The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (7 page)

He took up his glass again, his eyes avoiding Leanda's, and popped another cobalt capsule. He seemed to be on a direct flight line for the stars. Leanda was starting to feel uneasy. She couldn't twist a flex in the conversation. She wanted information about disembodied sex, or sex with extraterrestrials, and she was getting nowhere. She had read about humans being abducted by aliens, taken on ship, and having organs extracted for the purpose of alien
intelligence. One girl had been placed in a gold tank, and the liquid had turned her skin transparent. The alien conducting the experiment had immediately pinpointed the area for surgery, and the whole thing had appeared to take place instantly. And in place of the organ removed the alien had transplanted one with an independent biorhythm which would go on functioning indefinitely. She wondered if there wasn't a connection here with XZ. Were his intentions predominantly and unemotively experimental?

A cold friction pressed on Leanda’s
spinal nerves. She was convinced she was in the presence of someone who had removed himself from the human race. And all the time her conceptual thinking was interspersed with erotic images. She was thinking of ways to make love to Nicole in a real tomb. She had had erected in the château grounds a black marble tomb. On a given autumn day, mist wreathing the procession, she would be carried in an open coffin to the site, and there the obsequies delivered over her body which would be dressed in nothing but a silk chiffon negligee. And there, lowered into the earth, she would embrace Nicole who had jumped down into the open coffin. She imagined the passionate lovemaking which would ensue, while the midget sprinkled earth over their convulsed bodies. The two of them would walk back to the château naked, the heavy yew trees dripping from the mist, a roaring fire in the hearth awaiting their arrival. It was a recurrent obsession of hers. Leanda liked to subvert the whole notion of conventional erotica. She planned to write a new Karma Sutra, her directives aimed solely at the perverse. Nothing natural would exist in the book.

Her urgency to seduce XZ's apparent asexual leanings was growing progressively more intense
. He was drifting so far out, he looked like he would never re-earth. At such times his eyes turned silver, and he looked like no-one at all.

'I'll be very specific,
’ Leanda said. 'I've spent my life researching the erotic in its every form of expression. I'm interested in sex magic, cults who incorporate these practises into their beliefs, and of course in discovering new sensations. And I've the wealth to accommodate my interests. I want to know what you've discovered about sex, both before and after your deathless experience. I want in be turned on by the impossible.'

X
Z retained an air of impassive indifference. She wasn't sure if he'd even heard her requests. Again she thought of the possible influences of smack — and how he would be right out of it. If he was focused anywhere, it was right into his own mental dialogue. He picked up the tumbler attracted by the way the light was falling on its rim, and seemed obsessed by this particular. He then studied a fingernail which she had neglected to notice was varnished silver. The man was weird even by her standards, in his absolute centring in himself. She wondered what it was he had to draw on — light, energy, oracular guidance, an inner face that stared him into silence.

She poured herself another whisky, and felt her nerves seethe to make a positive connection.

'No amount of wealth can buy essential truth,' he was saying, more like he was answering himself than paying attention to her question. He shifted neither his eyes nor his voice over to her direction. He kept on staring at the rim of his glass. 'You've got every reason to believe that sex need not be attached to the physiological body. It can and often is a psychic manifestation. I don't know what you could be imagining. But if you're sufficiently trained in meditation techniques, then of course it's possible to make love by thought transfer. Get a friend to sit with you, in front of you, and make it happen. It's simple. You each communicate a preconceived image. It may be a position, a violation or whatever turns you on. And by isolating the image, you can frictionalise it to orgasm. That's the simplest technique, and it elevates mutual masturbation to a level of thought contact. But it takes a long time to perfect. But you can apply it to all the erogenous zones, so that eyes, ears, nipples, noses, and all the areas that don't normally get in on sex end up in contact. Imagine coming through polarising your third left fingernail to your partner's. No-one's ever tried to have sex that way. The erotic impulses are in need of being re-zoned. Contact between a penis and a vagina, a penis and an anus has gone on replicating itself for a whole genetic history. It's time we freed the body, or rather you did, as members of the cult have already gone beyond those limitations.'

'And that's where I want to go,' Leanda replied. 'You tell me of general theories, intended techniques, but I want to know the truth.'

But he was gone off again, only this time he stood up, and walked in slow circle round the glass table. But it wasn't like he was looking at anything. She could see that intense concentration really had turned his eyes silver.

'You've heard the story,' he said, 'how we were out there at the beach. Ten of us. Five men and fi
ve women. It was far more valid than a lunar landing, for we had created our own time and space. Even if someone had shown up, they couldn't have broken the circle. It was locked tight into imaginary time. We were travelling. We got beyond biorhythms. These aren't small things, and they're also scientifically disputable. What happened beyond that is what we're still researching. Only initiates are permitted access to that knowledge. If you study, and have an aptitude for it, you may in time share our discoveries.'

'But on a level of the senses,
' Leanda urged, 'my concern is only with the erotic.'

'You can't separate the erotic from its psychic components,' he replied, 'to go that way is in the nature of death. There are things I could tell you that would be greater than anything you've discovered at the château, but they would be useless to you. We learn only from things we can assimilate.'

