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  "I, Lord E.?" Sir William said in a hushed tone. "What should I have to say?"

  "Can you not control this upstart?" Lord E. demanded.

  I realized at once that Lord E. knew Sir William's identity within the Order. Corruption, it seemed, had spread far. I glanced at Harry. He too had understood and his eyes flickered dangerously behind his mask.

  "I..." Sir William stammered, coming to his feet.

  "Silence!" I cried. I pointed an accusing finger at Sir William. "Sit down, sir, or by Death you will answer!"

  Sir William flopped back into his seat, a broken man. I clapped my hands. Two masked men appeared suddenly. They were dressed in black tights and black turtle-necked pullovers. They moved like ballet dancers.

  I pointed to Lord E.

  "Take that blasphemous rogue to the cellars!" I commanded.

  Lord E. gasped and was about to speak, but one of my men in black had produced a short length of lead piping. He struck Lord E. once, hard, across the cheekbone, and the gentleman collapsed in their arms. Then, swiftly, they removed the unconscious body.

  Harry meanwhile had descended from beside the block and was dragging Lady E. toward the dais by the wrist. The rest of the company were shocked. Half of them were standing up.

  "Members, be seated. You are in the presence of Pain!" This was blared through the auditorium as if by megaphone. Harry and I had arranged a number of these stage effects against any eventuality. The reaction was instantaneous. The audience sat down.

  "Now let us have silence!" I cried.

  The hall was silent.

  "Strip naked!" I said to Lady E.

  She hastened to obey.

  Her slightly fat, milk-white breasts sprang free of the brassiere like startling rubber balls. The soft fat on her shoulders and upper arms was pink and quivering. In silence she undressed, removing her girdle so that the soft flesh of her creamy belly fell in a tremulous melon-smooth disc over her thick-chevroned cunt. She stood shyly before the multitude.

  I raised my arms to form a cross of my body once more.

  "Let us pray!" I said.

  The Congregation went down to its knees.

  "To thee, oh Pain, we consecrate the agony of this woman's flesh! Help her to suffer! To feel the quick brightness of your movement in all the muscles and fiber! Teach her to scream! Teach her to treasure every humiliation, every violence that we, thy servants, inflict upon her trembling flesh! Take unto thyself her utmost misery and turn it by the shard of thy cruel tongue into the fire of purity in her veins! Amen."

  I turned to Harry.

  "Let us proceed."

  He bound her tightly with leather thongs to the block so that her large spreading buttocks jutted out like marble toward him. Her big creamy thighs were thonged a foot apart at the knees so that her anus showed like a small red berry peeping beneath dark hair and the stubborn tuft of her hot cunt was visible from the rear.

  I raised my right hand.

  "Let the Great Lord of Pain visit the willing flesh of this trembling woman with his dark power, and let the Communicants who visit this, the symbol of the flesh of our Virgin of Death, with the seal of their doting lips be themselves visited with an eternal lust for his quick and striking fire!"

  I turned to the Members.

  "Let the Communicants come forward!"

  The Members rose as one body. They formed silent queues in the aisles.

  "Let the first Member bring his lips to the altar!"

  And then they were moving, each member kneeling in front of the soft mellow buttocks, crossing himself, and sinking his tongue to the hilt in the hair-sharded little red anus of the lovely Lady E.

  This part of the ceremony took about half an hour because of the large number of Communicants. At the end of it, Lady E. was shuddering with lust. She had no doubt come two or three times during the sacrament. The Communicants had returned in silence to their seats.

  "Daughter! Are you ready to receive the visitation of Pain himself?"

  "Yes, oh yes! Please!" Lady E. gasped.

  I nodded to Harry.

  He stepped back into position and struck her forcibly on the buttocks with the brand new five-fingered-spranger. I noticed that the wood of the block was wet with Lady E.'s sweat. After the third stroke it seemed as though her quivering flesh was trying to melt into the wood.

  At the sixth stroke, she screamed and the terrible scream ran like a nightmare among the Members. Their faces were tense and receptive.

  I directed Harry to go on. His big member flapped rampant on his gleaming white belly as he struck.

