“Sit down on the bed,” the photographer tells the girl. “Take your stockings off, please. And you, little fag, come here.”
She sits herself down on a short square of black silk, in the same pose as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. It all feels like a dream. The photographer moves his heavy apparatus and disappears under its black cloth. She hears the muted sound of his voice, commanding her: “No, thighs apart. Good, yes, like that. Lean backwards, steady your arms, breasts to the front, perfect.”
He reappears briefly . “You,” he says to the young boy, who is pretending to be terribly bored, “come and suck me off while I’m working, it’ll keep you busy.”
“Yes, uncle,” says the young man with a touch of irony in his voice. “Right away, uncle.”
The photographer again disappears under his cloth and, on his knees facing him, the boy, with obvious dexterity, pulls out a remarkable cock, disproportionate in places, whose fat and swollen helmet emerges triumphantly from a dry, nervous stem. The boy licks it quite methodically and witnesses the bulging fruit thicken even more under his ministrations.
“Swallow,” says the voice under the black cloth.
Obediently, the young boy opens his mouth wide and, jaws wide apart, devours the strange and monstrous fruit.
All the while, the photographer is taking picture after picture, only making appearances to change the plates and sprinkle more magnesium into his flash, just his voice emerging from beneath the black sheet. “Yes… now each of you suck one of her breasts… like that… ah, a hand on her thigh… open wider, my pretty one… against that black silk background, you are just sublime. Throw her backward, now. One kissing her, the other licking her… yes… more profile, please, I can’t see your tongue… no, don’t look at the camera… very good, head thrown back… and you there, suck a bit better than that or I’ll have you whipped right in front of these ladies…”
“Oh, yes,” says the catamite, interrupting his labors.
Together with her two new friends, he has her adopt the most lubricious poses, ever on the lookout for the moment when she comes. Under their tongues and fingers, she experiences a whole series of orgasms, until she totally forgets where she is. Only the bright explosion of the flash, from time to time, reminds her that a man is taking photographs of her while…
Is it the caresses that are generating her pleasure or the fact she is being photographed? The orgasms, the flashes of light, one or the other or both are levitating her out of her body. Every time her mouth opens on a silent scream, the flash of the magnesium betrays the fact that the photographer has captured her moment of selflessness, stolen yet another parcel of her soul, her life… it’s as if she was being emptied from the inside, as if her very substance was now flowing down her thighs, captured by the photograph, disfigured, transformed…
The sound of the door opening…
A bit later, a cock thrusting up her ass, another forcing its way down her throat, the room is now full of men and women, all the guests from dinner, each and every one fucking her in every way, and from orgasm to orgasm she feels herself grow wider, dilate until she is just a set of openings, of holes, deep abysses where cocks are ejaculating before being replaced by larger cocks or more numerous ones. Now they are penetrating her two at a time, in her cunt, in her ass, they come in twos to tease her mouth, and innumerable pairs of hands roam across her body, pinch her, sometimes spank her, and above it all the voice of the photographer encouraging them, and the brightness of the flash, and that anxious feeling that she is now no more than an empty space being furrowed, a nothingness full of come, devoured, eaten from the inside by a horde of vampires. Soon there will be nothing left of her, just some long blonde hair matted with sweat, a white expanse of flesh torn apart by caresses, a set of pale eyes she holds tightly closed while all of her is being impaled and only the violent flashes of light make their way through to her dead eyes.
Suddenly they all abandon her. From one moment to the next, it seems to her, there is no one left. She runs her hands in front of her eyes as if she were blind. The commander is standing in front of her and watching: the same cold marble eyes, the same early taste of the tomb. He gently applauds her, as he had earlier, but now there is no sign of irony on his face.
“Very good, my dear, very good indeed. I knew we could rely on you.” He comes towards her, takes her hands, invites her to rise from the deeply soiled bed of black satin. “Come,” he says. “There is one final thing for you to do.”
Together they walk down the stairs. There are so many rooms, so many passages she will know nothing about, whose anonymous numbers will not be revealed. What masked ball or orgy in room twelve, what improvised concert in room eight? They find themselves on the steps outside the castle. The cicadas are now silent, the night is still far from morning, but she hesitates. The moon has moved across the roof and a wide geometrical shadow now covers a whole section of the lawn. All that emerges, on the frontier of darkness, is the statue of the goddess, even whiter in the light of the moon.
The commander leads her to the statue. The grass is mown short and feels hard against her bare feet. She shivers, not because she is cold, as spring down here already has a touch of summer, but because of the anxiety that always strikes towards the end of a night’s party, when all is over and loneliness is about to knock on the door again and all you are left with is memories…
“Get up on the pedestal,” he says. “Yes, like that, with your eyes facing the eyes of the goddess. Take her into your arms – very good, now your hands on her ass, yes. Now, don’t move.”
Methodically, he ties her to the statue with thin string. He ties her tightly, the rope biting into her flesh, her breasts crushed against the stone breasts of Venus – or is it Diana – and then her legs are pulled up against the legs of marble, ankle against ankle, until she can barely move an eyelash, her face pressed against the stone head.
“They’re the same colour,” says a female voice.
“That’s true,” says another man. “Maybe it’s the statue that’s actually tied to her.”
“Predator and prey,” jokes yet another. Are they all there?
“Let’s begin,” someone says. “It’s time to end all of this.”
The sharp whisper of the first lash precedes by a microsecond the blow that lands on her rump. She screams, or is it her tortured flesh that screams under the assault of the whip? But she is not surprised; she is already resigned, abandoned, punished because she is innocent. Innocent of what?
She screams, tries to wriggle out, but she is tied so tightly that the marble bites into her. She cries out as the whip keeps on finding her, with every new blow her skin opens up, like paper under a knife. Soon her ass, her back, her shoulders have become the mad canvas of a mad artist, blood spurting in lines and blotches, spreading, merging. The blood now turning her flesh dark, woman of bronze tied to woman of stone. Pain begins to anaesthetize pain, she is an open wound, furrowed, overtaken by heat, by fire irradiating from the very centre of her belly, and she is aware that this unbearable heat rising towards her heart will soon kill her as surely as the cold poison killed Socrates. She no longer screams, just feels the heat rising, the whip opening up new valleys, Venus watching her in silence, and when the time comes a ray of moonlight reaches out to seize her in its grasp, and she dies of unbelievable pleasure, part and parcel of the immense fire of the whip.
The moon finally moves behind the house, the darkness drowns the statue and its victim. They leave her tied there and walk back to the house in silence, satisfied.
There is but a bare sketch of dawn. A gentle breeze weaves across the park, though the wind is not strong enough to lift the bloodied strands of blonde hair now slowly drying.