The Attraction, page 17
I paid Rabbit a one-pound note, and he nearly kissed my hand over it. He went hopping off, happy that he’d earned in a moment more than he probably had in the past month or more.
Then I turned back to watch this so-called “master.”
3
He was not like the others. Yes, he had an air of the aristocrat about him. He held his cane and gloves just so, and his hair was cut in the current fashion, and he had the long unremarkable face of the city gentleman.
But he was more alive in his eyes than everyone else sitting in that salon.
He wasn’t there for a girl.
He was there for all of it. A whoremaster? Hardly. This man looked as if he could indeed sell his soul to the devil.
And the devil would want it.
I immediately wanted to meet him. James was stunned that I was not ready to grab a wench and take off for one of the private rooms upstairs. “Take two or three,” he said as he pressed coins into my hand. “These girls will let you do anything you like.” Then he said something that only struck me as odd later, as the night wore on. He winked and said, “All right then, mate, you shall find us when you need us. But you must try the whores here. They’re fabulous creatures.”
But I had no interest. If I wanted sex, I had my life for it. I wanted to meet the man whose dark eyes seemed to know something more about the world than I could learn on my own.
4
I have learned since that his ability had to do with what is called “the glamour,” and that is a level of connectedness to the world that one only gets when under the influence of a particular narcotic, Lotos (not “Lotus,” but certainly meant in the same spirit as the classical lotus of Homer’s poem), in the parlance of the sect that harvests its nectar and administers it to those willing to risk using it, in small doses. But then I just knew that he was magnetic, and I wanted to know something of what he knew.
Without even being sure how I moved so swiftly to him, I stood before him, offering my hand. “Sir.” I bowed slightly, feeling as if he were some prince of the realm.
He waved me off, a dismissive gesture with his hands. “I’m busy,” he said.
“May I . . . may I sit here?” I indicated the seat beside him.
“If you wish,” he said.
“I am Justin.”
He nodded but said nothing. He kept staring at the others. I looked among them, and saw my friend Wendy grab a girl’s breast, stroking it lightly. Then they went off through a second door, presumably to the upstairs rooms.
“All of them,” the man said, “animals.” I would like to say that this distinguished-looking gentleman had an equally distinguished voice, but in fact, he had a slight Cockney accent, but with an upper-crust twist. “Look at them. Feeding on each other. Bloodsuckers. Wasting their energies.”
“You own this establishment?”
“You’re from the country.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Manchester.”
“No, I mean the country. Wales?”
I nodded. “The Northeast part.”
“A collier.”
“I was, sir.”
“Are you the one I was brought here to meet?”
“Sir?”
“I was brought here tonight to meet someone,” he said. “I was called.”
“Sir, it was not I. I only arrived in London today, and am staying with friends.”
“Ah,” he said. “Your friends are here. They bring you to London to see this. The carnival. The flesh pit.”
“No, sir. They brought me here to enjoy a few days respite from studies.”
“A student? I should’ve guessed. You are a poor boy who has clawed his way, using his talents, using whatever is at his disposal, to rise in the world. But this world, this world you see, has no interest in your concerns. Tell me, boy, why aren’t you coupling with one of these ladies? Why aren’t you in the hall, or upstairs on a sodden mattress, your cannon roaring? Isn’t this the sport you students enjoy so much?”
“I don’t find this interesting,” I said. “And I’m not a boy.”
“Of course you’re not, not like our little friend Rabbit,” he said. He reached over, and pressed his finger just under my chin. He felt my pulse. I could feel my heart beat beneath his cold finger. I felt wicked for thinking it, but when he touched me, I experienced a strange and lewd excitement, as if he were forcing some intimacy upon me that both felt good but also felt wrong. As he leaned into the lamplight, I gasped. His face was a smooth alabaster—like a statue, white and cold, and yet handsome in a smooth, unnerving way. His lips seemed to have the pinkness of youth, and his nose, aquiline and noble. Only his eyes, in the flickering light, put fear into me, for the pupils were dilated, engorged and blackened. I will admit that I had only seen this on one human being before:
A corpse.
In my brief study of medicine, I had gotten close to a corpse after examination, and its open eyes were like this. When I asked why, the surgeon told me that it had to do with the trauma that had caused the man’s death as well as some unusual chemical poured into the eye after death. It made the eye look as if it were a large shiny black marble.
“You are twenty. Your name is Justin. Justin Grave. Graverson.” Then he let go. He smiled, slightly. “You are him who I was meant to meet here. You are my reason for haunting this place. Shall I tell you something about yourself, Justin? Shall I? Shall I tell you that I know your soul, and that you have given yourself to pleasures and to death, and you long for something that cannot be held in our world, but only in the next?”
I listened to him with a sense of dislocation. He seemed familiar to me now, as if he were my father, but the kind father I had not yet met. He seemed someone to whom I wanted to be near, to touch in some way. My arousal for the whores (for it would be ridiculous for me to here deny that the sight of the nearly naked women, their bosoms rising and falling as they laughed in the arms of men who stroked them, would not bring me to full goat-hood—my phallus straining against my trousers—as the whole world now seemed as a flesh carnival made only for my enjoyment) had heated my skin and flooded my mind with visions and a long-forgotten taste of a woman’s Venus delta.