  The scream came again.

  He struck again.

  At the tenth stroke I recognized the familiar scream, out of control. The sacrament was accomplished. The lady was "beside herself:" only then did she enter pure into religion. I threw off my black vestments and stepped naked down from the pulpit, the black cross swinging between my legs.

  I motioned Harry aside and fell on my knees before the bleeding buttocks. Skillfully I ran my tongue in the sweating furrow of her cunt until I felt the shudder of response from her whole torso. Then, kneeling straight up, I crossed myself and turned again to face the members. The green arc-light had followed me and gave a ghostly radiance to the full curves of my flesh. I raised my naked arms so that my breasts were lifted high, my black nipples poised delicately like the eyes of an insect.

  "Holy Father of Pain we thank thee!" I screamed. "May the Virgin Death be appeased by this sacrament!"

  In unison the Members said Amen.

  Harry cut the woman from the block and she was carried out by the two men in black.

  I returned to the pulpit.

  The most difficult part of the ceremony was over. One of the most influential women had accepted public flagellation. True, I still had to deal with her husband who was locked in the cellars, but for them, the Members, he had already been dealt with. My authority was established. Harry, his arms crossed on his broad chest, and his member still rampant, stood below the pulpit to the right, facing them. I looked over the sea of faces and spoke calmly.

  "Members of Pain! I speak to you now to recall you to your true discipline! Over the years you have become fat and idle and prurient. Instead of lacerating your own flesh, you have preferred to lacerate the flesh of hired minions; instead of knowing the joy of Pain, you have inflicted an unholy pain on prostitutes; instead of drinking at the well of suffering, you have come drunk, fat, and replete with earthly joys to make a brothel of your Holy Temple. You have made an idol of ordinary lust and come amused to exercise it in the Holy Temple of Pain! With your money and your earthly power you have bribed and corrupted Pain's holy servants and caused the sense of Order and Hierarchy in this Congregation to resemble an auction in a whorehouse! The repercussions of your blasphemous behavior are not yet at an end. But the Order of Pain will weed all corruption out. Men may die, but the Order is everlasting!

  "Did you think that Pain was so weak that He would continue to overlook this outrage?

  "Did you think you had bought Him too?

  "Let me warn you of your error here and now! Rather would Pain thrust red-hot steel through each and every cowardly heart in this Congregation than suffer your blasphemies any longer! It is for you, the Members, to choose: Death or Purification! I warn you to beware! I, bearing the Holy Seal, am the Judgment!"

  I changed my tone of voice: "All Members in the first two rows will now leave the Temple. They will follow the Whipmaster to the Room of Flagellation. They will taste great Pain tonight!"

  I fell silent until these chosen twenty had been ushered out of the Temple.

  When they had gone, I addressed those who remained.

  "I take it that the twenty Members who have just gone to their punishment were at the center of the corruption of which I spoke. That does not exonerate you. When you felt the wind of corruption in our holy Order, you should have taken a firm stand against it. For this reason you will each during the next three mon
ths make a weekly presentation of your flesh for flagellation. Only the dead will be excused. And now, before you go, you will each swear allegiance to me, your Holy Painmistress, by kissing my cunt."

  I came down out of the pulpit and stood, hands on hips, my mound thrust forward, to meet the first of a hundred and eighty doting tongues.

  -4-

  In my private apartment I sat naked in front of the fire. From time to time I touched my clitoris and allowed the heat from the glowing embers to strike softly on the wet red amorphousness which lined the interior of my cunt.

  To have a cunt!

  How wonderful it was to be possessed of this sensitive passage! And yet, as I sat there fingering it, I knew that it would never know the presence of a male member. The office of Painmistress did not require me to be a virgin, nor did any other position in the Holy Hierarchy. I knew that now. But I remembered poor Oakes saying that he hoped I would turn out to be "our Virgin." The thought rankled. What had he meant? Was it not enough to be Painmistress? Could I not hope soon to be a Grand Painmistress, even a Pain Cardinal? Why then should I not give myself to Harry when he came up, Harry whose big cock I had sucked innumerable times since I had arrived definitively in the big house, Harry whose balls I had caressed, bringing them gently against my wet, lustful lips? Of all the men I had known, Harry was the most worthy. Why not then? He could sleep with me. I would be his woman. And as a Whipmaster he was excellent. Why not? Why?

