Chapter 137 Dreams, Disappointments, and Debauchery
Chapter 137 Dreams, Disappointments, and Debauchery
Jasper Slegg lit a small Sumatran cigar, inhaled heartily and looked on
with an air of satisfaction as Deng-shan once again made his rounds. The
well-built Chinese handyman passed among the crewmen quickly, collecting the
admission fees for the fourth of the seven torments that Slegg had promised his
lecherous shipmates.
The enterprising Englishman cast a glance across at Erika Weiss, the
beautiful bare-breasted blonde who continued to strain at the ropes that bound
her to the symmetrical Greek cross. The four oil lanterns in the ship's hold
splashed an aura of shimmering light on her tousled blonde hair and her
lake-blue eyes, which sparkled with indignant fury. Her infinitely desirable
body was clad only in a minuscule loincloth knotted at one shapely hip, a
glistening patina of perspiration, and the rosy blush of shame.
Slegg's eyes narrowed menacingly as he appraised her alluring, oil-slick
breasts, pink and blotchy from the manhandling administered by the lusty
crewmen and the punishing slaps meted out by Khasar the Mongol. Despite the
rough treatment they had endured, Erika's tempting, stiff-nippled mounds rose
and fell provocatively with her every ragged breath, their arrogant jut untamed
by her shipboard ordeal.
Slegg licked at his dry lips, enjoying every moment of her degradation,
leering at his stunning captive triumphantly as he exhaled a shimmering ring of
smoke. He watched the evanescent circlet drift through space for a moment
before it came to grief against Deng's coin-box, which by now was brimming with
the evening's proceeds. It had been a profitable night, to be sure, and would
soon be even more so, thanks to his statuesque and deliciously exploitable
prisoner. He had made the most of this voyage, as he had ever since fleeing the
crowded cobblestones of London for the untrammeled license of the high seas.
But as with most men of a grasping nature, Jasper Slegg was not content
with his lot in life. He considered himself immeasurably cleverer than the men
of the Yang-tze Dragon and cursed the fate which had cast him into the working
class. Why had he not been born an aristocrat like the black-booted baron who
had brought Erika on board, or a warlord like General Wang?
There were, as far as Slegg could see, only two paths to a life of ease for
a man of his lineage, talents and training. His father, Amos Slegg, had
suggested one course in a letter written a year or so earlier. The wily old
showman, slowed by hard times and advancing years, had never fully recovered
financially from the loss of Devadanyi, the lush-bodied Indian dancer whose
breathtakingly erotic performances had drawn all manner of free-spending toffs
to his shows. But, still alert to the ways of an ever more sensation-seeking
London, Amos Slegg had written his son concerning a freakish-looking man he had
seen in Southwark not long before, a man who might make them both rich.
The man's name was Merrick, his father had written, but a fellow-showman
had dubbed him the "Elephant Man" owing to the malformation of his over-sized
head and the pachydermatous scaliness of patches of his skin. An acquaintance
of his father's, a fellow-showman named Tom Norman, had come across the
unfortunate man and had been exhibiting him on both banks of the Thames.
But Norman was a man of little imagination, Amos explained to his son in a
tremulous scrawl. What if the Sleggs were to offer him a modest sum for
Merrick, and then sell him or lease him to the great Barnum himself? Barnum was
an old man now, but he had paid well for Jumbo, the enormous elephant he had
bought in London not so long ago. What would he not pay to display a grotesque
Elephant Man along with the great beast?
The sound of hands spanking bare flesh interrupted Slegg's musings. After
coughing up his fourth admission fee, Tranh, the ship's cook, had apparently
decided to celebrate by anointing Erika's breasts with a fresh coating of oil.
His first attempt had drawn a venomous whispered epithet from the blonde's
pretty lips, and Tranh had repaid this rebuke by unburdening himself of a string
of Annamese curses and slapping the sides of Erika's glistening love-goblets
with a force surprising for a man of his years.
Erika's moans of anguish were followed in short order by a plaintive plea
for water. But the heartless mate of the Yang-tze Dragon paid her no more heed
than the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square would have done as he continued to
eye her futile attempts to wriggle free from Tranh's lewd caresses.
