The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (9 page)

Leanda reached her bedroom, and went and curled up on her silk four-poster. She unzipped her skirt and lay back in her black panties and sil
k stockings. She liked the half-somersault position, legs over her head. It helped her relax, and also served as an exercise to stimulate the elasticity of her love-making. She lay with her legs arched over her head, the toes touching a silk cushion. She would like Nicole to have walked in now and discovered her in this position. Or else in her fantasy, a total stranger, particularly one who was nursing a substantial erection. She wouldn't protest. She would prove versatile to his instant commands. Her love juices were ready to flood at any engaging proposal.

Leanda ran a finger across her slit to incite its sensitivity, and then restabilized. She found herself thinking of XZ again, and the rigid asceticism he had prescribed. The side of her bored with excess leaned towards the spiritual discipline he had advised, but much more towards the idea of ritualised sex magic. She liked the notion of being an initiate to higher realisa
tion, and the château lent itself to the zoomorphic symbols of which he had spoken. The snake, the vulture, the bat. Surrounded by unusual beasts, she could surely create a corresponding menagerie in her inner world. But it was his manner of appearing to assimilate nothing external to him, that had her return with fascination to his image. She would have other gurus visit the château, but she doubted any would have the extraterrestrial qualities manifested by XZ.

It was late, but it was any time. It might even be October for ever, she hoped. A burgundy autumn with mist bushing the (lees. They would go boating tomorrow night. Leanda would have one of the oriental girls row her across the water in her black gondola. A lantern would be placed on the beaked prow, its purple light snaking on a lake in which huge pike browsed in the depths. She would dress in a black evening gown and pour a bottle of vintage wine into the waters as an offering, a propitiatory rite.

Leanda used a mobile to order the midget to her room. She had time to kill before having the transsexual brought in. Nicole would be editing her video shoot from last night, and books or music would engage her after sex. What she wanted at the moment was it another of the midget's sexual confessions.

He came in wearing his familiar rhinestone-studded jacket. The monkey sat on a cushion beside hi
m, and waited expectantly for the opium pipe which it would be offered. Leanda brought out a blue fruit dish full of cocaine, and offered it to the midget. He took a pinch of the multi-coloured dust, lined it on a small lacquered table and snorted. His head rocked back on its axis, as his mind went somewhere else and then cleared.

'Perhaps I never told you,' he began, 'of my stay in
Venice in the summer with an Italian film director. Some days this person was a woman, and on others a man, but that wasn't a problem. It involved minor details, like on the days when she really was a woman, I'd have to dust her silk panties with perfume before she slipped them on, find croissants which would tint her lips with vanilla, brush her false eyelashes with violet mascara, and myself dress as a nun. None of this was extraordinary. But unable to differentiate between film sets and reality, she risked arrest in the pursuit of certain fetishes. We hired a vaporetto and went out to the cemetery island to look for Baron Corvo's grave. There were boys brought along for the shoot. Youths selected for a certain coarse insolence which appealed to my film director friend. She was dressed as a man that day. Black suit and hair piled up beneath a beret.

‘
When we embarked it was about noon. The siesta hour, with no-one around. I guessed we were off to a bad start when one of the boys got his cock out on the road to the cemetery. No sooner had he done this than another of the group lay down open-mouthed beneath him. This avid piss drinker took the whole lot, the jet reaching him in modulated streams, now thin, now thick, now slow, now fast. We were all compelled to stop and look, for the performance was consummate in its rehearsed skill. Even the escaped runnels were collected by the tongue.

'This was the starter to an afternoon of mad lust. Luciana, or so I'll call her, insisted on filming the lot. And there were occasional tourists who walked backwards when they saw what was going on in the cemetery. Luciana soon had her suit trousers off and the mould of her bottom in silk panties left no doubt as to the fact she was a desirable woman. She wanted to shoot film under oral stimulation, and one boy knelt in front of her licking her pussy, while another was at her bot
tom. This would have been extraordinary in itself, if one of the boys hadn't quickly found himself being buggered by a tourist as he applied his exploratory tongue to Luciana. Or rather no-one seemed to know or care if the man was a tourist. He just got in there, and Luciana carried on filming, and the boy didn't protest.

'And that was nothing compared to the olives. And if there was a lack of refinement in these things, then there was a curiosity which had to be admired for its spirit of adventure.'

The midget took another snort of coke and continued.

'The olives. Well, they were mouthed into Luciana's pussy, and out again,
and then into her bottom and out again. The sun-dried black ones. Not to my taste. But the game was called the necklace, and seen as a perverse way of stringing pearls.

'The filming continued wel
l into the afternoon. The boys were made to dress up in costumes — elbow-length gloves, leotards, dresses. One had a ball and chain attached to his left ankle as a means of making him submissive to sexual advances. He was excited by the fact he couldn't run away from a circle of marauding cocks.'

Leanda luxuriated in these orgiastic vignettes. She lay back with her eyes closed, occasionally sip
ping at the smoke from the monkey's opium pipe. The château seemed so far away from reality that she imagined it suspended in time.

'Despite the continuous scenes of depravity,' the midget continued, 'the police were never called. We were in the cemetery until the late afternoon. Luciana ended lying face down in the grass with the lens so closely focused on
a boy's bottom that it was almost nozzled into his sphincter. What was got down on film was unrepeatable. And I suppose that's the art of selectively spontaneous image, as Luciana always called the process.'

Leanda coded the story. She w
anted it on permanent recall. It would remain an engram in her memory cells, another constellation in the midget's inexhaustible erotic narrative.

