Whorehouse Music

The carriage pulled up outside a gabled house with bars on the upper windows, below a full moon beaming light on the scene as if it was a stage play. A small, stout man in restrained courtly dress emerged from the carriage, pursued by a younger man in full royal regalia, sleeves slashed to reveal silk lining the colour of green jade, thick hair greased and waved in the modern style.

They were met at the door of the establishment by a madam whose wrinkled skin and flat chest were supported by shimmering black lace. The stout man found her attractive for what he perceived as her grit and tartness. He was here, however, for the Prince, and introduced themselves as visiting from the palace. 'Of course' said the madam, 'I have been expecting you.'

She let them into a cloyingly hot hallway whose suffocating effect was somehow accentuated by the garish floral wallpaper and framed silhouettes, which if you looked closely you could see were erotic. Prince Michael hoped that the other rooms were better ventilated. Rite of passage or not, he couldn't be expected to make love in this enervating heat.

On taking their coats, the chaperone relinquishing his gun with its ceremonial silver bullets, the madam walked them through to a parlour. A blast of cool air greeted the trio and was as refreshing to Michael as a glass of cold beer on a July afternoon. He wondered how the madam managed such different atmospheres in one house.

The parlour contained several armchairs, one of which was occupied by an old man in dungarees and a straw hat, chewing a stalk of burdock while a voluptuous woman sat on his lap. There was also a piano being played by a man in a red-and-white striped shirt with arm garters. The music was gentle and playful, slightly bawdy. Whorehouse music.

Michael's chaperone plunked himself in the armchair opposite the old man and his entertainer, and the two seemed to take this as their cue to scarper, discreetly rising and shuffling from the room, not daring to make eye contact with the Prince whose regal pedigree was obvious from his attire. Michael took their armchair.

The madam, who seemed none too pleased to have found another client with a woman in the parlour and would likely be scolding some functionary who allowed this faux pas to happen, recovered herself and addressed Michael. 'It is my understanding from his majesty the King that you are keen to progress to manhood' she said. 'You will have a fine selection here.'

She picked up a bell from an end table and rang it. A door opened and through it came a line of girls about Michael's age. They all wore corsets and fishnets, just as the farmer's companion had. Michael's gaze located a gangling ginger-haired girl with freckles like a domino mask around her eyes. 'That one' he said, hating the bruteness and efficiency of his expression while knowing that it was expected of him.

The madam smiled, beckoned the girl with her finger, introduced her as 'Alyssa, one of her fine-boned lot' (whatever that means, thought Michael, who suddenly felt childish and ignorant - more so than he did already), and ushered them upstairs to a bedroom. The madam returned to the parlour and poured the chaperone a whiskey. 'Now it's just us' said the chaperone with what he supposed was a handsome leer, 'why don't we wrinklies make our own fun?'

In the meantime, Michael and Alyssa sat awkwardly side-by-side on the bed, two marionettes without strings, unsure how they should act now that their puppeteers had absented themselves. Michael stood suddenly and walked to the window. 'Why are there bars?' he asked, separating the net curtains. 'Are you here against your will?'

Alyssa laughed. 'If I wanted to leave I could use the front door. Those are to keep the bandits out.'

'Bandits?'

'Robber gangs. They hide out in the woods behind the house. Before I came there was a girl who was kidnapped from her room by a gang, so after that, Madam Birch had bars put on the bedroom windows.'

Michael shivered at the thought of what might have become of that girl. His father said that he was too sensitive, which maybe he was for this world. He turned to the girl on the bed, who grinned sheepishly at him. 'How did you end up here?' he asked.

She decided to risk it. 'I could ask you the same question.'

He chuckled and then she did too. 'My father thinks I need to be made into a man.' Alyssa thought about this for a moment. 'Do you think that?' Michael shrugged and sighed in mild exasperation. 'I don't know... I've just never been as, I guess, robust as my fellows. I don't care for sports, I don't chase girls...' He scratched the back of his neck and looked away.