As he did so, he continued to ruminate about how he might acquire a
fortune befitting a man of his cleverness. The Barnum scheme had been a good
one, and he had sent his father all the money he could beg or borrow, telling
him to approach Norman about acquiring the rights to the Elephant Man. It had
taken many weeks for his father's reply to catch up to him in Shanghai, and when
it did, it was disheartening in the extreme. Norman, it seemed, had handed
their potential gold mine over to some do-gooding doctor who imagined he could
turn the misshapen freak into a gentleman.
The night he had gotten the news, Slegg, enraged by this cruel twist of
fate, had tried to drowned his sorrows in a bottle of gin, but the harshness
of the cheap alcohol had only served to aggravate his bitterness. He had taken
the rest of the money his father had returned to him and set off for the famous
bordello of Madame Wong, intent on salvaging some pleasure from a day of
crushing disappointment.
In recent years Jasper Slegg had had occasion to deliver countless young
beauties, fresh from confinement in the Bird Cage, the hold of the Yang-tze
Dragon, to the back door of Shanghai's most notorious flesh market. However,
he had never before had both the money and courage to enter through the
well-appointed foyer as a paying customer. But on this night, prodded by the
bravado cheap liquor can provide, he had stridden into the brothel brandishing
his money ostentatiously. Hearing reports from one of her girls of a loud,
somewhat tipsy Englishman with a wad of banknotes, the Madame herself had
emerged from her office to give him a brief tour of her palace of desire.
After giving him a chance to appraise the mouthwatering selection of as yet
unclaimed filles-de-joie loitering languorously in the lobby, an elegantly
dressed Madame Wong had led him down several long hallways, her slit skirt
rustling softly against her thighs with every step. As he passed a series of
closed doors Slegg heard the gentle clink of champagne glasses, the silvery
trills of flirtatious laughter, and the unmistakable grunts and squeals of
sexual pleasure coming from within. In the darkest hallway of all, he had heard
what seemed to him gasps of pain, not of pleasure, and he had stopped for a
moment to listen, giving his hostess an inquiring glance.
"Ah, I thought you might find the delights of our Newgate room ...
stimulating," the Madame had whispered in excellent English, "as so many of your
countrymen do." She inclined her head slightly toward her guest as she pressed a
well-concealed lever in the adjoining wall. "Needless to say, I had them in
mind when I named it."
At the touch of her fingers, a small viewing panel in the wall opened, and
Slegg peered into the dark, dungeon-like room beyond. Through the dimness he
saw a tall, slender Chinese in silver robes scrutinizing a panoply of
instruments that hung on the wall to his left.
To the right of Slegg's field of vision, an almond-eyed young woman had
been stretched against the opposing wall like a shapely butterfly. Her
honey-gold thighs were drawn outward almost at right angles to her slim body,
her ankles having been stretched to their limit and shackled to a pair of heavy
iron rings. Between her legs, the pleasure girl's obscenely-splayed sex
glistened, moist and inviting. Her slender wrists had been chained to a
forbidding iron hook that protruded from the grim, gray stone high above her
head. Between her sparkling white teeth she clutched a whip whose thick leather
handle was as black as her glossy hair. The agitated writhings of her young
body caused the whip's slender thongs to slither across her left breast with
serpentine malice.
"This evening Xia is entertaining in the Newgate for the first time,"
Madame Wong whispered in a seductive voice. "A pretty name, Xia, is it not? I
have called her that from the first moment I saw her. In our tongue it means the
glow of the sun at sunrise or sunset. Look at her skin. Does it not seem to
have been kissed by the summer sun?"
Slegg nodded, only half hearing the Madame's sensual byplay, so enthralled
was he by the captivating sight of Xia's futile writhings, and the accompanying
clink of the chains which confined her. It took a few moments for his eyes to
become fully accustomed to the dim light. Only then did he realize that the
trembling girl's thighs and belly were criss-crossed with three or four faint
striations; the evil-looking whip in her mouth had already struck and struck
hard.
