The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (24 page)

Outside he could hear the continuous rain. It streamed into his recognition as counterpointed dialogue. He could hear it washing through the dense oaks, and enveloping the surrounding countryside in a dazzling haze. He wanted it to rain all night and all day and night. He had the idea that the château was an island, and that rain was blowing in from a grey marbled sea. He imagined there were wrecks in the garden, and that liners had foundered in
their passage round the coast.

He would stay up all night, and savour the intensity of each moment. He know that Jacques would be urgent to fuck Nina, and he accompanied her to the bedroom where her urgent lover was waiting. He told her that she was allowed only twenty minutes with Jacques, on this momentous night, when he so needed her attention, and Donatien decided to wait outside the bedroom door for the allocat
ed period of time.

Nina disappeared into the bedroom wearing nothing but flesh coloured panties, and an equally transparent bra. Donatien could hear Jacques imploring her favours. The latter must have immediately placed her over his knee, for he could hear the sound of Nina's bottom being alacritously spanked. It was a register that never ceased to thrill Donatien. He knew from the sound that Jacques was spanking Nina through the skin
-tight nylon that windowed her bottom, while Jacques' intermittent gasps suggested that they had repositioned themselves for a backward 69 interlude, and Donatien could hear the sounds of Nina engorging her lover's strainingly-taut muscle. Nina must have impressed on Jacques that they were allowed only twenty minutes, for Jacques sounded desperate in his urgency to come. This was achieved with agonisingly convulsive sounds, and still unappeased, Donatien could hear Jacques flip Nina onto her back and enter her with direct authority. The noise of their intense fucking was one that had the bed smack violently against the walls. It sounded to Donatien as if the bed was walking around the room, as Jacques thrust harder and harder into the compliant Nina. When the bed began to stampede, Donatien knew that the couple were near to coming. Nina's shriek was extended again and again as Jacques buried his urgency in her interior.

Donatien decided to walk back down the corridor and wait for Nina in his room. He know that the hours ahead were to be occupied with nothing but the thought of his marriage. He could smell the night as it lived in the castle's deep corridors. The night to him was also the scent of Marciana's skin, and he found it under her tongue, under her arms, and in all the secret c
revices of her erogenous zones.

Nina returned to his room with her hair and face flustered from her recent exertions. Her eyes were lit with intense passion, and the bruised lipstick describing her mouth looked like a number of crushed raspberries. The stimulated pheromones had vitalised her skin, and Donatien could imagine the infla
mmation of her sensitive vulva.

Donatien continued to drink and reminisce. He had decided to sanctify his marriage through the letting go of redundant memories. There was much to keep, and much to exorcise. He intended the marriage to sanctify the best of him, in a way that would allow him to make a direct pact with the angelic realms. And only then would
he have secured his objectives.

Nina, who had checked progress on the wedding preparations informed Donatien that the chapel had been made ready, and that a heart-shaped space described by red sequins had been prepared as a performance area for Raoul. The chapel had been draped in red and black and purple, and girls dressed in angelic costumes were to stand on various elevations during the ceremony, and to shower the assembled gu
ests with bleeding-heart roses.

Donatien began feeding himself the aphrodisiac tinctures that accounted for his indomitable phallic mastery of his sister. He intended to give himself an erection that would last for twenty-four hours. In this time, he estimated, he would
introduce Marciana to paradise.

Donatien reminded Nina that six boys with their naked bottoms sprayed purple were to bend over as a salute as he entered the chapel. Their genitalia he insisted were to be glittered with silver, and their
hair glammed with frosted gel.

Donatien continued to drink a vintage fermented from the château's vineyards. The wine was his life force, and its
colour that of undying autumn.

Nina was now through with her last revisions to the refortification of Marilyn's black panties, and assured Donatien that after Marciana had worn them, they would become one of th
e sacred heirlooms at La Coste.

Donatien briefly resumed his night thoughts, imparting to Nina now and then some recollection retrieved from the crowded events of his stormily unpredictable life. He remembered being driven in a Rolls across
America, the car heading from the East to the West coast pursued by mafiosi. Donatien told Nina of how he had been conducting magic sex rites in the desert, and had been hunted across the States by members of an opposing lodge. Donatien told Nina how he adopted drag in order to elude his opponents, and of how he had worn constrictively tight skirts and satin pumps for weeks on end, until he had finally thrown his assassins off the trail.

Donatien fished for selective memories. He could sense the passage of time, and the glow in his abdomen informed him of the repressed excitement he felt at the prospects of marriage. He looked around him at the furniture which had survived the château's original ransacking in the French Revolution, and took in the books, the lacquered chests, the blue tapestries, the Chinese jars, the original flyers for various of his plays, and the general ephemera on show which contributed to his sense of continuity. He wondered why after so many centuries, he wasn't tired, and why he and his sister had been elected as t
he prototypes of a new species.

He informed Nina that before settling to his prayers and preparations for the coming service, he would like a bottom parade. She was to select from the castle's harem a number of boys and girls who were to visit Donatien at dawn. Donatien had decided that this viewing would distract him from the possibilities of feeling too isolated or too dehumanised in the long night watches. He was secretly frightened of remembering too much. For some reason he had found himself situated in 1790
, at the time of his separation from his wife, and the beginnings of a new affair with Marie Quesnet. They had set up house in two properties on the rue de la Ferme des Mathurins, in Paris, and much of the furniture now on display before his eyes had been transposed to those two houses. He recollected the stimulus of that new beginning in 1790, and juxtaposed it with his intention of marrying his sister. If the one had represented the coming together of two people in difficult historic times, then the other represented the timeless incestuous consummation to which he had always aspired.

