The faggot approached him. He seemed slightly grey from nervousness. He bent down and linked the middle finger of his right hand into the portion of the last, exposed link. Then, taking a deep breath, he straighted up, and ran at astonishing speed toward the far end of the stage. The chain sang out like a fishline off a reel when a big fish takes the hook. The links and interstices flew out at an alarming rate, the anus fluttering madly. When the entire chain was out, the far end fell to the floor with a resounding clank. Chet estimated that the thing must weigh thirty pounds.
The man fell face forward and lay on the floor for several seconds quivering from head to toe. He was visibly moved and the theatrical demonstration glided momentarily into the privacy of an unguarded moment. The members of the audience became voyeurs, and an uneasy vibration oozed through the crowd.
But then the man stiffened, came to his knees, stood up, and turned to face the people. He smiled and bowed. And with that, the accumulated tension broke and they showered him with a thunderous ovation. The applause and cheers went on for over a minute.
The man, now a star, nodded to the faggot who picked up the chain, curled it, and carried it into the wings. It was clear that he served, offstage as well as on, as the chain man’s slave.
Chet ordered a beer and stood sipping it as the crowd returned to its ordinary anarchic state, having been temporarily galvanized into an army of appreciation by the performances. He felt refreshed and cleansed. He wondered at the acts he had seen, and knew that one could do a doctoral dissertation on the meaning of it all. One saw the end of a civilization, the birth of a new liberty, theater, psychological dynamics, and a host of other categories of definition. Chet had always been amused by the academic naivety of Americans who, upon discovering something, always assume that it hadn’t existed before. All the so-called novelties of the sexual revolution offered such shock value to a society only because most people have been hypnotized into accepting official descriptions of reality as the reality itself. When the current period of breaking out came to its cyclical end, the civilization would go back into the closet, and millions upon millions of people will imagine that homosexuality, orgies, swinging, and “perversions” have disappeared. And then be outraged again when the next cycle of exposure arrives.
However, fist-fucking was something else. Chet wondered whether this might not be a historical first. The Babylonians had orgies, and the Greeks had little boys, and the Romans had a glut of various excesses, but he couldn’t recall any reference ever being made to fist-fucking. When was the first person fist-fucked? How did it come about? Was it a voluntary or a forced act? When was the term coined? Does the term exist in other languages? Chet, whose girlfriend, he still imagined, had yet to be fucked in the ass, and who couldn’t imagine himself taking a fist, was suddenly taken by a lively curiosity about the subject. He had one friend who was a fervid practitioner. And since he had begun being fist-fucked several years earlier, his health improved, his complexion became glowing, and his mental alertness went up several notches. He spoke of it as a supreme yogic exercise and grew eloquent in almost religious praise of its virtues. He once described an experience to Chet in which he had taken mescaline, and while peaking and watching the color-explosion sequence in 2001, he inhaled poppers and got fist-fucked.
“What more could there be?” he had asked.
The thoughts having peripherally brought Constance to his consciousness, Chet tried to focus his awareness on the problem of her kidnapping. It was difficult to compute, because she might already be dead, in which case he felt the best thing to do would be to forget. If she was alive, he knew he ought to try to find her. Fleetingly, he had a fantasy of using the computer to plot the place and time of the next disappearance, catch the Slavers in the act, and follow them to their lair, there to rescue Constance from her captors. But she could be anywhere. The Middle East, India, Africa, South America, in a dungeon of a Southern California mansion.
He thought again of the FBI, and decided that that would be his best chance. If she didn’t return within a week, he would take her published story, the printout of the program he had worked out to help her, and any other facts at his disposal, to the bureau and see if they could do anything.
Meanwhile, from across the room, he could feel the stare of a thin, very effeminate boy who wore a velour Fauntleroy suit, three-inch heels, nail polish, eye shadow, and had a button on his jacket that read, “I Am a Sewer.”
Chet smiled at him and waited to see what would happen next.