'My parents were merchants' said the girl. 'I have a brother but he's a lot older. He left when he was 18 to make his living at sea, and then Mum and Dad died of the flux when I was 13, so I went to the orphanage. I stayed there five years. Since I didn't feel like becoming a nun or getting hitched, I came here to earn a living.'

'Do you like it?' asked Michael. Alyssa laughed. 'It's not bad' she said. 'Birch makes sure the men have bathed, at least. Ginger girls aren't the most popular, though.'

'I thought you were the most beautiful.' They smiled at each other as a nervous tenderness passed between them. Michael wasn't sure if he could make love to this girl, but he could talk to her at least. He took in the tacky room with its thick netting on the window, faded curtains, and of course those steel bars, and it all made him a little bit sad when thinking about it in connection with Alyssa.

The sound of crashing glass came from downstairs. 'What on earth...' said Alyssa.

'Maybe I should investigate...' said Michael. Alyssa looked at the parted netting and the moon like the eye of a peeping tom's telescope, peering through the bars. 'Take me with you' she said.

They walked slowly and carefully downstairs, back into the cloying hallway, and approached the parlour door. Alyssa gripped Michael's arm and pushed herself against him, which loosed a nest of butterflies trapped in his stomach. He gripped the cut-glass handle, turned it and pushed open the door in a fluid motion, feeling that if he paused to consider they'd be in the hallway all night.

The room was much as Michael had left it, with the piano playing and the chaperone sitting in the far armchair, opposite where the farmer and the large girl were sitting when they entered. The differences were that the piano had no player, the keys falling and rising of their own volition, while the chaperone was missing his head.

A thick ruff of blood surrounded his neck, staining his attire to a point where no amount of time on the scrubbing board would ever salvage it. Michael saw no sign of the head. What he did see was a torn pair of arm garters and scraps of a red-and-white striped shirt strewn about.

Alyssa choked out half a scream and turned to run for the front door. Michael caught her by the wrist. 'If you go out that way you'll die' he hissed.

'How do you know?' she whispered. He gestured to the piano. 'It's bewitched' he said, 'the music allows him to shift between man and beast of his own free will when the full moon is out.' She stared at him. 'I spend a lot of time in the castle library' he explained. 'Does this house have a cellar?'

Alyssa nodded and took him to the parlour's second door, into the kitchen. On entering she almost screamed again but clapped a hand to her mouth just in time. Two of the girls had been killed and flung about like rats in the jaws of a wild quadruped. One lay contorted atop the stove while the other was crumpled against a cupboard, her guts spilling out.

Michael turned pale and reached for the short sword in the scabbard at his belt. It was supposed to be strictly ceremonial, though he figured that his father's armourer wouldn't mind too much. 'Alyssa' he said, bringing his traumatised companion back to reality. She nodded and guided him to the cellar door, away from the remains of her colleagues and friends.

The Prince removed his cloak and put it around Alyssa. 'Feeling chivalrous?' she joked in a trembling voice, her eyes wet with tears. He tried to put some courage into an answering smile. 'I'm not the one about to tramp through the woods in my underwear' he replied.

They started their descent from the kitchen, down rough wooden steps to a cavernous space lined with racks of liquor. At the far end was the entrance to another room, locked. Alyssa pulled a pin from her hair and picked the lock. 'Your parents were merchants, you say?'

'You learn a lot in an orphanage' was her response.

Inside the room were shelves laden with bottles containing herbs and insects, commanded by a podium on which was an open lambskin tome. The left-hand page displayed a pencil sketch of Madam Birch in erotic embrace with a werewolf. 'Can you lock that door?' asked Michael. Alyssa got to work and had it done in a moment. 'Right' said Michael, shutting the book and heaving it under an arm, 'it's time we made haste to Portshead.'

