With
the peacock following behind her, zigzagging along after her, attempting first
one way and then another in back of her, Chastity made her way warily through
the harem. In torn net stockings,
formal-length gloves, and a cutaway bustier that purposely exposed her fully
developed breasts, she continued to drag the counterweight of her misdeeds at
the end of her chain. To avoid the
charnel smell which was more thought than she could bear to think, she drew
only the shallowest inhalations. As she
herself searched for the Kea invader, for Rambabwa
who would reclaim his property and defeat her by the overwhelming weight of
that single-minded intention, she bit on her lower lip and reminded herself to
stay aware, to be aware of everything around her. Though there was some light from the dying
fires where mounds of clothing and other combustible material were still
smoking with some luminescence, she had yet to recognize where she was and,
much less, know where she was going.
As
she made her way further into the dark, she had the sensation of eyes awakening
to her, of having found a nether audience in some surreal drama that was more
nightmare than a night to remember. As
the feeling of being watched grew more pronounced, with somnolently etheric voices suddenly entering her consciousness, she
finally allowed herself to know that there were actual people all around her,
allowed herself to grasp that they were dying; and, at that moment of their
impending deaths, she realized that the pervading stench in the harem was that
of intestines slit wide open, that it was shit run cold she smelled. With her mind blossoming to epiphany as
familiar voices demanded to be recognized, demanded acknowledgment of
themselves as human beings, she began to see what she had denied, to witness
finally in morbid detail the death and devastation that had been visited upon
those around her, seeing them now massed for clinical examination around every
fire glow, around every point of light, knowing finally that she was certainly
not alone, that there were hundreds of women and young girls all around her,
hundreds more aware of her. With a
visible shake that rattled her chains and bobbed her impossibly firm breasts,
she tried to regain her composure while yet unable to shake off her terror of
the wounded, of the dying. As their
cries grew loud and tortured, rising in an eerie crescendo, she deafened
herself with her hands on her ears and blinded herself by screwing her eyes
shut. And she felt her consciousness
cave in, feeling the momentary attraction of that small cave in her mind before
she ripped herself back to the moment, to the sights and sounds that were sure
to be less horrid than what waited within.
As
she made her way further into the nightmarish depths of the baths...with the peacock
still in her wake, reluctant to follow but unable to give up the direction she
provided...she tried to distract herself from the horrified faces, from the
terror in their eyes, by guessing that the massive boiler in the cellar below
had exploded up into the harem, killing and maiming the scantily clad women and
serving girls who had tended her, who had advised her, who had helped her. As she realized that that remembrance had led
her back to the unbearable weight of a still surviving compassion, she found
her imagination rendering up wholesale slaughter and indiscriminate butchery on
the dark slate of her Pointe Blanche home...at the last, seeing her own bleeding
toddler crying up to strangers who, no better nor worse than she was now,
simply moved along. She gasped at her
own insensitivity and shook her head, while seeing too clearly in the glow of
the existing fires how the blast had decapitated or dismembered or eviscerated
those within--with innumerable bodies strewn about, many of them still moving, begging
for help, some floating face down in the baths.