The Book of Revelation Read Online Free

her hood, they seemed to glitter with an almost supernatural light.
    “You see, we don’t want you to suffer,” she said. “On the contrary. . . .”
    As if responding to a signal, the other women approached and kneeled. One sat at his feet while the other took hold of his sweater and eased it gently over his head. Underneath, he wore nothing except his old torn shirt. Starting at the collar, the woman began to undo the buttons. Her fingers were elegant but strong. This undressing was quite unlike the undressing he had just experienced in the bathroom, and not simply because a different woman had taken over. There was stealth in this. There was anticipation.
    Wanting to make things difficult for her, he tried to move sideways, but with his wrists and ankles secured by the stainless-steel rings, there was very little he could do. He could only watch, in fact, as, one by one, the almost transparent pearl-white buttons sprang out of their holes.
    “Ah yes,” one of the women said—or, rather, breathed. Their interest was in the air; it was palpable, like a vibration or a pressure.
    He closed his eyes, darkness as a form of denial, darkness as escape, but found he could see more vividly than ever, the women’s hands, what they were doing. Their fingers on the drawstring of his track-suit trousers, slowly teasing the knot undone, slowly loosening the waistband. . . .
    “You’re very beautiful,” he heard one of them say.
    “Such smooth skin,” said another.
    A third woman spoke, a murmur of corroboration.
    He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore.
    He couldn’t have said how long this adoration of his body lasted.
    Once, the colour of the inside of his eyelids altered, and he opened his eyes to see that one of the women had switched the main lights off and that another was bringing tall candles into the room. The atmosphere became intimate, but also oddly medieval. That flickering, unstable light, and his clothes laid open, peeled back, like the skin of an animal that was being dissected. His nakedness—three figures, hooded, crouching over it. . . .
    He shut his eyes again.
    There was a moment, too, when he felt the beginning of an erection, that gradual tightening at the base of his penis, that slow, almost luxurious rush of blood. It was as if his body was taking sides against him. Betraying him. Though his eyes were still closed, he could hear the women’s voices:
    “Look.”
    “He’s ready.”
    “Who’s going first?”
    •
    The ceiling was no longer there, the walls slid away, and he had views at last, wide open spaces, the bright sky arching over him, the dark vault of the earth. And the landscape kept changing before his eyes. He saw glittering salt flats that stretched for miles, and fields of tall grasses shifting under heavy dark-grey clouds. He saw a yellow prairie bounded by a range of mountains; they stood in shadow, tilting slabs of black and indigo. A fresh wind moved over his face, into his hair. It wasn’t raining, but the air smelled of rain; rain had fallen recently, perhaps, or else it was on its way.
    The air smelled of distance.
    Land all around him, vast and dramatic, land as he had rarely seen it in his life, and he was alone in it. Alone, but not lonely. There was that sense of being at the centre, of being somehow fundamental, the hub of a wheel that includes the universe in all its aspects and dimensions. He had felt this before, though not for many years. Perhaps it was simply the feeling of being young.
    Sometimes he was standing still, sometimes running, but he was always alone, untroubled and curiously absorbed—a kind of rapture. . . .
    Though there was a part of him that knew a door could open and lights could flicker on, brilliant and merciless, and then something could take place that would fix him exactly where he