked, her pixie cut bowing away from her flexing cheek.

Hilary accepted and gave the drink a sip. Iced chai. Her favorite. They’d done their homework. Another swished by handing them each a napkin and offering them a selection of pastry. Hilary took a chocolate croissant, for obvious reasons (all of them being…chocolate). As she munched at the tender crust and rich filling, she pondered Claire’s bias against their facilitator.

Montenegrin?

She'd thought Ludovic looked like he could have been Eastern European, but Claire was terribly
precise in her isolating his heritage down to the country. It seemed a strangely specific prejudice. Hilary decided to take the bait. She took a swig off her iced chai, letting the tea soothe her nerves and leaned in to Claire. “What were they arguing about?”

“
The suggestive, a guy named Chad I think or Craig, something starting with a 'C' anyway was complaining about his “accommodations.” Now, I assumed he was talking about his bunk on the staff floor, but then he said something quite strange.”

“
Oh?”

“
Yes. He said, and I quote.” And she did too, going so far as making air quotes around her words. “This meat is the wrong color. Isn't that strange? This
meat
is the wrong
color
. What could that possibly mean?”

“
Were they arguing over dinner?”

“
No, just out in the hall. It didn't make any sense. There wasn't any meat around anywhere, except the ones dangling between their…” She paused, a look of distaste squirreling onto her face. “Down there,” she whispered finally, signaling to the spot between her legs.

“
Hmm,” Hilary said, stretching the sound out more to humor this woman than anything else. “Have you noticed anything else?”

“
Besides that this retreat seems to be a gigantic cover-up for some sort of swinger's convention?”

“
Well, yeah. That's been my take ever since we were shown our rooms.” But she thought back to Jack's seduction in the steam room and couldn't deny that there was something to the place that had had a sexual effect on both Jack and, to a lesser extent, Hilary. At least she'd been able to enjoy it and that certainly hadn’t been the case as of late.

“
Well,” Claire confided. “There's also that Chantal. She's too pretty. I'm thinking a fembot.”

“
Nice talking to you.” Hilary tipped her glass in the crazy woman's direction and backed away quickly. Never turn your back on the actively psychotic. She'd remembered that quip from a management training course.

The circle of guests parted and the staff of Balustrade marched forward one after the next, t
he suggestives followed by the surrogates, trailed by the Ludovic and Chantal in their New York best, fitted black suit and tie on him, anaconda intestine stretched over her—or possibly a dress, Hilary would lay odds on the former. The woman pressed through the group, producing a key and unlatching a gate into the cage, then descending stone-faced into the darkness, the rest of the staff following. Hilary's eyes were trained on Ludovic. He trailed the line by a few feet as if his presence were bulldozing the rest into the pit, only instead of standing at the top as they plummeted into uncertainty; he joined them, trodding willingly into the darkness.