“Fist-fuck, fist-fuck, fist-fuck!” Madge exploded. “Is that the only thing anyone’s interested in anymore! I swear, if I get fist-fucked one more time, I’ll scream!”
She paced up and down on the deck that had been built some thirty feet back from the shoreline. It was a day of stunning, silent majesty and beauty. Not a cloud marred the sun’s dominion in the sky. Not a flirtation of a breeze teased the mind from its perfect equilibrium. Constance lay naked on the wooden stage and let the sound of the surf, the rays of the sun, the occasional rustle of a bird in the shrubbery, blend with equal phenomenological dispassion into the ground against which her total and vibrant sense of well-being provided the figure.
It was the third day of a long break, and she didn’t have to report to the Parlor until five on the following evening. It was now almost six weeks since she had been snatched up and taken to what she had come to refer to as “The Resort,” and on particularly exasperating days as “The Last Resort.” She had lost five pounds, regained an athletic vigor, put on a tan that would have been the envy of women paying a hundred dollars a day at an exclusive hotel, and developed a keen sense of irony.
“And now that goddamned high-rise,” Madge went on, her tirade gathering steam. “It’s going to ruin the view, create jams, and pollute the water.”
“I should think you would have more serious concerns,” drawled Sheila who had taken one of those qualitative leaps in studied maturity common to teenagers. She had dyed her hair jet black and cut it to within a half inch of her scalp. It was utterly incongruous with her complexion, eye color, and freckles, and yet freakish enough to compel attention. With that she had shaved her pubic hair off and now lay, spread-legged, her cunt facing the sun, to soak the heat into her exposed center.
“That’s serious enough,” Madge replied. “After all, I do have to live here, and I don’t see why I have to put up with that sort of ugliness.” She paced a few seconds and then whirled to face the two women. “Have you seen the plans?” she asked. “It looks like a Holiday Inn. Square, made out of glass and chrome.”
“I wonder where we are,” Constance said softly. “I mean, geographically.”
“There was a woman here who knew how to read the stars,” Sheila said. “She figured we were halfway down the eastern coast of South America.”
“What country would that be?” Constance asked.
“I don’t know,” Sheila replied. “I never was very good at geography.”
Their voices hung on the still air, disembodied, distant, soothing. Sheila had visited Constance the night before carrying two of the pills that Constance had been given by the maid on her very first excursion. The maid had never returned to claim her night of drugged passion, and her disappearance was not marked by any special curiosity.
The pills were an extraordinary experience. Without the tension aroused by being propelled into the Parlor, Constance could allow herself to surrender completely to its power. For six or seven hours she had wallowed in the licentious and voluptuous promptings of profound muscular relaxation. She lost her conceptual focus entirely, and entered a state of mild, continuous hallucinogenic dispersion. She became a raw mouth, an exposed nerve, a bundle of sensations without category. She was capable of sliding into extended physiological revery, and at one juncture glued her mouth to Sheila’s asshole for nearly an hour, and licked and sucked and swirled her tongue around with aimless abandon.
“We’re probably in some cockamamie dictatorship,” Madge sang out, waving her arms. She was having such a good time ranting that the two other women found her no intrusion on their mood whatsoever. Constance basked in the deep tingling of her bowels. Sheila had inserted one end of a double-dildo into her ass and the other end into her own cunt and fucked her for what seemed like hours. In the joyful presence of the day’s steady heat and the memories of such a night, a swarm of hornets stinging her all over would barely disturb her.
“The way I figure it,” Madge said, “is that this place is run by a group of international financiers. They are protected by the military of the United States, and possibly by the CIA. This country is probably one of the ones owned by U.S. interests. I would bet we’re on a private ranch belonging to one of the oil families.”
At this, Sheila opened her eyes.
The only oil family who owns pieces of South America are the R—s,” she said. “And I can’t believe that even people like that would run the risk of operating a place like this.”
