Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [155]
“Are you new to our establishment?” she asked. “Have you an appointment?”
“I’m due in room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel,” said David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.
“I see. Well, you’re . . .” she glanced at the wall-clock. “You’re ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way? Sally’s waiting for you.” She looked up at him and—horrendously, monstrously—gave him a complicitous little wink and smirk. David felt sick.
He turned from her quickly and headed up the stairs.
His heart was going very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end of the walkway was room seventeen.
David began to walk towards it.
He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.
The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.
David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours . . . her arms and legs were hairy and pawed . . . dog’s legs.
His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.
David’s mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.
This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.
The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.
Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the bio-thaumaturges of the state.
Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.
It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.
David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.
There was a thump inside David