Leanda let the silence build, and ordered the midget to admit the transsexual to her room in
half an hour. She needed to assimilate not only the story, but so much of what had happened at the château over the past months. She had the feeling that she had got free from time in a way that was diametrically opposed to XZ's, but was nonetheless an evasion of illness, reality and death. She couldn't account for her life. It occurred autonomously. She was beginning to believe that she had relinquished all ties with the natural order of life. But even as she conceived of the thought she could see XZ sitting in her mind, one boot balanced on the other, his mind crystallising a theorem she would never receive.

There had been news weeks a
go, or was it months or years ago, in the château's permanent autumn, that pink culture had marched. The apparently passive minorities had reversed the spiral on orthodox heterosexuality. Gay politics had assumed the ascendant. The old macho stranglehold had been broken. The takeover, at first a process of infiltration, had occurred dramatically and without violence. The pressure of mediatised marches and the incisive exposure of the corrupt values inherent in sexual politics resulted in the fall of most major leaders. Capitalism was seen as the monolith on which sexual lies were founded.

Leanda had these facts as received information and believed them. Nicole told her of changes for the better in every aspect of the city's life, and one day she would leave the
château again and cruise the docks where Betty would be waiting back to the wall in the late afternoon. She would be a tight red dress positioned in the mist.

Leanda began slowly to make up. She re-pencilled her high thin eyebrows, selected a dark green eyeliner and composed her face round a dark lipstick bow. Her silk stockings were so sheer they were like air breathing on her legs. She delayed the ritual, conscious that she
was living out a moment in life. Or was she? She kept on returning to the notion of timelessness. The château was exempt from involvement in the temporal. There was only her voyage through the night, a nocturnal journey that would take her to the château's interior.

Leanda slipped into a silk chiffon dress. The translucent fabric tightened on her skin. She was neither excited nor curious about the transsexual who would soon enter her room. She had exhausted the limited sexual repertoire of anomalies. This one like all the others, pre-op and post-op, would lay claim to having been re-born by hormonal structuring. She would earn admiration for her constructed figure, and for the way she took off elbow-length gloves like stockings. Leanda would enjoy her and then watch her disappear back into the house. And did they all remain there, a convention of sex slaves crowding a hall? She wondered if they were admitted back into time, or if they remained casualties standing on the edge of events, and no longer assimilated with the dimension on which they had lived. Perhaps she would meet them all again in one of her dungeons, and on one of those nights when she walked endlessly through the
château's multiplying rooms. In a room she had never entered before, she had found one of the oriental girls lying beneath her leopard, and had expressed no surprise that the two should form an incongruous sexual act.

When the transsexual entered her room, she was wearing a micro-skirt made of green and mauve ribbons, and heels so exaggeratedly high that she wobbled when she walked. She had been made up according to Leanda's s
pecifications, and the blonde wig she wore together with the pronounced lipstick line had her look like Jayne Mansfield.

She came and sat on Leanda's lap, subm
issive, desperate to please. Her tongue had been scented with a glass of cassis, and Leanda slipped her hand up the transsexual's skirt to find that she was now a woman. The male genitalia had been replaced by an artificial vagina. Leanda preferred it this way. Nicole still liked it if they had cocks in contrast to conical breasts. She encouraged the transsexual to explore her and they began a process of mutual masturbation, something Leanda found exciting for she could exactly empathise with the other's sensation. It was like tickling herself, and watching a stranger's open mouth answer in response to stimulus.

In her mind she hadn't yet conceived the strategy she would employ with this slave. Whipping her would prove too mundane, as would selecting the right colour and size dildo with which to enter her bottom. Leanda
just allowed their exploratory fingers to create a tantalising friction. She let herself drift into fantasies in which she was lying beneath her leopard on the four-poster. And without instructing the animal, it had her with all the sinuous expertise of the best male lover. The creature withdrew before climax and left her shaking with convulsive orgasm. Then she was somewhere else. Strings of pearls were being fed into her bottom and vulva. The contact of the beads with her sensitive tissue was excruciating. The trick was repeated with increasing speed. As her mouth widened to a red oval so a cock was forced into that apace. She didn't know who she was sucking, she might have been practising fellatio on a leather giant. And she wanted the whole cock inside her, the balls as well. She achieved this with oral felicity. The recipient gasped in way he would never repeat. And after him there were others who invaded her mouth, a whole succession of phalli desperate to be deep throated.

Leanda clicked out of her suc
cessive fantasies, and found the transsexual awaiting her instructions. She ordered the girl to strip to her red sequined thong. Her breasts with their silicone implants were like Monroe's. Generous to the point of appearing deformed. She wanted to come between them. She sat astride the girl and worked her clitoris to a comfortable position in the cleavage. Leanda felt like cheapening the act. She straddled hard, working her clitoris from breast to breast, delighting in the contact of each nipple with her slit. She wanted to cry out, but didn't. She pulled up short of reaching orgasm, and began slowly and with modulated passion to kiss the transsexual full on the mouth. And all the time she was imagining death, the erotically charged split second before extinction, the moment supra-consciousness exploded like amyl nitrate in her nerves. It would be literally like breaking through to the other side. She would leave her partner stranded in time as her trajectory reached for the stars. This person was too malleably inert, too obsessed with the body to get beyond its limitations. Leanda sensed that this sex would take her nowhere. XZ had pointed to far more interesting possibilities. Not only extra-dimensional contact, but the programming of the senses to create new erogenous loci. There was no way in which Leanda was going to discover a means of eroticising this transsexual's stomach button or left eyebrow, and there was no way they would meet on a subtle plane, each of them attached to their physical body by a vibrant thread that tensed silver in the light.