“Why not?” Madge said. “They start wars, they finance fascists who torture and imprison their own people, they play fast and loose with the money market and don’t give a fuck that millions go hungry or lead impoverished lives because of their greed for power. What makes you think people like that would stop short of outright slavery? For them, that would be a step in the direction of honesty.”
“But what difference does it make?” Constance said, drawn into the discussion at last. “The rulers have been the same throughout history. They’re the same in Russia as in America, the same in Iceland as in Australia. They were no different in ancient Egypt. You think there’s any difference between the pyramids and the World Trade Center buildings? They’re both monuments to a man’s pride. Who cares if it’s the R—s or not? We’re still slaves.”
“Ah, the voice of the quietist liberal,” Madge sneered, and flung herself down onto one of the deck chairs and lit a cigarette. She smoked in silence and the three women lapsed back into lassitude.
The long curved beach described a widened horseshoe perhaps three miles from tip to tip. Their enclave was right in the center, where the ground rose precipitously to form a high and forbidding cliff. The three women, by agreeing to triple-team one of the stewards, had won the relatively rare privilege of being taken down to the beach itself instead of having to content themselves with the swimming pool in the compound. They had been escorted out of a gate in the wall that surrounded their prison and led down a gently sloping trail to a point on the beach a mile away from the spot directly below the compound. That section of beach was fenced in on three sides and patrolled by guards and dogs. It held a sunning platform and a small bar where they could order drinks and sandwiches.
The steward was, it seemed, of the same rank as Robert, and notorious for his exploitation of the women. For the beach privilege, he demanded the following scenario. That one of the women get fucked from behind by his Great Dane while going down on another woman, and while a third woman sucked his cock. The three of them drew straws for roles and Constance got the dog, Madge got to be eaten, and Sheila had to give the man head.
Constance had never been fucked by a dog before and examined her prejudices in the matter. As with most erotic taboos, it was mostly a matter of unexamined repugnance based on an image rather than the reality. What, really, was wrong with the experience? At worst it might prove mildly unpleasant; at best, highly exciting. It didn’t seem possible that she could get pregnant, and if she did, she was sure the offspring would constitute a marvel of genetic surrealism.
When the time came, she fingered herself for a while until her cunt was moist, then got on her knees, dropped her face to the floor, and offered her exposed rump. Madge guided the dog to her, patting it and stroking its cock. When the beast was aroused, she lifted its front paws and placed them on Constance’s back. Then she slipped the bony tool into the soft, slushy pouch.
The dog began humping at once. Constance was amazed to find her loins flush with heat. She lifted her ass higher.
“This dog’s a good fuck,” she thought, as the Dane pumped wildly into her.
She felt the first drops of the animal’s drooling on her neck as Madge slid under her and offered her cunt to Constance’s lips and tongue. Constance slipped her mouth onto the furry gash and began the licking and sucking and kissing and biting which remains unchanged in each human being from the first moment at the mother’s nipple, the only difference being in the object which is put in the mouth and the imagery accompanying the act.
Meanwhile, Sheila gobbled on the steward’s cock, giving him all the slurping, gobbling, gagging, and dribbling that his pornographic heart desired. She let him feast his eyes on her bobbing buttocks and allowed him to slip three fingers into her cunt and slosh around, knowing that his real interest was in the discrepancy between his actualized ennui and the intimacy of the behavior, that difference of heat and involvement lying at the core of degradation.
It was a relatively innocuous session, used, as they were, to the rigors of the Parlor, and for it they purchased a day at the beach. Once there, however, they discovered that if they went down on the guards who patrolled the area, they might be sneaked onto the strip again without express permission from the steward. The guards were paid mercenaries and as such had no erotic privileges. Thus, when they were descended upon by a trio of oozing women for whom sucking cock, getting ass-fucked, fist-fucked, and gang-banged was considered mere foreplay, they were ready to bend the rules a bit to show the ladies a bit of a good time.
“Let’s go in the water,” Madge said after stubbing out her cigarette.
“Must we?” Sheila complained.
“We can talk there,” Madge told her.