And the man who sat with me now, speaking in sonorous tones, with the eerily pale skin and eyes like stone, seemed part of the arousal itself.
“You were born to what you are about to receive, my boy. You were meant for this, for my world, for the future.”
I sighed when he spoke, no doubt like a girl in love, because all my life I had wanted to be destined for something greater than where I had been born. All my life, I had felt that missing thing, that half of me, my twin, my other, the one who knew of me and yet had not reached me.
This man, much older than myself, and yet still young and virile and masterful, might be that one. I do not write here of a sexual nature, but of a compelling magnetism that I could not resist, nor would I, even if given the choice.
“I am your Master,” he said. “I am he who is meant to initiate you into the truth of who you are.”
In that moment, I believed him, and accepted the adventure he offered.
Then he took his gloves up, and rose. “Come with me, Justin. I want to show you something. Something extraordinary.”
Chapter Eight
The Three Rooms
1
The smells of the rooms were intensely conflicted: perfumes the likes of which had not scented harems outside of Araby, mingled with the stench of human sweat and sexual congress. If one believes that fornication is pleasure, one only need dispute this when smelling its effects with many fornicators doing what they love the most. It is the human body at its most pained. And yet its most pleasured. We watch the act of fertility with disdain. It brings us to the level of dogs. And yet within each act, if we are the participants, the excitement and feelings make us believe we are entering the pure realm of godhood. So the participants in these rooms, and in the recesses of the corridors, must have felt their urgent mission of lust to be uplifting, afterward looking at their compatriots, they surely must’ve been struck by the futility and the filth of life itself, and the source of life, the act of the phallus invading the opening of another, which then engulfed and devoured the manhood. And this is what I observed with my guide pointing out the more lewd and twisted body formations around us.
I followed him like a puppy in need of a master, through several rooms, passing by mattresses and writhing bodies. “There are three rooms I want you to see tonight. You will observe those things that you may find most repulsive, perhaps,” he said. “Does that frighten you?”
“No,” I said, and meant it, for I had developed a keen curiosity about him and this place. Truth be told, I had dreams that were much more lurid than even the heaving bodies that slammed and pressed each other in the dank corners of this brothel. Nor, I admit, was I a stranger to the whore, for in Manchester, with friends, I had visited them once or twice, although in circumstances much less elaborate than the Pandemonium.
He led me first into one large room, upon which was a sumptuous bed. The room was well-lighted, and in one corner an African serving girl, coifed in the older style of powdered wig and a lady’s riding suit, played the clavier near the entrance, a lively tune with an unusual rhythm. When I entered the room, she alone turned to look at me, and I discovered that it was not a girl at all, but a young man dressed as a girl.
2
I passed this musician and stepped in farther, for it seemed there was a small crowd therein. Over the bed, a great mirror. Beside the bed, two manservants, wearing only trousers, sat holding long, intricately carved pipes that released a thin, lazily swirling smoke. These were opium pipes. Around the bed sat several well-dressed young ladies and older men, stout and puffy of face. A peculiar sweet smell was in the air, mixed with something like wormwood. The audience looked as if they were meant to be at the opera. Instead, they watched the spectacle on the bed.
The servants’ masters were in the bed, pleasuring a wench sandwiched between them, their shirts only half torn from their bodies. Buttocks thrust into her from before and behind. I was repulsed by this public display more than the activities seen in the other rooms. There was a strange and disturbing refinement to it. These acts seemed less about the pleasure and more about the spectacle. And yet I, like the other spectators, wanted to watch. The moans of lust became loud, and seemed like chants to me, and then in the mirror above, I saw the faces of the participants and recoiled.
My school chums, James and Wendy, pressed into the whore, their hair flying, their eyes rolled up so much into their sockets that all I saw was whiteness. Worse than my friends taking their carnal pleasures, the woman in between them was none other than the angel of purity I had seen at the dinner party:
Anya, the one whom James intended to marry.
The lady I had spied upon in her private moments.
It looked—if this scene were to be believed—as if my friends were taking their liberties with her just as I had dreamed of doing.
Surely, I thought, this was a charade for my benefit; this was a whore who had been made up to look like that most chaste young maiden. Surely this could not be the virgin who at the dinner table was fascinating with art and politics and seemed so much finer than her dinner companions, whose milk-white breasts had invitingly been displayed for me, briefly, without her knowledge.
Behind me, I heard my guide’s voice, “Do you see the beauty of it? And do you see the monstrosity?”
I nodded. With much sadness, I said, “Is this the extraordinary thing you wanted me to witness? The debauchery of an innocent at the hands of two libertines?”
