Metamorphosis of Narcissus

“I only got involved with Charles because we broke up,” she said. “I didn’t know what he was like, of course. He seemed … exciting somehow.”

“Pippa, you don’t have to explain.”

“Oh, but I do! James, it was horrible. I don’t know how it happened but we’d been out for the evening and ended up back here. I hadn’t drunk much but I was feeling really woozy. He showed me that Room.” She gestured towards the mirror. He started laying out a couple of lines of coke and snorted them. He asked me to give him a blowjob and I don’t know why, but I agreed. Then these other men appeared. They literally ripped my clothes off.

“James, it was horrible. They were doing all these things to me and it was like I was watching it happen. I was powerless to stop them. I couldn’t even struggle, I felt so weak. Then Charles started to have me, you know, anally. It really burned but it was like it was happening to someone else. I knew it hurt but I couldn’t really feel it properly. Charles got really angry because I was just lying there. He wanted me to show how much I was enjoying it! But I wasn’t. I hated very second but I couldn’t do anything about it. My arms and legs seemed to weigh a ton. He stared at me with this really cruel look on his face and then he started to hurt me.

“He twisted my nipples and bit them hard, then he got a riding crop and whipped me all over my front, from my breasts to my thighs. The others were getting a bit concerned and saying things like ‘you must have given her too much; the bitch isn’t feeling anything. Be careful, you don’t want to do any lasting damage.’ I must have passed out about then and when I woke up, I was alone. They’d left me on the settee in the foyer. The place was all dark and closed up. I got a taxi home and went to bed. It wasn’t until the next day that I fully realised what had been done to me. I called Sally. I wanted to call you but I was too ashamed.

“Sally told me that Charles must have drugged me with that date-rape drug. That was why I was so detached and helpless. I thought about going to the Police but I was afraid. Mostly I was scared that you’d find out.”

Any lingering doubts about what we were going to do left me then and there. I put my arms around Pippa and wept softly into her hair. “I still love you, you know,” I whispered. “I never stopped.” I saw she was crying too. She shook her head.

“How can you when I’ve been such a whore?”

“It wasn’t you, it was that bastard and his sick mind and sick friends. Well it stops here, tonight!”

Suddenly a light came on in the private room and we all saw Charles and Rachel walk in. Charles nonchalantly dangled a bottle of Champagne and two flutes from one hand. Rachel was looking tipsy and we could hear her giggles over the hidden microphone. Charles pulled her towards him and they kissed passionately. He unzipped Rachel’s dress and she shrugged her shoulders to send it sliding down and pooling at her ankles. Someone, I think it was Sally, said, “Will you look at that? She’s got artificial tits!” We all laughed like maniacs, it broke the tension.

It was true. Rachel was definitely surgically enhanced – or otherwise – depending on your point of view. She slipped her fingers into the waistband of her thong and stood, totally nude, in front of Charles, striking a pose with one arm raised and her head thrown back. Her pubes were trimmed to a thin stripe down the centre of her mons. You could see her lips pouting pinkly and her erect nipples signalled her arousal. Her long blonde hair was a silky frame to her beautiful face. She looked wonderful and wanton. Charles’s face was a picture of lust. His too-perfect features were contorted into a satyr’s mask. Rachel turned and wiggled her backside at him. “Come and get it, Lover-boy.” Her voice was loud through the amplified microphone. Phil had started the video camera.

Charles stripped quickly. His body was flawless, as was his tan. He was sprouting a semi-hard on and Rachel grabbed it and began to rub him feverishly. He pushed her hand away and propelled to her to one of the leather bench-like things that were scattered around the room. She pushed him back and walked to a sort of X-frame. She lay against it, face forward and indicated to Charles to secure the manacles at each corner of the X over wrists and ankles. It was clear that our Rachel was something of a player. I was starting to have my doubts about the plan. It may have been kinky but it was clearly consensual up to this point.

