“Yeah, he is.” They lounged near the front desk. Down the hall, Monica and Valerie were in separate sessions, one of them moaning loudly between harsh smacks. Monica, probably.
Rose held the door open for James. He entered with a half-formed smile on his face.
Karen waved to him.
“Hi, Penelope,” he said.
This time they took the dungeon chamber room.
***
“So, Mr. Cannon,” said Karen in her Penelope twang. “What’s on your mind today?”
James laughed a shaky, hiccupping laugh. “I was actually wondering if, um...if I could maybe spank you this time. If not, that’s fine, because you’re a dominant, right? Not a...um....”
“...submissive?”
“Right right.”
“Well, James baby, you just happen to be in luck. I’m a switch.”
His hands trembled in his gabardine pockets, between which a very observable erection now bulged which he tried to suppress. “How old are you?”
“Let’s not get bogged down in details.” She handed James the paddle. “You got into it just fine the last two times.”
“That was because you were spanking me.”
“It’s no big deal, you’ll be great.” Karen smiled, but it seemed phony. “Just please don’t be too hard.”
She said this sweetly, melting her face into a cute pout. Irresistible, thought James. Then her bare ass was suddenly and fully there before him. Power shuddered through his limbs. He thought of Teresa. She wouldn’t be waiting at home with a gourmet feast, not tonight. Something to do with her Book Club. Probably an excuse. Probably she hated him. Beginning to despise him. There was relief in that. Good. Good.
For reasons not wholly understood, James said, “D-did you...did you know I’m an artist?”
“Oh yeah?” Karen said. “Well, then decorate me however you see fit, James baby.”
“Actually, I shouldn’t say I am an artist. I sort of was. But I’ve been looking at my sculptures and thinking about getting back into it.”
“Please, James baby, I need some discipline. Bad.” She glanced at the clock.
“Could you not call me James baby?” he asked, timidly.
“Okay. Whichever.”
“It’s nothing against the name. I like it. It’s endearing, actually. I just think it’s...you know what, just say it. Please. Don’t mind me.”
“This is your castle now. Whatever you want.”
“You can call me James baby.”
“All right, James baby.”
“I wasn’t always like this, please know that, not this bumbling dork. When I was doing my art—”
His rambling stopped in mid-sentence as Karen took the paddle from him and gave his own rear a forceful swat.
“Pull ‘em down,” she commanded. “Someone’s gonna get it this hour.”
While surprised, James instantly complied.
Karen walloped him hard. At first, the impacts were spaced well apart, each strike leaving a tingling, ecstatic wake, then she sped up the rhythm, harder. Faster. She smacked away the nerves—she smacked away the guilt—smacked away thoughts of the trial—smacked away the James Cannon of five minutes ago. What was left against the wonderful poundings of pain was that vibratory power, hidden deep in his bones and now emerging further, a corona around his mind.
“Penelope,” he said, breathing hard. “Give me the paddle, and get ready.”
She grinned and assumed her original position.
“And in fact,” James said. “Just to make it more interesting....”
“Yes?”
“Could I maybe tie you up, too?”
Penelope smiled as true and bright as Karen would allow.
***
Karen had one more client that day, two hours after James Cannon. She chatted with Monica, who’d had to suck down cigarettes for a client while he tickled her feet. Karen noted that the convulsing reactions of tickle-torture didn’t seem too conducive to smoking, but the client’s fetish came only in both—as individual actions, they did little for him.
There was another client for whom Monica had to run around topless in a room full of balloons, bouncing and frolicking. The girls laughed, and Karen realized in the talk of smoking that she needed a smoke herself.
Not long into her first cigarette, she saw Max coming up the front walk toward the house.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. In his hand he held a cutout newspaper article. “Feel like taking a trip up north?”
Chapter 3
I
Norman Ritter missed the crew of Southwest Airlines telling jokes. As two-bit as many of them might have been, they’d provided him good ice-breakers for the trivial schmoozing inherent in openings or art parties. He was also quite appreciative of a chuckle, chintzy or not, when stuck twenty thousand feet above the Earth in a giant cacophonous capsule rank with the breaths, coughs, sneezes, farts, and who-knew-what-else of hundreds of strangers.
Better than spending eight hours in a car.
For much of the flight, he read about Clifford Feldman, easily one of the strangest personalities that had entered his radar. That was saying a lot, too. Although in the last decade Feldman had been quiet about it, in the late seventies he’d claimed to be the latest incarnation of a Count St. Germain, supposedly a legendary alchemist. On live television, he’d demonstrated a method of turning lead into gold, provoking reactions both curious and contemptuous. How had he done it?
He hadn’t. A goddamn special effect, as it had turned out. Yet in the swirling limbo of controversy, he’d attracted notoriety, built a platform largely of impressionable, disillusioned flower children. Officially, he never denied his claim of being Germain. Those who wanted to believe, would believe.
They landed in Oakland. Ritter promptly went to an airport restaurant and grabbed a ham on rye. Nerves had diminished his appetite on the plane. He ate the sandwich fast on the way to the rental car counter, where they gave him a sparkling blue ‘89 Buick.
Within an hour, he was on the road north. Not long out of Oakland, he passed a small sign.
Twilight Falls 172 mi.
***
II
Dead.
The city was dead. The world was dead. His breaths the last, his movement the final, and it was all for good. Death was a process of folding all things and all people inside out, the ultimate reveal of the core principle living in all matter. The sheer grotesquerie, unfurled to light once more. Everything else a façade.
For the last fifteen hours, Max had been entombed in