“No, my friend. The extraordinary is yet to come. This is the world, and it is no better than this bedroom,” he said. “Most human beings watch those with power take their pleasures from the innocent and unknowing. She is drugged, you see. She is innocence. They are all guilty, not just the two men, but those who watch and smile. The world is full of spectators, watching the debauchery of others. Watching and applauding its corruption. Look at them, with their fascination at seeing this event. Who in the world is not like this, willing to sit in judgment in the bedroom of others, to clap and hoot and live only through the eyes and not through the soul, and enjoy the humiliation of innocence? The lady in question does not even know she is here. She is dreaming, perhaps. She is not aware of her surroundings. Tomorrow, she shall awaken in her bed, knowing what has happened, seeing these same men and women in her daily life, not being certain if she experienced a nightmare or if, in fact, she has merely been a puppet in their despicable fantasy.” Then, he touched my shoulder. “But come, Justin. There is more to see here.”
I went with him, drunk, not understanding, not knowing if this were all a lie, a show, if Anya hadn’t been at the dinner that night, a whore dressed up as a lady, or if she were a lady, drugged, kidnapped and brought into this den of depravity by my two rakish chums who, in my mind, seemed common criminals for this terrible show. Confusion took over my mind, and I could not believe that James and Wendy were the sorts to do this to a young lady, nor would I believe that Anya was a whore who pretended to society. I began to wonder if something of the poppy had not been slipped into my own drinks that night.
And yet I went with the owner of the Pandemonium, out into the corridor, and down a dimly lit hallway.
3
Into the next room we went, and this one was much smaller than the one previous. Here, there was nothing, nor was there anyone but a small figure, cloaked in some sort of black cape, bent down in the far corner of the room.
“Go to,” he said.
I went over to the figure, and saw that it was not a person at all, but a carved stone statue of a saint in an aspect of prayer.
I turned to my guide, wondering.
“This is God,” he said.
“This is not God.”
“He is in this room, and this is His miracle. A stone image of His work. The image of man. In the image of God. Do you feel Him? Smell Him? Can He be in this room in a house among whores and thieves and drunkards?”
“They say that He can be anywhere.”
“Then He is here. This is His room. But where are his worshippers? They are elsewhere, they surround him in other rooms, obeying the laws of the flesh rather than His laws.”
“Why do you show me this?”
“It is to show you that even in the midst of the worst of humanity,” the gentleman said, “God does nothing. God cares little. Only this statue sits, bent at prayer, hoping to become something other than stone.”
I laughed, enjoying the joke, feeling somehow less disturbed. So this was a carnival, a play, a show for me to enjoy. I wondered if all new visitors to the Pandemonium were treated to this grand tour. I thought of my father, and how he would’ve cried out to heaven to save himself from such heathen and godless behavior, and it made me warm to think that I had ended up at the same place he would’ve considered a vision of hell.
I left the strange little room and its odd statue, and followed him down the last several feet of the corridor.
4
The hall ended abruptly.
“What of the last room? The third?” I asked.
The gentleman then produced a key from his waistcoat, and proceeded to open a door that I would not have noticed had he not known where to turn the key. The door, smaller than most, opened on a long staircase downward. I had to crouch down to fit through the door, as did he. There were lamps lit along the wooden stairs, and again, I followed him, this time into the bowels of the building.
When we reached the bottom step, it seemed darker there, and I hesitated before taking another step forward.
Gently, he took my hand. In the shadows, I could barely see his face. “You must come, Justin. This is why we had to meet. This is what drew me here tonight, and you.”
He led me through the shadow of this underground lair, and soon enough we came to another door, behind which were voices.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To speak with the Dead,” he said.
Visionary 3
Now, I can see them better—there are four of them, coming from the burning forest, loping toward me with their teeth showing yellow and sharp, and the puffed skin around their eyes, their many eyes, red and wounded, and I continue to batter at the door to keep it open, to keep the portal wide. I hear the moans of my chosen one, but I continue to tear at him, to scrape my fingers across his flesh, as the creatures—the gods—come to me, their arms raised in joy and hunger, their nether mouths opening, revealing shiny black teeth beneath the folds of their bellies.
Tentacles of pleasure shoot from me, like light from pinholes in a shadowbox, I AM BECOMING! I AM TRANSFORMING FROM MY FLESH OUTWARD! My subject, beneath me, held and clawed by me, feels the tendrils of my energy pressing along his flesh, into the soft lubricity of his skin, which is shimmering like a lake, and rippling as if hundreds of pebbles are being thrown into it, but not pebbles, my tentacles, my slim quivers, my quills, thrust into his back and thighs, along his shoulders, into his neck, curving around to enter the holes of his ears, and, like a starfish opening a clam, they reach around to his mouth, to his clenched teeth, and pry him open there, to enter him, to take the sacrifice offered, to possess him completely.
The burning within the pathways of my body is heaven itself, is a feeling of well-being and weightlessness, and I as I begin to possess him, to tear him, to gnaw at him, and the gods approach, and reach for his eyes.
Chapter Nine
The Room of Sighs
1
I laughed when we entered the large, well-appointed room. I knew now I must have been drugged in my cups, for I felt wonderful and light, and resisted nothing.