When Nina returned she was accompanied by six of the château's best bottoms. Both sexes were wearing face veils and rhinestoned G-strings, and Donatien who took up a seat central to the room ordered that the seraglio should walk around him in a continuous circle for fifteen minutes. In this way his trained eye could appraise proportions of the blindside face which fascinated him to a degree of madness. But Donatien could find nothing exceptional in the molecular composition of the three male and female bottoms on display. They were heart-shaped, nut-shaped and epsilon-shaped, but lacked the square within the circle that so dis
tinguished Marciana's buttocks.

Donatien had decided not to fuck any of the bottoms on show, but to devise a game of hunt the instruction. The three girls and three boys were duly blindfolded, and then bent over a sofa. Donatien took a lipstick, and with its red point wrote a series of erotic imperatives on each of the twelve cheeks. The rules of the game were that each person should then form a chain, and act on whatever were the instructions written
on the bottom in front of them.

The six individuals were placed in a line, and their blindfolds were removed. They had no option but to obey whatever confronted them, for the failure to do so would result in a severe thrashing from Donatien. It was Donatien's way of choreographing an opportune orgy. He advised the company that they had only fifteen minutes at their disposal to live out their fantasies, and then retired to his chair to observe the proceedings. The way in which the pairing fell was random, and in one case two girls faced each other, and the order comprised boy, girl, girl, boy, girl, boy. Dildos were made available to the girls, for one girl had been commanded to sodomize the other, while it was intended that the third girl in the party should sodomize the boy. This weirdly contrived geometry afforded Donatien a sense of perverse pleasure, as he watched the often mismatched couples attempt to conjugate bodies. Al the end of the proposed fifteen minutes he brought the orgy to a peremptory termination with a single whip crack across the wall. The incongruously coupled partners dropped down from exhaustion, before being revived again wit
h copious amounts of champagne.

It was to be Donatien's last distraction before the great ceremony in the morning. He dismissed the orgiasts as though they were inconsequential ephemera, and changing his jacket to black in accordance with his night thoughts, he again took up with his inner dialogu
e.

At some stage in Donatien's introspective drift, Nina must have gone over to the window and reported on the change in the autumn sky. She told Donatien that the morning star had never shone brighter, and that the night was receding. The light in the sky, she said
, belonged to his marriage day.

Donatien composed himself for the monumental hours to come. He intended the marriage to carry an extravagance paralleled by nothing in the history of his ancient family. The marriage bed on which he was to sodomize Marciana would comprise the compounded heads of five thousand red roses. On that floral platform he would be initiated into angelic secrets. Marciana's bottom as he knew it, was
a receptacle for the galaxies.

'The world will change as a consequence of this marriage,' Donatien said out loud to Nina. 'We will never be the same again. We will all begin the process of divinisation. And not as XZ has experienced it, but as a gradual awareness of a journey begun.

'Security is to see to it that XZ does not attend the service,' Donatien added. 'I will not have a walk-in present,' he asserted. 'The man is a virtual intruder, and his alien intelligence is not welcome here. Our coding of cryogenic knowledge is not something I will have him infiltrate. At the same time he's too valuable for me to eliminate. I could have him taken to the château's subterranean cages, but that would turn his cult against us. La Coste would have to withstand avenging extraterrestrials.'

Donatien resumed pacing across the purple carpet. His restlessness showed in the way he appeared to be listening to some internal prompting, as though a voice was speaking from his interior. He crossed and re-crossed the purple carpeted arena, his mind dilated with astral theorems, and appeared to be pondering the greatness of the coming day. It seemed to him that he had come this far against all possibilities. He had arrived, and should go on arriving, he told himself, and there was great courage needed to individuat
e according to his incarnation.

Donatien found himself fearing revolt from within the
château. He had so often listened at night to the dull underground roar emanating from the castle's labyrinthine abyss. Some of these captives he reflected, had been imprisoned in the vaults for three centuries, and he was unable to countenance the prospect of facing their age or probable metamorphoses. He knew that he could never risk penetrating the château's depths. To do so, he imagined, would be like stepping direct into the worst recesses of his unconscious, It was an insoluble and recurring problem for him, his inability to silence the inmates. He checked again with Nina that the Purple Princess had been notified of the marriage, and asked that she should be brought to him for a brief conversation. Donatien knew that this would help to warm his emotions, in the way a singer warms his voice, and certain that all the preparations had been undertaken to ensure the extravaganza of the chapel's interior, he settled himself and waited for the Purple Princess's arrival.

Donatien swung round in his chair, and the heartbroken Purple Princess was quite suddenly standing in the room. She still held the mirror in which her dead lover's lips were mounted, and tears had smudged her mascara. Her body showed nude through her shot silk negligee. This woman seemed no longer to care about herself in any way, and Donatien was able to enter direct to her centre. The Purple Princess allowed him to conceive of what it would be like to be a woman. In his imagination Donatien was himself as a lachrymose diva, all piled up hair and panda e
yes and seam-splitting sheaths.

The Purple Princess was shown into a chair by Nina, and there she sat facing the mirror from which she could never be separated. Her black lipstick defined an unsmudgable gloss, and before she would even look at Donatien she bent forward and worked
her lips into her dead lover's.