"Lord Chan likes to ... officiate ... himself when our new arrivals
entertain in the Newgate for the first time. We are greatly honored, of course,
by his presence," Madame Wong continued, bowing reverentially toward the stern
figure in silver as he held a pair of nipple-clamps up to the light and examined
them with an expert eye. When Chan turned toward Xia, holding the clamps by
their short, connecting chain, so that she could see the sharpness of their
serrated teeth, she shook her head fearfully, 'no.'
"Oh, she should not have done that, poor girl," the Madame clucked in a
voice tinged equally with disapproval and anticipation, as Richard Chan brushed
the breast-clinging thongs of the whip gently to one side so that he could affix
one of the clamps to an enticing nipple. "But she is new and has much to learn."
Madame Wong pressed her body against Slegg's so that she would have a
better angle to see through the viewing panel. The tips of her breasts felt
like nuggets of precious jade against his shoulder, betraying the fact that she
was as excited by the events taking place in the forbidding cell as he was.
"Xia's breasts are exquisite, don't you think? Who would guess that she is our
newest girl, and only fifteen? How fortunate it is for her future lovers that
Lord Chan is such a meticulous teacher! In a month's time, she will be so
well-instructed, and so skilled in the arts of love, that only the most
discerning clients would be able to guess that her pretty lotus had been pierced
for the first time only a few weeks ago."
Slegg had felt the Madame's appraising eyes on him as he watched the stern
figure in silver pull the chain taut so that he could attend to Xia's other
nipple. The chain, being only as long as Richard Chan's hand was wide, pulled
the tips of Xia's shapely breast-plums inward in a way that sent jolts of erotic
pleasure through Slegg's loins.
Taking the handle of the whip from Xia's mouth, Chan frowned distastefully
and wiped the saliva-covered whipstock on a handful of Xia's lustrous hair.
Then, after taking two steps backward, he proceeded to deliver three withering
whip-strokes to Xia's soft, supple thighs, before Madame Wong gently closed the
viewing panel.
"And now, sir, how may we please you?" she had whispered in a voice as old
as temptation itself.
********
The raging fire in Jasper Slegg's loins was quickly addressed. Within the
space of a few minutes he had surrendered nearly all of his money to the Madame.
That transaction had permitted him to select as his companion a petite Japanese
named Kyoto who had bowed and smiled to him sweetly upon his arrival. Taking
the tiny sensuous steps of a geisha, Kyoto had led him to a scented chamber
bedecked with flowers and furnished with an elegant assortment of floor pillows.
Despite the considerable amount of alcohol he had imbibed, Slegg had
gotten his money's worth from the sloe-eyed cherry blossom. He had forced the
tiny pleasure girl to her knees among the pillows and gestured for her to undo
the buttons of his trousers, liberating his thick-veined erection. Then his
strong pressure on her head and shoulders had compelled her to use her warm
mouth and her soft, silky hair to tease his hairy testicles and to nurse his
throbbing member into a saliva-slick tower of flesh.
Only then had he undone the beautifully embroidered obi that held Kyoto's
cherry-red kimono together. Draping the sash around her neck, he slowly slid
the robe back over her shoulders, letting the silken gown slide sensuously to
her hips, leaving her nude to the waist. Then he had tugged gently on the sash,
pulling her against him so that she could cradle his stiff, mouth-moistened
phallus between the perfect cones of her dark-nippled breasts. She had
dutifully pressed her love-mounds close together, imprisoning his moist manhood
in their sweet caress, while her pretty tongue traced an electrifying path from
his pubic hair to his navel.
But despite Kyoto's consummate erotic artistry, the news from London that
his dreams of fortune had been dashed had left him in a dark and angry mood.
And the innocent Kyoto was to bear the brunt of his bitterness.
Perhaps because he was a man of only average build he had chosen the
tiniest and most fragile-looking of Madame Wong's pleasure girls as the object
of his lust. His superior size and strength allowed him to dominate her
physically in a way that would have gratified the most barbaric tribesman of
central Asia.
He had imposed his sexual will on the Japanese beauty relentlessly,
stripping away her elegant gown and treating her diminutive body as if it were a
plaything, a warm-bodied doll to be bent and twisted in any way that pleased
him. As young man he had dallied with some of the female contortionists in his
father's troupe and he treated Kyoto as if she were as loose-limbed as they,
crushing her into the billowing sea of pillows, and twisting her flexible limbs
into whatever position suited his pleasure of the moment.