The frame twisted and spun in both the vertical and horizontal planes. Charles twisted her upside down and started to rain a series of light slaps on her thighs, buttocks and crotch. Rachel shivered and gasped. Charles then bent his head and started to lick her with feather-light flicks of his tongue. We could see the muscles in her buttocks flexing as she struggled to push her pussy up to his teasing mouth. He took a twist of paper from a hidden recess and we watched as he poured a sprinkling of white powder at the junction of Rachel’s thighs. “Got him!” said David as Charles proceeded to snort the cocaine off his human table. Two more figures entered the room. Rachel was incapable of noticing anything at that point. She was lost in the middle of a very loud and vocal orgasm.

Pippa’s grip on my arm tightened as the two new arrivals stripped. They were in good shape but didn’t compare with Charles. In the meantime, he had lowered the top of the frame to the horizontal. Rachel was now suspended face down at about waist height. One of the newcomers went around to her head and thrust his engorged cock into her mouth. All Rachel could see was his legs and feet so I suppose she thought it was Charles at first, for she sucked avidly, making moaning noises in her throat.

It was only when Charles rammed two fingers into her arse that she realised her mistake. We saw her jerk, shaking her head to get way from the insistent cock battering at her mouth. The frame and the guy fucking her face wouldn’t let her move. The second guy was now crouched beneath the frame, rubbing his hands over her breasts and pinching her nipples. Charles grabbed a tube of something from the recess and spread it on his fingers and prick. He jabbed forward and we saw Rachel’s eyes go wild with pain and shock as he rammed her into her with no warning.

The guy at Rachel’s head suddenly convulsed and yelled aloud as he orgasmed into her helpless mouth. There were tears in her eyes and she was choking and retching. The one who had been on the floor playing with her tits swapped places with the now sated head-man. Charles was pumping like a demon. Rachel’s scream of “Nooooo!” was cut off as another rock-hard prick was forced into her mouth.

“I think we’ve seen enough,” I said. “Time to surprise our friend Charles.”

I nodded at David and he thumbed the button on a remote he took out of his pocket. The five flashguns he’d hidden previously in Charles’s playroom all went off simultaneously. We raced around to the door marked ‘Private – Staff Only’ and pushed inside. The two strangers were frozen in place, visibly wilting. Charles, too, had stopped thrusting, but was still buried deep in Rachel’s arse. Rachel was the one who seemed to recover quickest. She began screaming and cursing and threatening Charles with the direst and most anatomically impossible of fates. Charles was thunderstruck. He saw the six people in front of him and then he spotted the video camera. Comprehension dawned. He relaxed. His two pals grabbed their clothes and fled. We let them go, it was Charles we were after.

“How much do you want, Harrington, you bastard? Giving it all that about only wanting me to stop talking you down. You’re just as money-grabbing as all the other shysters!”

“Yet again, Charles, you are woefully mistaken. This isn’t about blackmail, it’s evidence.”

His face paled and his withered dick slipped out of Rachel. She was still screaming blue murder. I gestured to Sally and Phil to get her out of the contraption. It was a mistake. She flew at Charles with claws extended like an avenging fury and raked him from eye to chin. Phil grabbed her and hauled her off. Charles put his hand to the side of his face and gave a twisted grin as it came away bloody. You could almost see him calculating the odds.

“You daren’t use it, Harrington. You’d have to explain how you got it. Not a good career move, I’d say.”

“Oh we’ve thought of that. We all agreed if that what it takes to stop you, so be it. Of course, we’ll have to explain about your two-way mirror and the ladies’ changing room. We also have three women at least prepared to testify that you also raped them. We may get drummed out of the brownies, Charles, but you are going down.”

I was so angry; I must have sounded absolutely sincere. He became conciliatory.

“Can’t we find some other way of dealing with this? After all, no harm done, eh? Just a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“No harm done you bastard!!!” Rachel succeeded in evading Phil’s grasp and launched another attack on him. “You raped my arse you sick Fucker! You got your slimy friends to join in. I agreed to a bit of fun, not some fucking fantasy by the Marquis de Sade.“

Rachel suddenly spotted the Champagne flutes and before anyone could move, she grabbed one and darted towards Charles, smashing the fragile glass and ramming the broken stub into his face. He screamed as the razor-sharp shards tore at his face. Phil, David and I all grabbed her together and dragged her away. Her own hand was badly cut and we had some difficulty prising open her fingers, slippery with blood as they were.

