Temple of the Gorgon

(Music at paragraph 13 is 'Hanging On' by Active Child.)

"We have been able to 'reach an understanding' with him, First Director..."

"And I see you wish to insert one of our 'illegals' too, alongside -" He leant forward and clasped his hands together on top of the desk. "One of our top foreign resident operatives."

"Aah – we have a slight note of caution to express about this one element First Director. It is likely that our own operative is possibly also experiencing some mild form of pathological profile, we think related perhaps, to past, er, synaptic overload..."

"And so then you will have to explain this to the professor beforehand, so that he is not taken by surprise. I have read the operative's personal file extensively. It is interesting."

*

Where Valeria Rakmanina lived was not an overly-tall building, but it did have a heli-pad on its rooftop. They took me to her using a private KA-62 Oboronprom helicopter, a bright shiny crimson thing, with an interior that looked like it was designed by the same people who build Mercedes cars.

It never fails to impress me just how stable the ride is in the cabin of a decent, non-military helicopter when in normal flight, and how precise good landings feel when they are carried out by competent pilots. This helicopter was set down with its characteristic whiny turbine noise echoing very loudly across the street-created concrete canyons in between all of the surrounding other buildings, probably waking up the entire block neighbourhood snowy caped in its otherwise quiet winter darkness of nearly midnight.

I disembarked and immediately had to turn the collar of my overcoat up in what even seemed to me at the time like a very stereotypical move, but it was so cold outside. I could feel the heat from the turbines juxtaposed against the freezing cold air, wind, and swirling breezes of the open outside deep wintery ambience. Luckily it wasn't very far to the small entranceway down into the building. I had been provided with a key, and I unlocked the door and went in.

...Suddenly, everything was different. The air was different. The sound was different. The temperature was different. And the smell was different.

I had walked into a thick but optically crystal-clear elevator tube, with its luxe floor of thick dark navy blue coloured new carpeting and some kind of logo or ensignia embroidered into it in a silver weave.

As the rooftop door closed behind me, a soundproofed type of silence descended all around. The elevator, instead of lowering, began to turn slowly around. And when it did eventually begin to move downwards, it did so in a smooth languid spiralling motion. At first there was a faint hum, followed by the sound of amplified tumbling water, and then a fluoro-coloured light began spearing into the wan glow of the elevator's round glass space.

All around, outside the elevator's glass, in the dark wall, were small tile-sized coral-filled aquariums with little electric blue and canary yellow animated bits and pieces flitting about within.

A series of cold neon light tubes shone, about two feet each in length, placed apart in irregular, non-linear fitments embedded into the circular tunnel wall at intervals between the separated, vertically-descending, glowing aquarium display units.

In Russia, almost everywhere among the super wealthy, there was still this obvious penchant evident for the by-now-everywhere-else nearly passé luminescent vodka bar interior design motifs. I say nearly because I suppose passé is still dependent on the sheer money value being expended - this was right up there at the level of ludicrous extremes, and that certainly made a difference. The light was certainly being bent in rare fashion, here, I thought.

*

She knew I was coming. Obviously for the sake of theatrics she had synchronised some kind of strange music to accompany me down in the elevator as I descended slowly in its turning cylindrical, again crystaline cabinet. It sounded like an awesomely powerful and technically accomplished castrati voice singing, albeit singing some ultra-modern, chill-trance-lounge, professional dj-mixed electronic composition. I had never heard the song before. And it was distinctly unusual.

And actually... there was something disturbing about the particular tune.

But I was truly not prepared for the scene that opened up to me when the elevator stopped descending, and when I oriented myself fowards.

Okay so I was pretty sure I was looking at a real live Gorgon. You know, red snakes in magnificent hair, ultra-beautiful face, flashing grey eyes. The tall sinuous body, the upper arms with those almost masculine guns...

The room was large and this time down here it was all very classically purist in design theme - elongated dimensions in every main element, brushed metal fittings and woollen carpeting and rich, steel-inlayed, highly polished dark wood everywhere. The slightly raised, full-sized chaises were in brush-napped dark blue velour. And there was a single chain-driven counterbalanced, hi-tech weights machine standing right in the middle of the floor. And bent over its leather-padded strut extending out to one side, was a young -, very young man, almost a boy, stripped to the waist, wearing tight black jeans... And with bare feet. A chewy tube neoprene bit and bridle in his mouth and around his head...

