Philip Palmer Omnibus by Philip Palmer

Author:Philip Palmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC028010
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The woman was tall, slim, naked, and bound with shackles. The man beside her was muscular, and also naked, and had been adeptly hog-tied. They both groaned with pleasure as they were kissed and fondled and whipped by the giggling girls in the hen party.

Elsewhere, similar acts of violence and lust were being performed between paid and paying consenting adults in a wide variety of acrobatic variations. The whores, male and female, were beautiful, agile, and tireless, and capable of enduring extraordinary amounts of pain. And the paying customers were good-looking and toned, but lacked the easy grace and poise that a lifetime devoted to sensuality will bring.

“Nice place,” I said, and smiled. That always unsettled people. My plastic face has, pretty much, the texture and sheen of human skin, but it is still plastic. And I rarely smiled, because I knew that when I did, it made my eyes look blanker.

“It’s a service,” Hari Gilles said, defensively.

Gilles was an eerie-looking man: thin to the point of being skeletal, extensively tattooed, with eyes that did not focus, and lips that were always moist.

“Some people find this a turn on,” I mused, as I watched the orgies and the beatings and the whippings and the flesh-mutilations which took place to a soundtrack of ceaseless groaning and expletive barks. A curtain was pulled back and three female courtesans appeared, in richly coloured Arab robes that swirled around their naked bodies, and began to dance inside a haze of hallucinogenic mist.

“They do, indeed,” leered Hari, and I felt – or rather, quite dispassionately, noted the presence within my psyche of: Contempt.

“How about you? Does it turn you on?” I enquired.

“I’m a businessman.”

A scream rang out. The dungeon was dank and dark and steeped in evil, and bodies sweated, and semen oozed, and rain dripped from the ceilings, and rats scurried about underfoot licking blood off the black flagstones.

And, for me, the cumulative effect of the whole ghastly mise-en-scène was curiously… amusing. How strange these humans were! How abjectly driven by their bizarre passions and obsessions!

I had counted fourteen sexual perversions new to me since I first entered through the slimy stone corridors that led down from the House of Pain’s reception area. The stone arches of this underground cavern were pitted with metal hooks from which chains dangled. The air was thick and fuggy and rank with incense and aphrodisiac spices. And TV screens unobtrusively placed in alcoves gave the punters a tantalising fast-cutting overview of the wickednesses of the day.

“There was a time,” I said – for I pride myself on my historical knowledge – “when sadistic acts that led to death were considered to be criminal.”

“No one dies here,” Hari protested, “not really. The brain doesn’t die. Our performers are all insured, and everyone who pays our prices can afford to replace their limbs and organs. Where’s the harm?”

I sighed. I actually had no answer to that. A hell-hole of depravity like this one always rocked my moral values, but logically, where was the harm?

“Why?” I marvelled.

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