Metamorphosis of Narcissus

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.