Leanda narrowed her eyes at his imperturbable composure. He wanted nothing of her and she wanted everything of him. There had been no uptake to her implied offer of a gift. And if he accepted, she knew it would be with contemptuous indifference. He was unreachable because he contained the secret that others needed. She recrossed her long legs, feeling the itch in her and imagining all the men and women in the world who would like to have possessed her at that moment. She saw herself wiggling down a city street, eyes smouldering on her bottom, their intensity touching her skin like burn marks. She would get high on this game; the idea of men and women going home and masturbating over her image. XZ wouldn't do that. She was sure of his asexual reserve. Instead she fantasised about going into a shoe shop, and having the pretty assistant tickle her toes, while she tried on an endless variety of high heels, her short skirt affording the girl copious glimpses of her panties, tantalisingly erotic flashes that would lead in the end to her inserting a finger there, then two, despite the other customers, and finally working her little provincial tongue up her stockinged thighs, fractionally nearer and nearer her crotch. As the girl was about to attain that treasure, she would get up and reassert a customer's right for absolute respect. She would then have the girl carry out thirteen shoeboxes to her car, and not even tip her as a mark of disrespect.

XZ was still focused off somewhere. She kept thinking he couldn't care less for her company. But she was too intrigued to let go of him. Men were usually attempting to crawl over her, but this one represented an interspecies whose sexual attractions she had still to unseam.

'I'm a different person now,' he was saying, 'I mean since the entry into imaginative time, and the years of discipline preceding it. But I'll tell you a story which may help you.

'There was a man who came here to the château. He was the one who carried within him a sexual secret so terrible, that whoever hears it undergoes a breakdown. I know he came to you, for he still writes to me. I met him when I was part of a male orgy cult. How many years ago? I don't know, as I've ceased to live in time. But this man was peculiar. He was looking to be burnt in order to burn others. He was from the beginning a serious exhibitionist, and later the master of a sex cult. He came a long way. When I knew him first he used to preside over crucifixions in the night woods. Men would hang from nooses or be mock crucified to trees. The dark was full of colliding bodies. Marauding police would run into the scene with flashlights, S&M fetishists in leather would seek each other out with chains and knives, the air would be loaded with amyl nitrate escaped from poppers. It was so dark there you couldn't see your own hand. And the sex was rampant. Blind body finding blind body in a conspiratorial pact. It was a crazy pre-AIDS world, a disease that affects your people, but not mine. We are immune to viral permutations.

'It was summer. We waited longer for night to fall, and for its grainy texture to get in under the trees. We called the central pivot to the woods the Orgy Tree. To go in there was to be lacerated. I never risked that furnace. I stalked it like a panther. But he was always there, wearing a leather crown. I'm careful not to name him for his prominence in politics. You couldn't see it, but he wore red leather, as opposed to the uniform black, and was usually dressed in a red studded leotard and biker boots. He was evil if one uses that definition in terms of describing someone who extracts from others in order to leave them permanently depleted. He marked people like that. It was said that no-one would ever be the same after listening him out. He was vampirical, his voice was never pitched above a whisper and was lethal. You could hear the man limiting on his restrained breath. It was his loaded eyes that trapped victims. They had so much adrenalin shine in them they were black. Big blow-up eyes: eyes that would follow you into sleep and beyond.

'We were all mobbed in t
here one night. But there was something wrong. It was hard to describe it but there was panic in the air. Too much silence. The sort of twitchy feel you get before a storm. I saw two men running away and they didn't look like they'd ever stop to say why they were running. I thought it was a police raid. And there were other freaks came out to the woods; gangs, off-duty policemen wanting to let off steam, a range of pathological thugs. I thought someone had been murdered. But there wasn't anywhere to go in that pitch black, and I started making my way towards a fire which had been lit near the Orgy Tree. I pushed my way through foliage, alert and ready at any moment to fly. Already the smoke was bitter in my nostrils. I saw that something terrible was happening in the night. I heard people running away. They were cracking through the undergrowth. I got through obstacles and within view of the fire. And he was standing in front of the flames In his red leotard, the shadows jumping on to his thighs. He was performing some sort of rite. There were two men hanging from crosses in the flames. Periodically, and himself untouched by the flames, he would walk through them to his victims and commit sex acts. I was compelled into watching, but at the same time I knew that this scene would disturb me for ever. I broke off after a time, and I was shaking. I couldn't breathe. Anyone who came within range of seeing the red devil at work got out of there quick. I was conscious that if the flames rose his two victims would be roasted. A massive enquiry would ensue. I wasn't going to stay around to get caught. There was a smell of burning on the air I didn't like. I struck off into the woods and joined the exodus of bodies running away.

'There's much more I could tell you
about this individual, but I won't. It was at a formative state in my life, a period of sexual confusion, that I encountered him. Soon after that I pursued hatha yoga and other meditational arts as a means of focusing my energies. And what happened after that is another story.'

Leanda listened attentively as his words faded on a dying trajectory. Once again he assumed the manner of someone who had never spoken at all, and who was too far out to be engaged in something as trivial as conversation. He re
-clicked into a guarded silence. If he'd got up abruptly and walked out of the door, she wouldn't have been surprised. He would have walked out to the car, disconnected, and as though nothing of their meeting had ever taken place.

For a moment they were distracted. An effeminate young man with a turtle shell strapped to his back, and gold horns protruding from his forehead, slid into the library on all fours, and proceeded to cross the floor without reference to Leanda and her guest. He was wearing gold slippers on his feet and matching gold gloves on his hands. He went over to the far bookcase, retrieved a volume on molecular biology, and with the same inexplicable deliberation made his way out of the room again, disappearing into one of the château's endless corridors. Leanda watched his progress with close scrutiny, observing at the same time that XZ, after recording the boy's initial entry, ceased to pay any attention to him, and seemed to have forgotten his existence. It was like he let everything extraneou
s to his inner life go.