At one point he pinned her ankles to the pillow behind her head and forced
her to count each thrust aloud as he drilled his cock-staff deep into her
pleasure-nook. He had striven to give her a hundred strokes, but on the
eighty-eighth the tantalizing grip of her vaginal muscles had gotten the better
of him and his lust spurted from him in great gushing geysers, spitting deep
into Kyoto's love canal.
He had rested after that ecstatic climax, but only briefly. Within minutes
he offered his still-dripping cock to his petite paramour, seeking resuscitation
and finding it in her oral caresses.
When Kyoto's lips and tongue had nursed him back to full arousal he had
taken her in the style of the missionaries who had set up outposts in Nagasaki
two centuries earlier. Then he took her with one shapely leg bent over his
shoulder, and then with both legs wrapped around his neck. He ravished her
akita-style, crushing her pretty face into the soft pillows and then mounting
her fiercely from behind like the dogs of her native land.
It had been the saucy roundness of Kyoto's bottom beneath the thin kimono
that had first attracted Slegg to her, and for the better part of three hours
her buttocks had been the centerpiece of his marathon of depravity. He had
gripped and squeezed and spanked and clung to those sweet bottomcheeks while he
conquered her fragrant body with a ruthless virility honed by weeks of sea-borne
abstinence. He had drenched her inviting love canal with his seaman's semen
from half a dozen angles, on each occasion compelling her to revive his depleted
lust by paying worshipful homage to his manhood with her soft lips and
fluttering tongue.
After their penultimate embrace he had brought their one-sided sexual
combat to an ecstatic conclusion by rubbing his flaccid cock-staff into the
beckoning cleft between Kyoto's soft, sexy bottom-globes until it had regained
its manly length and girth. When it was once again blood-hardened and randy he
pressed the knob of his saliva-slick truncheon against Kyoto's fleshy anal ring
and entered her aft passage with an almost bestial savagery.
Working his manhood like a fleshy cork-screw, he had pumped his weapon
into Kyoto's spasming bunghole with tireless ardor, thrilling to the way the
muscles in her tiny rectum milked his throbbing cock. He had drawn soft moans
from her lips with his every thrust, as his lust-heightened senses drank in the
cloying scents of flowers and incense and tatami mats, and the pungent odor that
accompanies coerced sex as smoke accompanies fire.
********
At the harbor the next morning, tired, unshaven, bleary-eyed, his head
throbbing from cheap liquor, Slegg had seen a mighty British frigate approaching
a small Japanese steamer. He had stopped to stare at their flags fluttering
briskly in the morning breeze. A grin of remembered pleasure crossed his face
as the jaunty Union Jack of the British warship edged aggressively closer to the
Japanese flag which sported the Hinomaru, the crimson disc representing the
sun, centered on a stark white field. In his woozy condition the two flags
appeared to merge together for an instant, the Jack seeming to be the aggressor,
dominating the crimson disc and blocking it from sight. Then a sudden trick of
the wind and the peculiar angle of the ships' course left the Jack whipping in
the breeze, strong and proud while the banner sporting the red disc of Nippon
looked defeated and vulnerable. Then, as he watched with the complacent smile
of a conqueror, the two ships parted, perhaps never to pass again.
********
Slegg had never forgotten the softness of Kyoto's baby-fleshed bottom, nor
the infinitely arousing stifled squeals of protest that had accompanied his
every manly thrust. It had been that intensely pleasurable if impoverishing
experience that had opened Slegg's eyes to a second path to riches. Why should
he be content with being Captain McMahon's lackey, delivering young beauties to
the brothels of the treaty ports, when he might, with a bit of joss, become an
entrepreneur in the flesh trade on his own account, and reap for himself the
economic and sexual bounties offered by that ancient industry. But it would
take money, a considerable sum of money, to acquire beauties of the caliber of
Xia, or Kyoto, or Erika Weiss, beauties that could command such sums as he
himself had been willing to pay. But what if ...