The three women stood up slowly and, stretching the laziness from their muscles, walked toward the water. There were barely any waves, merely one-inch ripples, which fell like exhausted waifs upon the sand. As they went forward, two guards moved out from the brush and came to stand in the sunlight, just far enough to let the women know they were there and holding high-powered rifles. The men had semi-erections as they watched the undulating forms, the jiggling, shifting asses, the swaying tits, the primeval cunts.
The women swam out until they were some thirty feet from shore and then hung there, floating and treading water.
“Do you think they’ll bring in a construction crew for the new building?” Constance asked in a whisper.
“They’ll have to,” Madge replied. “But I’m willing to bet that for the duration they keep us hidden away. Even in a situation they control entirely, they can’t afford to let anyone on the outside know what’s going on here.”
“What’s the building for?” Sheila asked.
“Expansion,” Madge told her. “They’re getting more girls and more customers. They want to offer more services. And I think they’re reaching a point where they’re developing a bureaucracy to take care of all the details . . . schedules, supplies, salaries, and the rest of it. Richard told me that the building would have indoor squash courts, a fully equipped fourteen-bed hospital, and a reading room with newspapers from all over the world flown in daily.”
“What’s it have to do with us?” Sheila asked her.
“If they’re bringing in a regular construction crew, the site is going to have to have rope. And that becomes our objective. To get five hundred feet of rope. With that, we can go down the face of the cliff.”
“Is that all?” Sheila said, squinting against the sun as she lay on her back buoyed by the salt water. “I thought you were going to come up with something real.”
“You have any better plans?” Madge exploded, her voice rising.
“Shhh,” Constance warned. “No point in letting them know what we’re talking about.
“It’s silly,” Sheila went on. “First of all, stealing that much rope will be practically impossible, especially since they will probably be keeping us indoors. Secondly, even if we can negotiate the cliff face, then what? We’ll be on the beach, in the middle of the night, in a country where the army and police are run by our captors, and probably fifty miles of dense jungle away from the nearest town of any size. This you call a plan?”
“Oooh,” Madge exploded in exasperation and pushed Sheila’s head down until her face was two feet under water, her arms and legs thrashing. Finally, she let the other woman up. Sheila was coughing and gasping, water running out of her nose.
“You cunt!” she spat out.
“Takes one to know one,” Madge said and began swimming calmly toward shore, her buttocks winking above the water as she moved.
“What do you think?” Sheila asked Constance after a few seconds.
“Personally, I don’t want to try anything until I find something that feels absolutely foolproof. I think the worst thing we can do is to get caught trying to escape. We’d never get a second chance. The rope idea seems absurd. Your objections are absolutely correct.”
“Do you think she’s going to try anyway?”
“Probably,” Constance replied. “And, who knows, maybe she’ll make it.”
They took a few more minutes to enjoy the cool clear water, and then joined Madge on the shore. They decided to go back to the compound, and were escorted by the guards to the gate in the wall. Before being allowed to go inside, however, they had to play French Roulette with the four guards. The women were made to kneel on the ground, side by side, very close together. Then they had to suck off each of the men, one at a time. Each sucked for a minute, and on signal, had to transfer the cock in her mouth to the mouth of the woman next to her. The man came at random, and spasmed his jism into the throat of whichever of the women was riding his joint at the moment. As it fell out, Sheila got to swallow all four orgasms, something which made the other two women a bit peevish, for by the time they were on the third man, they had begun to get into the spirit of the thing and had started to ride their own waves of excitement.
It was like a tableau from the Meat Rack outside of Cherry Grove, as three naked women squirmed on their knees, fingering their pussies more often than not, blindly sucking the cocks that were slipped between their lips. The guards, all men in their early twenties, tall, with hard, taut muscles, looked down at the ladies through lidded eyes and reveled in the juiciness of the condition. Slavery, nudity, and surrender to the abasement of the moment provided blazing aphrodisiacal flashes.
As they were going through the gate, one of the men slipped his hand between Sheila’s thighs and cupped her cunt with his fingers.