Sally grabbed the Champagne bottle and hurled into the two-way mirror. The bottle shattered and the mirror cracked in two. Our hasty reversal had not secured it too well and it fell from its frame onto the changing room floor, where it smashed. Things were now well out of hand. It was Pippa who pulled it all back together. She slapped a now hysterical Rachel into a stunned silence, crushed Sally with a glare and grabbed Charles and sat him down on one of the leather-covered benches. She sent Phil to get towels and Penny to fetch the first aid kit out of my car.

Fifteen minutes later calm was restored. The glass had punctured Charles’s right cheek but fortunately the damage was limited to a single jagged cut about two inches long. Rachel, now dressed and calm, had a bandage over her cut hand but still had murder in her eyes. The rest of us were feeling pretty subdued. Charles, particularly, looked deflated. His face had three livid scratches down one side and a bloody hole in the other. Winter had come with a vengeance for Narcissus.

“This has all gone far too far,” Pippa said. “Charles, You should get a Tetanus shot. You too, Rachel. I don’t think you need stitches but you might.” She turned to glare at me. “James, I don’t what you were expecting to happen but I can’t believe we all agreed to do this. We should have known better, all of us!”

Sally started to protest but Phil and David looked shamefaced, which was precisely what I was feeling. Only Rachel looked defiant but she was still flying on whatever cocktail of booze and drugs Charles had fed her. Pippa continued in the same vein.

“As for you Charles, I dare say you deserved what happened here tonight. You are a low, odious creature that doesn’t deserve to be called a man. Well, now you know that we all know and that we have the evidence to prove it. You even look hard at any girl in future and I’m going straight to the Police with this tape.”

We left it like that. We were all too drained to think straight. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Sally to say she’d settled with Charles on the Caxton Street property. I called Pippa a few times but she was never there and never responded to any of the messages I left. I asked Sally but she didn’t know where Pippa had gone. Christmas was an anticlimax. Phil, David and I joined another Gym. There was no trace of Charles.

A few weeks into the New Year, I got a real surprise. I had spent the morning in Court and just got back to the Office when Charles walked in. I ushered him into my office. He looked as prosperous as ever and, apart from a pink-ish scar on one cheek, just as good-looking. His demeanour, though, was something else again.

“James, this is going to sound very odd indeed, but I want to thank you. I’ve been in rehab for the past two months and I have been fortunate enough to discover some things about myself before it was too late. Those poor girls I abused, it wasn’t the sex. It was because I felt I could, It was largely the drugs, of course, gave me this feeling of omnipotence. But I have learnt, James, that it was there in me, lurking. I haven’t ever believed in good and evil or light and darkness but I do now.

“We all have a dark side. Basically good men, like you, keep it under control. Weak men, like I have been, find excuses to give it free rein. Anyway, I am off drugs now and swear to you I will never go back. I have stopped drinking as well. I don’t think drinking was the cause of it but I’m afraid that if I get drunk, I might weaken. I have apologised to all those I hurt and humiliated, except Pippa. I couldn’t seem to find her. I have offered to compensate them all. Some have accepted, others told me where to go.

“I know it’s hard for you to believe but I really am a changed man. I just wanted you to know that you did me the greatest service anyone can do for another. You held up a mirror and I saw myself, truly, for the first time.”

I just sat and stared at him in wonder. He took my silence for disbelief, no doubt, but the funny thing is, I did believe him. His face was different, somehow. Then I twigged. It was his eyes. They were human. They showed pain and hurt and pleading. The old Charles’s eyes were cold and dead like a shark’s, the effect of gazing too long at his own reflection. I got to my feet nodding and shook his hand. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

I got another shock when I got home that evening. Pippa’s car was in the driveway. She was sitting on my porch, two suitcases at her feet. She smiled as I hurried towards her. I just grabbed her and hugged her to me for the longest time. At last I let her go.

“James, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I went to stay with my cousin and her husband in Edinburgh. I finally realised that you only did this insane thing because of what Charles did to me. Sally told me that you got really mad when you heard I’d been involved. I am not proud of what we all did that night but I hear it seems to have worked out for the best.

“I also remember you saying you still loved me. I hope that’s true because I’ve come to stay, if you’ll have me, of course”

For the second time that day, I couldn’t think of a thing to say.