The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus Read Online Free Page A

the cranial fissures of the skull placed in front of him.
    There were no acknowledgements or introductions, just a formal disquieting silence. Betty was placed opposite Leanda, and the midget served a marginally chilled Brouilly, its tang sitting on the tongue like an autumn leaf. Betty noticed that a pair of black gloves had been arranged beside each plate, as though in preparation for a rite. A monkey ran into the hall and out again, pursued by the midget. Betty waited for the extraordinary to happen. It wouldn't have surprised her if she was to be the main course, wrapped in gold foil, and made to lie on a giant serving plate. She could imagine such perversity. There was no end to sexual preferences. She had licked chocolate mousse off managerial cocks, and savoured caviar on a swollen vagina. Edibles were one fetish, and there were a million others. It was the serene detachment unnerved her. The people appeared to be spectators of an invisible film, and little connected to any form of shared reality. There wasn't any point in starting a conversation, and Betty wished she was back on the street in her precinct. At least there was an external world to which she could relate in the familiar streets that she had made her own. Here she was displaced and disorientated. She wondered if the two male guests were automatons, and if at some point the women would consult their artificial intelligence. Betty hardly touched her starter, a particularly fine consommé perles de Nizzan . Her adrenalin was fired, and she found it difficult to eat. Not that she had any reason to be self-conscious. No-one made any reference to the food or each other. If a coffin had been brought to the table, the wreaths spilling whitely across the dark wood, she knew it wouldn't have drawn any comment.
    The midget assiduously poured wine. There was a pause between courses, before Betty and the other guests were advised to put on the black silk gloves beside their plate. Leanda and Nicole accomplished this with finesse, the two male guests and Betty achieving it by slower degrees. The gloves were fitted to the elbow, and ruched across the fingers. A wine was poured, before the midget, commanding silence by the smallness of his body in proportion to the book, began to ask for absolute concentration prior to reading a prayer written by the Marquis de Sade. The voice that issued was an unwavering baritone.
     
    ‘Lord of the penis spiced to please the tongue
    and testicles like full chestnuts, well hung,
    accept my litany that I may know
    the ways in that I should and shouldn't know.
    Accept the provocation of a bum
    d ivided neatly like a purple plum.
    And may I stand at dawn like someone who
    identifies with those whipped black and blue.'
     
    The midget closed the book, and placed it on a purple cushion. Now that the rite had been performed, the silence seemed even more oppressive. Betty waited for the main course to be brought in, conscious all the time of the contrast between the guests who appeared outwardly to be refined aesthetes, and the apparent debasement intended by the prayer, and the erotic accoutrement attached to everything at table. The cultivation of the weird seemed less an affectation as a gloss on some deeper aberration. Betty sniffed a rat in their motives. She was increasingly anxious to break the silence. And now the midget had reappeared with a silver serving dish. He carried it, eyes focused on the lid, his manner one of having been assigned a hieratic task.
    And in keeping with the unorthodoxy of the occasion, Betty heard Marc Almond's buried vocals accompany the midget's serving. She had heard this song The Slave played in select clubs. It concerned a man who relates his experiences in a Byzantine harem. Naked, kept in a cage, his overriding desire is to become a real woman. The impassioned emotions communicating through the lyric seemed in keeping with the place, but in contrast to the imperturbable cool of the guests.
    After