His hands were secured in shiny chrome chains to a chrome lug in the floor, neatly installed in the carpeting. And there was a single shiny chrome chain attached to an ankle bracelet and held tightly at the other end to another floor lug.

The woman was clearly sweating profusely, beads dripping down her face from her forehead under the shock of gorgeous hair and shining gold custom real Versace diadem, with its snake designs that made her look really, in the circumstances, like she actually had snakes in her hair. She wore a tiny black soft leather top and tight leather mini skirt, all bearing the superstylized winged-Vee Versace motif, and long-up-to-the-knee and high-heeled patent black leather Versace boots. I knew that her name was supposed to be Valeria, and now I got it: she was Valeria – the only surviving Gorgon according to the myth – and whose name meant, 'The Mighty.' Whether or not it was her real birth name didn't strike me at all as particularly that important to know right now. Right now, she was, The Mighty Gorgon.

And the young man chromium-chained up in there seemed likely to think so too. He was shaking with what appeared for all the world to be pretty much like straight out fear to me...

"It's you, though, he's afraid of." She suddenly said, turning to me, as if reading my mind. "He's an extractee. What we call an extractee... I told him, Ian, that if I don't manage to pump a thousand kay-gee's up on this weights press right now, here, in the next half an hour, a bad man is going to come in and pull his pants down and fuck him in the ass real hard – like happened to him in Virginia." She smiled and repeated sarcastically, "Virgin-ia."

She leant over to the male and pulled his face up towards her. "Is that what happened to you over there prr-etthy bhoi? You got fucked in the ass? You've been fucked in ass already, have you? You're gonna be fucked again, soon too."

One or two jerking breaths pulsed out from the victim.

Valeria began to move away from the weights machine and towards me. Suddenly I could smell her. Clean watery sweat, very acrid underarm apocrine sweat, and brand new leather tanned the old fashioned way with its oxides and aldehydes and bleaches and dyes. "And I also told him, that if I do manage to pull up a thousand, I will pull his pants down myself anyway and plough a strap-on in him. And whip his ass. But my muscles might be so tight it will be hard for me to hurt him that much at all, but I told him -" She almost whispered, and made her eyes into thin slits. "I really do want to hurt him a lot." He breath smelled hot and excited, but it had none of the poppyseed overtaste of someone on heroin, or the sourness of someone using cocaine, or the phenolic of amphetamines, or the sulphur and onions of someone on MDMA. Or even the crushed green Morning Glory odour of someone using marijuana. Or that odd disconcerting scent that always accompanies the mentally ill and the mentally desperate.

"So are you going to fuck him in the ass for me, Ian, or do I have to hit that thousand kg's."

"No. I don't think so. I won't be doing that. So you'd better hit it for the both of us, O Mighty One. For him, and for me. Besides, I want to see you work out." I replied.

"Okay Yanni. Let's see me go for it then."

For the next half an hour I watched in awe and amazement as she got behind the machine and half squatted a thousand kilograms in total, in a calm and relaxed regular rhythm, even cajolling the boy along the way to look over at her telling him she wanted him to get a strong hard-on.

Eventually, and with all the more of a hot sweat pouring from her after the exercising, she got out of the machine, wiped her face and arms with a fresh white towel, and slowly wiped her thighs and legs in front of the lad so that he could watch her stunning body fervidly, proposing an apparent expectation of something even more sexually arousing yet to come.

She moved around to behind him, and reached under his waist and undid the top button of his jeans and unzipped the front of them, and began to peel them down off him until they were around his knees. And then she got down and unclasped the leg chain. And moved around to his front and squatted down in front of him and undid the wrist-holds. Then she stood up and leaned forward close up to his face and clicked her tongue and said softly: "Stand up, little boy."

She looked over directly at me. "Fear is a part of divinity." She said somewhat didactically. "Fears grow all by themselves just like living snakes growing out of your mind. You cut the head of one of them off with a rationalisation, and just as soon another springs up right there to take its place. Fears are limitless."

