Betty was left wondering what action had ensued. Did the girl masturbate to the man’s instructions? Did she ride him later on, their two bodies floating like somnambulists on a bed removed from time? Did she discover that although she was connected to his penis he was untouchably far away in another dimension? Perhaps they were living in parallel ones. Betty had known men who were never able to come. They experienced pleasure, but were unable to ejaculate. They could make love for hours but to no conclusion. She usually avoided these, for they tired her with their unappeasable frustration. She had read how Marcel Proust, when he was unable to relieve himself at the sight of a naked boy, had a cage of rats brought into the room. His thrill came from seeing the rats attack and kill each other, a perversion that Betty surmised would be sympathetically viewed at the château. Proust had a dread of direct sexual contact, and half of Betty’s clients were the same, preferring to act out elaborate fantasies than to engage in one to one sex. Microphobia. Autophobia. She just wanted to get out of this dungeon, and go back to a familiar bar by the port. But she could hear footsteps now, and the grating of hinges as a heavy door was ceremonially unlocked.
The leather floor cushioned acoustics, but Betty heard the jab of two pairs of spiked heels cross the intervening divide, and stop at the level of her feet. She couldn’t look round to see who was standing behind her, and she tensed in the uncertainty. Someone or something was licking her toes, and adrenalin shot through her circuit as she realized it might be the leopard. And if it was, the leopard might be instructed to work its way upwards to her thighs. She was still staring at a blue screen. She believed that if she projected hard enough she could travel through it. Her astral propulsion would power her like a jet. Her captors would find nothing but a hole burnt in the blue.
The asperity of a hot tongue interrogating her toes, ceased. No one came forward. Betty lay there every nerve alert, as the silence was punctuated by the rapid breathing of an animal. Then it appeared. The leopard walked along her right side on an extended lead, and sat down in front of her head. Betty was able to observe how the cat’s feet had been fitted into four high heels, the five-inch stilettos that Nicole wore with her constrictive leather skirt. The consequences were those of creating a surreal monster. It also meant that although the animal was deprived of claws, the leather heels would be equally effective instruments should the creature lash out with its paws. Betty thought she was connected with a nightmare. At any moment she would wake up and consign the incident to a dream. The leopard settled down and lay on the floor, eyes lazy with potential menace. Betty felt nothing. Fear had displaced her. She wasn’t here or anywhere. And quite suddenly there were two figures standing with their backs to her, right and left of the leopard. They were dressed in identical black leather. The curve of their figures told Betty that they were women. She imagined it was Leanda and Nicole, features disguised by masks that left holes for the eyes and mouth. Neither of the two paid any attention to her. Rather, they acknowledged the torches, and stared direct at the flame. When she looked again she could see that one of the women was performing a rite with a black dildo. She was intoning a chant, and offering the mamba to the statue. She held it to the marble lips, and Betty heard the voice engaged in a liturgical imprecation. The leopard yawned, and flexed its stiletto paws. Betty had the apprehension that the dildo was being offered up prior to its entering her. She had a vision of the two women strapping it on respectively, and violating her with the fierce pretence of being men. And where were the two men? She could hardly believe they had left the château after dinner, their long wavering headlights pushing white feelers through the country dark. Were they in a relationship, the two of them hiring a penthouse overlooking the harbours, the red and green shipping lights winking on the night waters? And did the man with emerald lenses change them to violet or orange? Betty’s suppositions were conjectural. She had lived for so long amongst people who were of indeterminate or exchangeable gender, that she took no-one’s sex at face value. She knew only the odd and the extreme. Men who dressed up as women for sex, were to her the norm. And she had been had in the past by women who strapped on dildos with the intention of entering her as men. She knew a client who kept a cupboard full of interesting shapes, colours and sizes. Some of them were personally made for her. There were green, blue, mauve, silver and gold artificial phalli which for her extended the vocabulary of sexual possibilities. How many women or men had been made love to by a gold penis on which was drawn the eye of Horus? And for purposes of pure decoration, the woman had dildos encrusted with jewels, metallic or velvet phalli which instead of flowers she placed in a vase beside her bed. That room came back to her now. The woman pleased that she wasn’t a real man, for the ritual surrounding the wearing of a dildo thrilled her. So too did the making out of instructions for the craftsman who delivered her specifications in a series of satin shoeboxes.
Having offered the mamba up as part of a weird ritual, the leather figure kissed it, and returned to her standing position facing the statue. Betty kept blanking out by closing her eyes, in order to avoid the leopard. The creature remained slack, but tensely alert. It was like a tuned guitar, waiting to be played. The two figures continued to stand with their backs to her and then one of them, without warning, spoke. “You will be released at dawn, and driven back to the city tomorrow tonight. You will never know this place again, nor will you remember where it is situated. You are a paid captive. You are expected to obey. You have been given a drug which will subliminally alter your conception of time and space for a week. Your memory of what has happened here will be erased. So too the knowledge that you have eaten flesh from the sacrificial penis. For it was penis we ate at dinner, that most subtle of homeopathic aphrodisiacs. Your priapic virtues will increase enormously as a consequence.”