  I had not bothered to join Harry and Willie in the basement. Lord E. was securely locked in the cellar humorously referred to as the "death-cell." His wife was recovering in one of the many antechambers. The twenty proud Members were at present being reduced in the flagellation room to so much whining flesh. I had already sent instructions that they were to be detained for a week's continual treatment. By the time they went back to their ordinary life, they would have signed and re-signed allegiance with their blood.

  What was it then that haunted me? Why was I not satisfied with the success of my official inauguration?

  Was it that I was not born to be a member of the Hierarchy? What strange lust made me cling to my virginity?

  Above the fire was the usual picture representing the Virgin Death.

  The Virgin Death?

  Had I to die a virgin?

  How?

  Like her?

  Nailed to the cross of wood?

  A sweat of lust had gathered about my thighs.

  To be crucified?

  Was that the ambition that lurked in my heart?

  The last dedication?

  Life itself?

  For the Order?

  Why, then, had they elected me? No, not death, not that ultimate leap into nothingness. Pain, yes. Pain and more pain. But where did that lead if not to death? Death, the final pain. And if death, why not the Virgin Death?

  Had she ever existed?

  Our Virgin, Oakes had said. What did he mean? I lifted the black cross between my fingers. What did it mean? Why had they attached it to me like a price-ticket to a sold object? To whom could I go for advice? To Sir William? The Grand Painmaster! But he was part of the corruption! He was what I had been brought in to destroy. To whom then? Harry? But Harry, for all his intelligence and bodily beauty, was only a functionary. What could he tell me? He was absolutely cut off from the higher echelons of the Order, like Oakes. Like Sir William? Perhaps he, already corrupt, could be persuaded to give me information.

  I smiled at the thought.

  My own Grandmaster was at present in the cellars undergoing the same punishment as the mutinous Members! And he had not raised his voice in protest. Neither had King, who was also among the twenty, nor Duval, nor Coldstream, but those three were evidently to be trusted. That's to say, in so far as anyone in our Congregation could be trusted.

  Try as I would I could not kill the little worm of discontent that wriggled deep within me. Before my election I had, as it were, been innocent, involved entirely in my personal pain and the ecstasy of my flesh. I had had no contact with intrigue, with politics; my religion was pure. I could remember loving St. Francis as a small child, but the worldly machinations of the Popes and Cardinals had held no interest for me. And here now in another Order, an Order similar in structure to that of the Roman one, I was already established within the Hierarchy. Was this, then, to be my life? Perhaps in the distant future to be elected Pain Cardinal and to have a voice in the election of Pain?

  I rolled over on my soft belly on the rug and closed my eyes. There was a delicious tiredness at my limbs. It had been a strenuous day. I had emerged victorious. Time enough later to think of the small needle of discontent.

  There was a knock at the door.

  "Come in!"

  It was Harry.

  "All over," he said as he walked across to the fire and sat cross-legged beside me. "Your Willie did a good job. I'm sure half the women are in love with him already."

  "What about Hazel?"

  "They've gone to bed together."

  "Who?"

  "Willie and Hazel. They make a good pair!"

  I felt a small prick of jealousy, but it soon faded. What did it matter? Those innocent days could never be recaptured.

  "Something worrying you?"

  Harry had laid his hand on my buttocks and was caressing them gently. I turned over so that my hot hairy mound came against his hand.

  "Why don't I give myself to you, Harry?"

  He was slightly pale.

  "Why don't you?" he said. "You know I worship you, Gertrude."

  His fingers played gently with my pubic hairs and touched the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. He lifted the black cross and looked at it as he might have looked at a pocket watch.

  "You're not happy," he said, looking at me intensely.

  "No."

  My eyes were closed. I felt his warm palm on my belly.

  "You want to get away from all this?"

  I laughed sadly, opening my eyes to look at him. His face was set. He was not wearing his spectacles.