She turned back to the young male with his jeans around his ankles. "Take them right off." She addressed him in a low tone.

She turned back to me and changed the subject slightly. "We just more or less kidnapped him, you know. He has not much idea about all what is going on here – what I have been doing to him," she said fairly ungrammatically. And then, raising an eyebrow: "I think maybe even, that he is still a virgin as far as women go, but of course nowadays these guys still know plenty enough of things about sex don't they?

"Are you a virgin, young man? Well, anyway you're a young man aren't you?"

He appeared genuinely afraid of her; what she had been specifically saying or doing to him before I got there I had no real clue about but possibly she might have been playing up on, recently-in-the-local-news, urban legends, really -, of rich people stealing the vulnerable off the streets for whatever kinds of uses they had for them. Nothing very pleasant though, of course.

"This young man is a heterosexual -, virgin, doesn't have a girlfriend, used to go to the national libraries a lot..." She declared gratuitously, in a terse summary, although with some certainty.

She held him by the jaw with her elegant and long fingernailed, if also rather strong, left hand. "Don't worry. I will not harm you. I might hurt you but I won't harm you. We don't do those kinds of things here that I was talking about. Good people don't do those things. Only bad people, very bad people, do those things. I am saving you, from those things."

I decided it was the moment to ask a potentially touchy question. "Are you going to take in any weapons – in-country, I mean?"

"Me, personally, actually take in, no. I don't need to..." She smiled on that last bit.

I shrugged. I just figured that I needed to know how much distance to keep at key moments. At the moment it was a bit of an unknown; a bit inconclusive of an answer that she gave. Not that I knew for sure but I realized some of the foreign mission centres might have had those modern, ultra advanced digital printers for certain pieces of illegal equipment, and for those really very expensive projects, they very possibly would have even had access to the military-launched VHALTi-cubed's: very high altitude intelligent descent delivery device systems - that were able to payload small side arms, maybe one of the new Strizh Swift Strike 9mm's, or other dubious items, and were able thus to insert such things behind closed borders. Although I knew in reality there were a veritable number of ways these things could have been enabled; some more mundane than others.

"Miron Ivanovich." She addressed the young man. "Are you afraid of me?"

"Yes." He replied. He was now completely free of all of the restraints including the leg-chain but as far as moving his body around he seemd to be almost catatonic.

"You will address me with some courtesy, either 'Miss' or 'Madame' it doesn't matter to me. Do you understand?"

"Yes Madame."

"Stand up straight." She ordered.

I almost missed it because I was so interested in this interplay in front of me, but another door to another room at the far end of the lounge had opened quietly and unobtrusively and now there was a second woman in here. Ordinary-looking, with a head of fairly full, dark brown hair, almost plain featured in her angular symmetrical face, yet in closer focus there was something extremely memorable, intelligent, in the eyes and mouth and slightly Patrician nose; she could hardly have been more than say, about twenty-three or twenty-four. Dark blue silk dress with a flowing skirt that stopped above the knee. Not Rubenesque but very definitely tightly curved. Trim and hard muscle hipped. Body accentuated by the current season, a la mode, European High Fashion Pavlovo Posad handcrafted shawl tied around her waist. There was a single little owl motif on the front upper left-hand side of her dress. She looked directly at me, her flashing grey eyes acknowledging me subtly as if we knew each other. I had never met her before as far as I knew...

Holding onto a hem on one side of her dress she almost tip-toed around the scene and came over to where I was.

"Hi," she said, in a quiet matter-of-fact voice."

"Hi." I returned.

"That's my pal Sara, John." Valeria announced across to me, suddenly affecting an English accent, from the centre of the room. "Mind that you treat her nicely, she's much more dangerous than I am."

I couldn't imagine what that meant; this girl who was standing in front of me holding the hem of her skirt as if nervously, or something, I wasn't sure.

"Would you like some vodka," the girl asked, nodding over to a small bar area to my left side. "I think maybe we'll need some..." she opined, and then gestured with a small movement of her head towards the direction of over-her-left-shoulder. "For the floor-show with those two over there."

