The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (14 page)

At a word from Donatien, Nina withdrew, so as to leave him deliriously pacted with his sister. His thrusts were accelerating to a pitch that was so final that they were irreversible, like a train picking up speed across the French countryside. The always inconclusive dialogue he held with Marciana's bottom was nearing another mystical terminal. Both he and his sister began to speak out loud in lyric discourse. They were like lovers overtaken with visiting fire, and as the star exploded in Marciana's brain, so Donatien experienced the first jabbing intensity of an orgasm that burnt like supernovae sheeting across deep space. Their united body convulsed in spasms as the House of Sade was rebuilt in her rectum.

When the furious assault has subsided, prayers were offered to Laura, the Laura of Petrarch's
Sonnets
, who had once been married to Hugues de Sade. It was she who had visited Donatien during his insupportable years of imprisonment, infusing his dreams with white light, and appearing to him as an intermediary in his desperate hours. As a sign that she would never desert him, she had left a white rose on the floor of his cell in the Bastille, a flower that had proved imperishable, and one which Donatien kept close by him at all times.

Donatien and Marciana remained prostrate before the torch burning by the bedside. Physically sated, and suspended in a state of post-coital reflection, they appeared in their exhausted awareness to be waiting for a word or a sign. It came in the form of Serge Lama singing L'Esclave', a song that Marciana insisted on alternating with the English version sung by Marc Almond. The lyrics that intimated the story of a slave in a byzantine harem, whose secret desire was to become a woman, comprised the ultimate paean to a transsexual ethos. Marciana never tired of listening to the song's instructive decadence, nor Donatien to the lines about being bitten by a serpent's slow attack.

They lay there a long time, assimilating the contents of their mystico-erotic journey, before Donatien went to join a deeper and darker night in the castle's depths. Marciana heard him go towards his secret destiny. There would be big cats at his feet, and the sound of rains falling through all the autumns of the world would temporarily accompany his passage through the dark.

*

Part II

Torch Song Extravaganza

The theatre had been prepared for the concert. Marciana anticipated Nicole and Leanda's visit to La Coste, and the singer was due to accompany them in their customized leopard-spotted limo.

Ten thousand red roses had been delivered to the château, as decoration for the theatre, and the entire floor-space was ankle-deep in red and pink sequins. Twenty foot black candles, columnar in width were to be lit as an additional histrionic accoutrement to the performance. Open coffins full of lilies, barbiturates and photographs of Marilyn Monroe had been assembled in the orchestra pit. There were black feathered arrows piercing photographic portraits of James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, Judy Garland and a whole pantheon of icons who had died early or with their lives still unfulfilled. Donatien's original manuscripts decorated the walls. A red gown worn by Marlene Dietrich was draped over the Steinway.

There was a throne on stage: its use being optional to the singer. The renowned torch singer had been hired at extravagant cost, and was a favourite of Marciana's to the point of her knowing the words to each of his songs. He had been requested to preview a suite of songs written specifically to celebrate the Sadean mysteries. There were three open coffins on the stage full of wads of paper money and this was to be the singer's payment. The hundreds of empty chairs arranged for an imaginary audience were to be occupied by memorabilia jackets once worn by the great
Hollywood stars. Litre size bottles of perfumes by Chanel and Jean Patou were lined up so that the guests could receive exotic oblations. There were whips with jewel-encrusted handles propped against chair-backs, and full-length sequin gowns for the singer's use.

Nicole and Leanda, the occupants of the infamous Pleasure Château, were due to be driven to La Coste by their transvestite chauffeur. They would be accompanied by their midget, who served as an erotic raconteur, supplying Leanda and Nicole with a narrated compendium of perverse erotic experiences.

Marciana looked forward to the fusion of energies promised by the coming together of two notorious châteaux. Donatien would undoubtedly sodomize Leanda's pet midget, and so give birth to the beginnings of a new legend to be cross-fertilized by the respective households. Like the inhabitants of La Caste, those of the Pleasure Château also lived in a time-zone that was permanent autumn. Neither knew any other seasonal occurrence, but that of the dank melancholy of October rains, the ruin of red woods scarved by smoky fog, and the tonic olfactory satisfaction of a world in continuous decay.

Marciana intended to be carried into the theatre in an open coffin by four pallbearers dressed in outrageous drag. She had decided to wear a seam-splitting dress cut from pink sequins, and to adopt Marilyn Monroe's provocative trick of wearing shoes with one heel slightly higher than the other, so as to give prominent display to round buttocks.

