The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (13 page)

‘You ready to come down yet? No? No? I'll make you beg to be let down. Don't you
worry about that at all.'

She slammed the door behind her and the echo throbbed through the candlelit darkness.

Holly stood. She turned back towards the dark tip of stairs. The candles were fewer
here and she kept her hand on the wall for balance, feeling it cold and damp under
her fingertips. There was a smell to it, foetid like groundwater, thick as moss.
The lower stairs were slippery, greasy. She thought of snails and rats and sewers.
Whatever could have brought her parents to such a place?

There were only three candles in this new corridor. It was lined with doors as before,
but these were solid and dark, the
wood old and cracked and damp with seepage. Holly
picked one of the candles out of a puddle and held it up to the gnarled wood. The
handle was brass; ornate. Holly was afraid even to touch it. She moved between the
doors listening, but the wood was massive and silent.

A slit. A crack in the heavy surface of the door, right at the base. Holly knelt,
water slippery on her knees, palms submerged in a puddle. She pressed her face to
the door. It took her a moment to adjust to the darkness, but when she shaded her
cheek with one hand she began to make out something. Teeth. A snarl. Some animal,
a lion or a tiger, glaring at her. She sprang back, blinking.

She took a deep breath and looked again. Not a tiger. The head of a tiger. A rug.
She almost giggled with relief, leaned closer to the crack in the wood, letting the
mud and muck soak into the front of her black dress. Her nipples hardened with the
cold, her thighs snapped closed like an oyster protecting its pearly prize.

There was a man standing on the rug. A naked man. She took in the tight toned buttocks,
the fine silvering of downy hair on each cheek. The shadow of his balls swaying between
his thighs as he shifted from one straight strong leg to the other. The man had a
mask over his head, a leather sack with coarse stitching holding the edges together.
He eased himself from tiger paw to tiger paw. She noticed his toes, so long they
were almost fingers, the arches of his feet high enough for a rat to scamper under
them safely. In his hand he held a stick with a leather tag on the end. He slapped
the leather gently against his thigh and yet the sound of it was amplified as if
he had raised the crop over his head and brought it thunking down on the back of—

—Her father.

It was her father who cowered at the feet of the masked man, chained to the wall
with a great metal shackle around his neck. Her father: naked, his cock larger than
Holly would have imagined, erect, so engorged with blood that it was almost purple
in colour. The tip was twitching, a single drop of liquid dangling from the swollen
head. Holly watched, appalled, as the mysterious fluid trembled on the tip of her
father's penis before plummeting down onto another animal fur. A zebra this time.
She noted the stripes, and the pained frozen whinny of its horse-like head. Her father's
face glowed with terrified excitement that filled her with horror; and yet somehow
she could not look away.

The other figure was revealed only when the masked man slapped his crop down on the
ground beside her father's legs and he scampered away in mock, or perhaps real, terror.
The woman was chained more tightly to the dank wall. Her legs were spread wide, the
ankles fastened, the knees bent slightly. Her arms were secured behind her back,
thrusting her large breasts forward. Holly could not see her face. The woman was
as anonymous as her torturer, but Holly shuddered to think that this pathetic submissive
might just, by association, be her mother. Her mother. The woman who had packed her
school lunches for so many years.

‘Again,' the torturer spat, a voice that sounded barely human. A slap of the crop
on her father's quivering buttocks echoed awfully around the walls of the chamber.

‘Again.'

And the man who had sat Holly on his comforting knee, taken her to the high school
formal, proudly clapped her
mediocre performance in the final-year musical, this
man, her father, took his frightful, swollen, sweating prick in hand, turned to the
bound and blinded torso of the woman, and plunged it like a weapon into the gaping
maw between her thighs.

Holly shied like a pony, scrambling away from the door. She batted at the mud that
caked her chest, and clawed at the insects that suddenly seemed to be crawling through
her hair. She hurled herself, skidding, slipping, grazing her elbows on the stairs.
A respectable-looking woman was rearranging her skirt in the upper corridor. Holly
shoved past her, hands outstretched, leaving a perfect muddy print of her fingers
on the woman's neat white blouse. She must have looked like a banshee as she hurled
herself through the polite crowd still milling around the living room. She upset
a plate of crudités.