(This was a common phrase in the kingdom, meaning to get out of town. Portshead was a dockside settlement from which the fleet most often went out and to which it came in when the time was nigh for the sailors to enjoy their leaves.)

He walked to a bookcase and started pulling books from it, letting them clatter to the ground. Finally one seemed to resist his pull and then a clicking was heard as some mechanism was sprung, and the bookcase moved on its axis with a great heave and ho, like an old man dragging himself up from an armchair in which he'd become ensconced.

A rude passageway was revealed, a flaming torch in the distance lighting the way. Michael took Alyssa by the arm. 'It can't be worse in there than it is out here, can it?' Accepting this logic, she followed, and the two of them made their escape down the long passageway, Michael taking the torch from its bracket as they passed.

The tunnel wound and doubled back on itself until they felt completely disorientated. Once or twice they thought they heard a sound as of a child laughing, and sometimes crying, and it came to them that the woods above where they probably were had a reputation for being haunted. At last, they came to a staircase leading up to a trapdoor. Michael prayed with all the force of whatever faith he had that it wouldn't be locked, and his prayers were answered.

The two escapees emerged into a rough sort of church, the type which was constantly under attack from the new and civilised faith. In this case, they might have had a point, as Michael and Alyssa took in pews filled with corpses, some missing heads, most with their throats ripped out, one or two with guts spilling like gored whales washed up on the beach. Alyssa stifled a scream and leaned over to vomit, as much from the smell of steaming offal having mingled with the earthy scents of soil and insect life.

The congregation marked no real imbalance as to gender or class; a housemaid with her abdomen open was sat beside a suited gent whose head lolled sickeningly, barely attached to the rest of him by torn and scattered cords. Michael looked to the lectern facing the faithful and saw his chaperone's head stuck there, a gruesome mockery of sermonising. He extinguished the torch in a pail put out to collect water from the roof. A clamour came from beyond the chapel doors and Michael all but dragged Alyssa to behind the altar, before which stood the podium.

The doors were pushed open and admitted low growls accompanied by a familiar voice. 'Enjoy, my brethren, you soon will have more to dine on, and I now have the dead I need to make the king my slave.' A silent message passed between Michael and Alyssa as they huddled below the altar. Madam Birch. They saw her legs as she moved behind the lectern as if to address the (two? three?) werewolves digging the remaining edible meat from the congregation like society people enjoying lobsters.

They heard a grotesque squelching sound as the chaperone's head was plucked from its congealed pool of blood and raised aloft, Madam Birch beginning to intone the ritual, in a tongue so old it remembered when there were no chapels, woodland or civilised. Michael put a finger to his lips while making eye contact with Alyssa, turned and moved forward apelike on his haunches, just about clearing the table as he drew the sword from its scabbard, matching his progress to the rise of Birch's voice as her ritual reached its climax.

With a catlike grace learned from combat lessons with tutors in his father's courtyards, he sprang from his haunches and drove the sword through the back of her neck, impaling her on it. The wound sprayed blood, her eyes grew wide with shock, the pupils drowning the irises. She dropped the head and it clattered to the floor; it was only then that the werewolves looked up to observe what was happening. There were two of them. They moved to defend their queen, but mid-rush were struck by silver bullets, the explosions of which from their barrels startled Michael as Birch was dragged to the ground with him still clinging to her back.

He looked behind him and saw Alyssa wielding the gun with which she had saved him. The werewolves combusted and screeched as the divine fire reduced each one to ash, leaving behind discreet piles once the flames were gone. Alyssa grinned at Michael, almost with apology. 'I took the liberty of searching your chaperone's coat when we were in the hall' she said. Michael couldn't think where on her body she had hidden the gun before obtaining his coat, but he supposed that he hadn't paid too much attention to her form at that time.

Since he had the leisure to, he did so now. And even in this charnel house, the thought came to him: 'Perhaps I can make love to this girl after all...'