Donatien had promised a spectacular entrance in purple velvet. He was to be seated on a black horse decorated with ostrich plumes, and to be ceremoniously led to a throne in front of the stage. Any horse droppings were to be eaten on the spot by his attendants.

Marciana prepared herself for her visitors. She injected herself with a slow-release aphrodisiac, and had Nina paint her three inch false fingernails a gloss indigo. She sat on Nina's lap in her see-through panties, while the latter prepared her body with a beautician's eye for detail. Marciana was to wear an indigo coloured wig, and her black lipstick was glammed with a dusting of blue stars.

Donatien intended the concert to celebrate the marriage of La Coste and The Pleasure Château. A torch lit banquet was to ensue in one of the castle's dungeons. The guests, as Marciana told Nina, were to eat off black-bordered plates, and the main course would be served with indigo sauces derived from squid ink. Marciana, stabbing her tongue into Nina's mouth, withheld knowledge of the courses, but told Nina that dessert would comprise a bottom sculpted out of painted sugar and almond paste and filled with insect jelly.

Nina, who came from a rural village near
Roussillon, had heard of such bizarre confections. She slipped a tongue back into Marciana's mouth, prior to making it up, and swam there like fish patrolling the parameters of its tank. She could feel Marciana growing sticky through her transparent panties, as though a snail made tracks on the pink chiffon. Marciana began to grind her crotch into Nina's lap. Nina spread her five fingers teasingly over Marciana's twat, and began to play the frets inside her panties. Marciana threw her head back and responded by convulsing with a paroxysmal cry. It sounded like a nocturnal animal had found its way into her throat, one that had come to slake its thirst in a pool in the hills. Marciana was suddenly nothing but vocables, her scale of pleasure ascending according to the expertise of Nina's caresses. Nina moved her fingers from inside to outside Marciana's panties, find played finger-exercises on the transparent gusset. Marciana sounded in torment, as Nina played a game of administering excruciatingly slow caresses. She worked with three fingers, two fingers, and sometimes one. She polished Marciana's clit as though it was a raspberry she was about to tweak and eat.

Marciana let her head and torso fall back on to the floor, and at the same time her stockinged legs worked their way round Nina's shoulders, and her pussy was presented to Nina's lips. Nina entered it with her tongue like a hummingbird sipping at a flower. She tracked in as a telescoping enquirer, little by little savouring the pepperish glitter flooding Marciana's passage. Marciana was arriving at a state of pre-orgasmic agony. She worked herself harder against Nina's tongue, as though it was the pivot on which she depended. Nina used her tongue like an erect penis to bring Marciana off, the friction invading every centimetre of her erotic core.

Marciana's blue hair poured across the floor as her racked being was consumed by wave after wave of pleasure. Her climax was a hoarse, thrashed out crescendo of throaty entreaties.

The two women relaxed. Nina placed Marciana's wet panties in the chalice, so that they could be offered to Donatien for his ritual gratification. Marciana then slipped on a pair that were as clear as daylight.

Marciana was no sooner zipped into her sheath, than news of the singer's arrival was brought to her room. His dressing-room came replete with black slaves and a variety of wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, St. Emilion and Valdepeñas. There were rose coloured pink champagnes, a massive attack of dark red roses, gifts of perfumes and shirts and make-up. There was also a surprise for him in the form of a box marked with the word
Night
. Inside the box, and bound in black satin, was a notebook containing unpublished passages from
The 120 Days of Sodom
in Donatien's handwriting.

Marciana was told that Leanda and Nicole had been shown into the sumptuous orange velvet sitting-room, where a juniper scented fire
had been lit for the arrivals.

When Marciana entered t
he room, she discovered a midget sitting on the table, cracking walnuts with his teeth, and fuming with ribald obscenities. He was dressed in a scarlet coat blistered with tacky rhinestones. Marciana had an immediate premonition that this was the vermin that Donatien would skewer with his cock on a game platter.

Two stylishly attractive women had arranged themselves like flowers in opposite chairs. The one who introduced herself as Leanda had poppy-red hair, while Nicole was dark and wore black and white Japanese make
-up, highlighted by scarlet lipstick.