Holly ran till her feet began to bleed. She ran till she had no idea where she was
or where she had come from. When she could run no more she stood, gasping, tipped
her head back to the sky, and there was the bright luminescence of the moon. She
opened her mouth and screamed. It was a sound that seemed to shake the pavement,
the rumble of an earthquake looming. She screamed until her throat was raw and red.
She shook her fists at the sky and when the moonlight glinted off her abstinence
ring she wrenched it off her finger and flung it out into the darkness. She heard
the click as it hit glass. A light flicked on suddenly. A light that clearly illuminated
the interior of a telephone booth.

The bookshop. She was here where the night had begun. She walked towards it like
a sleepwalker, the scents of mint, lavender, rocket rising under her bare feet. The
book was still there where she had thrown it. Not one book but a pile of
books, all
identical, a hundred copies of
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
scattered
like fallen leaves under a strange and curling plant. She touched a naked branch
and sniffed her fingers. A strange oceanic smell, an odd stickiness on her skin.
She bent and picked up a copy of the book. She felt the sharp sting of a thorn pricking
her finger. Put her thumb into her mouth and tasted blood.

Holly turned the book over in her hands. She examined the lewd jacket, the open mouth,
the string of pearls.

‘If you had read the Angela Carter then the truth would not have come as such a shock.'
Mandy was standing beside her. She rested a hand on Holly's slumped shoulder. ‘Nothing
will be the same after reading Angela Carter. But then nothing was the way you imagined
it anyway. Am I right?'

Holly could not go home. Every time she closed her eyes the face of her father reared
up, fierce, pained, pleasured, stark in her imagination. The shape of his cock, the
size of it, the colour.

Mandy laid her down in the back room of the bookshop on a couch made of soft leather.
She drew a fine woollen blanket over her, and when she tucked it up under her chin,
Holly felt safe for the first time that evening.

Mandy picked up the novel that she had placed beside her pillow. She flicked through
the pages, sniffed it as if it were imbued with the most wonderful perfume.

‘Take this,' she said, pressing the book to Holly's chest. Holly's nipples responded,
pricking up to rub against the blanket. ‘Take this in one gulp, all of it. When you
have read it all, you will have gone some way towards recovery.'

Holly nodded. She pressed the book to the little darts of her
nipples. She wanted
Mandy to reach down and rub them, soothe them. She wanted so much more. Her love
was broken. Jack, her friends, her family. All was broken as Holly herself lay shattered
on the couch. Her finger was naked, the abstinence ring abandoned in the herb garden.
She felt the wind whistling across the shards of her body and its strange caress
aroused her.

Mandy leaned forward. She pressed her lips to Holly's lips. A kiss. Holly opened
her mouth. She tasted the colour of Mandy's tongue; the velvet caress of the inside
of her cheeks was a sound like birds celebrating the dawn. Her senses were all mixed
up but that seemed right. She sighed into the confusion of that kiss. She sucked
it down greedily. She fed on it. Her belly swelled. Perhaps she was floating.

The kiss ended too suddenly. Mandy stood. Nodded. ‘I'll return.'

She reached for Mandy's hand but the woman slipped away, out of her grasp.

‘Take it down. One gulp. I promise I'll come back.'

Holly sank into the disappointment of her departure. She picked up the book.

She dropped it suddenly. For a moment she could have sworn that the mouth on the
jacket of the book had moved. She had seen the lips form words and heard a whisper.
‘Nothing is as it seems,' the mouth had said.

She was confused, she was hallucinating. It had been a terribly long day.

Holly picked up the book once more and stared at the jacket. A mouth, a string of
pearls, beads of rain or sweat. She folded back the cover and there was a wet parting
sound like a knife slicing into a melon.

Nothing is as it seems.

She knew that now, and so she was not shocked by the idea that the world was full
of illusions. A machine that made dreams and let them loose into the waking world.
She read, fascinated. When Doctor Hoffman built his terrible desire machine it became
impossible to know what was real and what was fantasy. Holly nodded. Yes. It didn't
seem so fanciful, really. Already she had begun to understand.