  "Get away?" I said softly. "What does that mean? You know there is no way out of the Order, Harry."

  He did not answer.

  "You think there is?"

  "We could disappear," he said in a dull voice. "We could, Gertrude. We could go somewhere where they would never find us."

  I laid my hand on his, causing his hand to lie heavily on my belly.

  "Do you really think so, Harry? Do people like us not need the Order? Is that not why we belong to it?"

  "I don't," he said obstinately. "Of course, I'm not a member of the Hierarchy. I'm simply a permanent civil servant!"

  "Would you make me happy, Harry?"

  "Yes, Gertrude. I think I would!"

  "And if I wanted one day to be flogged to death?"

  He was deathly pale.

  "Could you not learn ordinary love, Gertrude? I mean, not ordinary! But a man and woman love."

  "You mean ordinary love, Harry," I said gently.

  He smiled hopelessly.

  "Yes. That's what I mean."

  "No, Harry, I'm afraid not. Don't think I don't want you just now. But afterwards. What then?"

  "But the Order is not against our making love, Gertrude! And afterwards – so what? Afterwards, when we feel like it, we make love again. What else?"

  "It sounds monotonous, Harry. I couldn't bear for it to become monotonous."

  "But life's like that, Gertrude! What do you want? You can't burn with passion all the time. You would soon burn yourself out. Like phosphorous."

  "Perhaps that's the answer," I said quietly.

  "What do you mean?"

  "To raise passion to such a level that life becomes extinct within it."

  "But that's suicide, Gertrude!"

  "I've been thinking, Harry."

  "What about?"

  "About the Virgin Death. Do you know anything about that?"

  "Of course. She symbolizes the infinite lust for Pain, to the point of de
ath."

  "Did she exist?"

  "Oh, lots of people have died under flagellation," he said evasively. "We had a stockbroker ourselves who went out with a heart attack during a flogging."

  "Yes, but it's not the same, Harry. This woman mounted the cross to die. She knew she was going to die. She demanded it. Did she exist?"

  "I suppose from the official standpoint she did. But we're living in the twentieth century, Gertrude. It's a relative age. People don't have the same lust for the infinite, or if they do, they're mad. What's the point? Men like to be flogged or to flog. But to the point of death, that's another thing."

  "But that's just the point, Harry. You know the point at which one screams out of control, the point at which one is simply a helpless victim of the thongs? That is dying, Harry, when one no longer has the power of will. You are suspended in Pain; you no longer wish for it to go on or to stop. You become Pain. If someone were to drive a knife into your heart at that moment, you wouldn't feel it; it would be like turning off the light, that's all. Normally, when you don't die, you come back through Pain to yourself, and it is you who is painful, your own aching flesh. And there's nothing in that; it's simply painful. The triumph is in the rising beyond the painful into Pain. Once that leap out of the self has been made, it is an anticlimax to go back. That's like ordinary lust which goes on and on. You come to the climax and then everything is shattered. You are yourself again, alone, just as you were before. And it goes on and on and on. Until we feel like it again, you said a moment ago. But that's monotonous, Harry. And it's the same with flagellation. Only with flagellation there's no excuse. It's sheer cowardice to come back. Only that person is admirable, only that person is truly religious, who has the courage not to come back. What for, after all? To do it all over again?"

  "All right," Harry said in a tired voice, "so you choose to die because you find life monotonous, because it goes on and on with the same rising and falling, the same thrills which are provoked and which come to an end. But that is what living is, Gertrude, and I don't see why one should expect it to be anything else. For me the courageous thing to do is to come to terms with what you call monotony, that's to say, with reality, to accept it, and intelligently to alter it to one's best advantage. Your way out is sheer Nihilism, and there's a strong core of Nihilism in all the religions. You call life meaningless, and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other. And the application of the words meaningful or purpose to life in the abstract is itself meaningless. All meanings and purposes are men's meanings and purposes; men choose them, often courageously, and then living is easier. But it is the living that counts. Death is nothing; it is simply the point at which there is no more possibility. It may or may not be courageous to court death, but for me, it's insane."