Both women were so perfectly made up, that Marciana was not surprised to be introduced to Saki, their private
make-up artist, a woman whose mask-like face offset a deeply morose sensibility. Sitting poised in a silk micro-skirt and red satin blouse, she had placed a pink carnation in her lap.

Marciana also noticed a monkey sitting in an armchair, and the midget directed his raucous verbiage at the seated creature. To Marciana's amazement the creature was smoking a cannabis joint, and punctuating its inhalations with the reflective
pauses of an inveterate smoker.

Marciana felt an immediate sexual attraction to the poppy-haired Leanda, and knew instantly that it was she whose legs she woul
d like to open in an exacting V in one of the castle's decaying attics. It was there, she decided, that she would give Leanda the one hundred orgasms that resulted from Sadean cunnilingus.

Marciana sat in a chair directly next to the fire, and felt her pa
nties shiver across her bottom.

'Coming here is like home from home,' Leanda commented. 'It's only Raoul who had difficulty with the journey. I mean
he belongs to another reality.'

'But I know he'll sing well,' Marci
ana affirmed.

'He'll love the place,' said N
icole, taking in the ceiling frescoes, and the black velvet drapes that waterfalled from orange walls.

'It's the perfect setting,' said Leanda. 'A torchy, gothic con
struct, in which he can excel.'

'There may be a real funeral als
o,' Marciana alluded. 'One of Donatien's relatives, an astronaut from the defunctive space-age is brain-damaged from his last return through the re-entry corridor. For years he's lived in virtual space, a hyper-real substitute for his interplanetary missions. Donatien has the idea that as his relative will die a virtual death, so sex after death may biologically resurrect him. It's one of my brother's hypotheses about deathlessness.'

'These things sound rather like our encounter with XZ,' said Wanda, 'the leader of a deathless cult who visited The Pleasure Château. He has the secrets to biogenetic engineering, and he and his android sect claim to have overcome the
genetic inheritance of death.'

Leanda crossed her legs in a way that was like a provocative means of origami. The promise in what they concealed was to Marciana like the idea of a flower g
rowing at the bottom of a lake.

The women sat and spoke of new combinations of neurotransmitters, DNA memory banks, and the whole cellular morphology required to create a new species. The need to redesign neuro
-cellular chemistry was a theme of Donatien's, and one that similarly preoccupied Marciana. Organisms in all their complex structures had evolved and stabilized their forms over millions of years, and so too their own deconstructing mechanisms. Marciana was aware that Leanda and Nicole may also have been initiated into infinite life-extensions, and that four people presently at La Coste were faced with the possibility that they may never die.

Marciana talked of her brother's attachment to La Coste, and the blue Luberon mountains which formed a natural amphitheatre beneath windy clouds. Donatien had added new rooms to the château, she informed Leanda, and had also beau
tified the ground by planting olive and almond trees. The house had been an obsession of his for centuries, and each detail of change had to be approved by him.

'There are rooms that not even I have entered,' Marciana told Nicole, her eye attempting to tele
scope up the latter's silk skirt.

‘
Donatien has forbidden me access to a suite of rooms in the castle's interior,' said Marciana, 'And each time I go in search them, they appear to be in infinite regression. A few weeks ago I felt compelled to undertake a new journey to try and locate the whereabouts of his secret domain, and I must have fallen asleep in the process, but continued sleepwalking, for at some stage Donatien slapped me awake. He led me back through passages I had never seen before. There were children who opened doors and looked out at me, and their blue eyes seemed frozen into permanent trance. It was impossible to know if they had just arrived, or if they had been there for ever.

‘
Donatien tried to assure me that I had dreamt of the presence of children, and that what looked like a bottomless hole at the end of the corridor, was simply a nightmare phenomenon. I remember a creature that resembled a jackal snouting at my legs, and the animal wore a collar of sparkling blue stones.'

'It sounds like a journey to the underworld,' commented Leanda, as the midget performed
a shoulder-stand on the table.

'You'll meet my brother later,' said Marciana. 'He plans to make a spectacular entrance in the theatre, just before Raoul comes on stage. I don't need to tell you his story. His biography has been made known, although the real Donatien seems always to have been excluded from the story, like the subject left out of a photograph. Only I truly know his
story. Sometimes I find myself writing it all down, typing it all on to disc, but without the knowledge of how or when the confessions will ever reach the world. And paradoxically, I suppose he must have known a similar despair when he was writing his huge novels in prison.'