Her finger had slid inside herself; now it was slippery. She had been rubbing it
absently against the tight stretch of her hymen, she realised, testing the thickness
and strength of this tiny flap of skin. She felt better now. She knew what she must
do.

When Mandy opened the door to the back room of the bookshop Holly sat up, feeling
the colour returning to her face. She had felt pale and sickly only hours before.
She had been fretful. What would she do now? Where would she go? How could she continue
on with a life that had been destroyed?

‘A quest,' she said to Mandy and the woman tipped her head to a quizzical angle.

‘I will set out on a quest. Like the man in the book. When the city is so cluttered
with illusion I must set out on a quest to see the world with fresh eyes. Another
country. A foreign language. That is the only way to return with fresh eyes, don't
you think?'

‘When will you set out on this quest?'

‘Immediately. Today. Tomorrow. Before my family and friends have time to notice I
have gone.'

‘Goodness. You don't muck around, do you? Where will you go?'

Holly pursed her lips. She thought about the book that had started this transformation,
A Sport and a Pastime.
‘Paris,' she said, decisively.

Mandy moved to the bar fridge in the corner of the room. She opened it and extracted
a bottle of champagne, plucked two glasses off the shelf and then settled onto the
sofa beside her. Holly felt a little thrill plucking at the hairs on the back of
her neck. She shifted restlessly, felt her thigh brush up against Mandy's.

‘Well.' Mandy popped the cork and poured them each a glass of champagne. ‘You will
be where Anaïs Nin fell in love with Henry Miller, and James Salter fell in love
with an entire city.'

As Mandy spoke, Holly glanced at her shirt, the top two buttons open, the soft swell
of cleavage glimpsed. Holly felt the heat from her like a force field. When the woman
pressed her leg against Holly's she felt that same static zap and a tingling that
spread up through her thighs and settled into the cleft between them. She pushed
her knees more tightly together, but that just made it worse. She put her champagne
glass on the table and pressed her hand against her cheek.

‘You can do a literary sex tour of Paris. I'll get a collection of books together
for you. Bataille, de Beauvoir, Duras. Take only the books that were written there,
or about the city of love.'

Holly leaned forward and kissed her firmly on the lips. ‘I'm ready for this quest,'
she said. ‘I'm ready.'

Her heart was beating so fast that she could barely feel Mandy's lips against hers.
She felt the pulse of blood in her face. Her fingers crept up into Mandy's hair and
balled into a fist.
She was kissing. This was the only thought in her head. She had
made the decision to kiss and now she was kissing, not being kissed. She came away
from it breathless, triumphant, a little disappointed that she had no actual memory
of the kiss at all.

Mandy smiled gently, shifted on the chaise, reached out to stroke her head. Her fingers
moved through Holly's hair and Holly felt herself relax. Mandy leaned forward slowly.
Holly smelled the sweetness of the wine on her breath before her lips were close
enough to touch. When they did it was no more than a light caress, a faint feathering
that did more to arouse her than the harsh, full-mouthed first kiss had done.

Holly reached forward, lips as hands, stretching out to catch Mandy's lip, marvelling
at the soft thickness of it, the moist underside, the dry outer rim. Mandy's tongue
flicked out and traced the line of her teeth and Holly opened her mouth a little
to allow the tongue to venture further. The soft wet caress.

Mandy pulled away and Holly felt her tongue recede. A little disappointed sigh.

‘The mouth is like a cunt,' Mandy said, barely a whisper. ‘The mouth is something
to be opened like an oyster, savoured, explored. It hides its cuntish secrets, ducking
behind a smokescreen of words and expressions, but basically it is an organ for
fucking. Like this.'

And she leaned back into the kiss. Holly felt the hard little stabbing of a tongue,
testing the slit between her lips, parting them gently, slipping inside. She felt
the saliva shooting into her mouth, just as a slippery spurt of juice escaped those
other, hidden lips. She felt her hips rock forward, her chin press towards Mandy's
face. It was true. Her mouth and her cunt were somehow mirrored. She felt her mouth
opening, and her
vulva softened with it. She felt her lips part for the probing finger
of the tongue and gasped suddenly as a finger slipped under the defensive line of
her knickers and, aided by the slippery wet, found its way inside her.