"Oh really... Well maybe some voda then." I willingly and easily went along with her viewpoint.

"But can bisexuals drink vodka?" I murmured under my breath jocularly. She smiled thinly back.

I watched as Valeria turned back to her weights machine once again, and bent over to the floor and produced a pair of shiny metal handcuffs from near the base of the machine where they had been lying, latent, under another small clean fluffy white towel I hadn't taken much notice of there before. She lifted her arms high above her head and with deft movements clicked her hands into the metal handcuffs and looped those tightly into a dead-lock clasp balen secured onto the end of a steel cable coming from the highest overhead strut on the machine.

"Now, there, look Ivanovich. I am completely at your disposal and at your mercy. I'm sure you weren't expecting that, now were you?"

The young man was most unsure of what he was meant to do about it or what was meant to go on now.

"I will explain it to you in detail Ivanovich." Valeria said, very casually. "And I hope you will hurry to the understanding. I am completely secured and unable to move my hands very much from here. And I am inviting you to take fullest advantage of the situation – now that you have me at you mercy and not me having you at mine, as it were. What will you do, Ivanovich. What will you do?" She lifted her head and tilted it to one side, exposing a side of creamy long neck.

"Why don't you come closer to me, over here. Come and inspect me."

Miron Ivanovich's eyes fixed themselves on her exposed underarms, and he drank in the submission of her handcuffed, hands-high-above-the-head position. Yes, it appeared that now she was indeed fully under his power, at least as far as it went physically. But he was unable to do anything except shake his head sporadically, almost in irritation at something, perhaps at himself.

"So if you don't mind my friends over there watching... And they will not interfere I assure you, unless you try to do something very seriously dangerous... So why don't you go ahead and fuck me.

"Get over here Ivanov!" She shouted at him contracting his name deliberately and he jumped. "If you don't get over here right now I'll break through these pissy cuffs and break your fucking neck with my bare hands!" She hissed and he got the point. "Get over here right now. That's it. Right up to me. Right up close to me. Right up against my ass. That's right...

"Touch me...

"Touch me with your hands. That's it. Touch my ass. Feel my ass. Feel my ass with your hands. Feel all over my ass. That's right. Go ahead. You like a woman? Maybe you don't know whether you like one or not yet. This is a woman. Get down there boy and smell my pussy... Do it!"

It took about another few minutes though before the young man's sense of relief at becoming unexpectedly unbound, and also very likely as not, too, a sense of his being less in danger of sheer physical sexual violation than he had initially thought, started to make the blood flow more freely through all of his extremities, and then soon enough too his cock began to stand fully erect and then it looked like as if it had became almost unbearably hard, and clear transudate began dripping out from the top of it.

For about the next half an hour at least, I got to watch a stunning display of frenzied naiive cock fucking a very controlling pussy – to the additional background sounds of insinuating murmuring instructions that issued forth quietly from the luscious, languorous, possibly even slightly sardonic mouth of the chained up creature: "Come on, come on, come on... Wait... Wait... Wait... Come on, come on, come on. Wait... Wait..."

And then she just said something to him that was inaudible to everyone else and he spurted out all over the floor outside of her, his painfully stiff cock jerking upwards all by itself in its final crescendo from the previously ever-heightening amplitude. ...twitching in its falling eventual resolution.

*

What is utterly fantastic and fanciful in real life sneaks up upon you and you may easily fail to realise the impossible logic behind something, especially when it is presented to you as unquestioned fact in the typical broad media cant.

And then there is the existentialist spin that always goes along with that too. For evil does 'anything it takes,' to get what it wants - they say so themselves. Whereas the good has boundaries.

There is of course, a fight going on.

But factually, without expectancy or prior knowledge that a certain intentional key exists at all, the things that are going on around everyone, are simply so many meaningless shapes and moving shadows in the breeze.

The woman called Sara walked over to the centre of the large room, untying the ornately-coloured wool, silk, and cashmere hand-woven Russian craft cloth wrapped around her waist... And placed it carefully around the young man's neck and bare shoulders. "Craft," she said. "Makes performance." And satisfied with her addition, she stepped back.