Chapter 1 The Invisible Village

Voile

Southern France, 1873

Margot Collette stepped out of a shop into the dust-scattering sunlight of the market square. It was warm and bright as befitted a typical summer’s day in the South of France. Margot was a beautiful and elegant lady, adorned in the finest dress available from the shops in Paris; her long auburn hair was pulled up and concealed beneath the rim of a sun hat. She smiled as she noticed the sign affixed to the lamppost along the sidewalk. It announced yet another public sentencing that was to take place – in only half an hour’s time.

She made her way around the corner, to the centre of the market square, and gazed upon it – the mechanism for executing the sentence. She was possessed by more than a little excitement – such a magnificent apparatus! Patiently, she waited.

Chuck Carter was an American visiting France. A substantial inheritance had spared him the need to work. At the tender age of thirty-two, he was a world traveler who loved visiting Europe – France, in particular. A handsome man, now on his second self-directed walking tour of the country, Chuck had long since fallen in love with everything French – especially the women. He had a particular penchant for their stylish dresses and their delectable forms that seemed to radiate femininity above all else. The perfume, the colours, their fair skin – all seemed so sensually perfect.

As he strode along the dusty farm road toward the village of Voile, he paused to check his map again. It was so remote that its existence took him by surprise. One moment he was walking through the farm fields and forests of rural Southern France, and the next, the town’s buildings and church spires were suddenly there ahead of him, projecting above the horizon. He pulled out the regional map from his right pocket, uncrumpled it and studied again the roads and villages it displayed. Strangely, there was no indication of any kind of settlement ahead – his map displayed only farmland and forest. Carter decided to proceed straight to the village, to learn more about this undocumented community.

In less than an hour, he was striding the streets of Voile, absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of the remote French village. As he immersed himself in the mystery of the town, he noticed a small poster tied to a lamppost next to a café. The rendering of the guillotine caught his attention, and – as he tried to translate the French text – his heart began to beat faster. He suddenly was aware of an old, familiar stirring in his pants.

“When?” he asked himself with a cruel lust. The flyer stated four o’clock that afternoon! Quickly, he checked his pocket watch. Oh, God, he thought – just one hour from now! Carter knew that he had to witness the promised public spectacle. Without even stopping for a meal, he hurriedly made his way through the narrow village streets to the square in the centre of town.

Entering the square, his eyes squinted, adjusting to the dusty sunlight. A wooden stage had been constructed for the occasion in the middle of the broad open area. And there on the platform it stood, before his very eyes. Imposing, implacable, and silently terrifying. As he studied it, he felt an erection rising in his trousers.

The machine was of formidable size. The paired vertical posts were carved oak, towering ten feet above the platform. Between them, horizontal supports of forged iron braced the two posts and held them rigidly in place. On the inner face of each post was a vertical slot running its full height, a brass-lined groove to guide the heavy blade in its gravity-powered descent toward its hapless victim below. The diagonal iron blade was larger than Carter expected. It was suspended from the top of the machine by a rope and pulley system, and he could make out a release mechanism with a dangling cord hanging to one side of the far post.

Carter tried to imagine the blade falling, the massive angled slab of iron accelerating relentlessly as it fell, and – just before the end of its journey – slicing instantly through anything as inconsequential as a human neck, without slowing in the slightest. In a fraction of a second, the victim’s head would be tumbling down, even before his brain registered the shock of separation.

And yet, there were aspects of this particular guillotine’s design that Carter could not comprehend. The more he studied it, the more questions he had. For one thing, the lunette – which would normally clamp down over the victim’s neck – was at the wrong height. Was the condemned supposed to wait for execution on hands and knees? If so, the lunette was too high. Or, would he be standing? For that, it was too low! And another thing: unless his eyes deceived him, the circular aperture of this lunette was far too small to accommodate a human neck!

Carter could only conclude that he didn’t understand how this guillotine was intended to do its deadly work. Perhaps it wasn’t the lunette at all that he was gazing at. And then, thinking about the separated head tumbling into the traditional basket, he saw that there was no basket. Instead there was only an average-sized silver bowl, perhaps 12 inches across.

Perplexed, Chuck looked away from the machine, wondering if there might be a sympathetic English-speaking Frenchman willing to answer the growing cascade of questions forming in his head.

As his eyes searched the crowd, he suddenly found himself gazing directly at the attractive French woman standing beside him. Instantly, their eyes met. Margot looked up at him with a bemused smile.

Carter felt his face flush in simultaneous confusion and embarrassment.

“You came to see the youths unmanned?” she asked in very good English, with a beguiling French accent. “I too am looking forward to watching it.”

What? Chuck’s mind seemed to go blank. He stared at her, uncomprehending. What was she talking about, “unmanned”? Surely there was some misunderstanding here!

“But what are you saying?” he protested, bewildered. “I thought the poster said there would be...will be...executions today!”

Margot listened with apparent amusement, a smile growing in the corners of her mouth. She glanced again at the guillotine, then abruptly laughed. As her eyes returned to Chuck’s, she said quietly: “Not today, mon ami. Not executions, but punishment enough. Although for these … these sex … how do you say? …sex criminals, they may someday wish it had been an execution.”

Chuck shook his head, not understanding. If not executions, what was all of this about?

“What happens here, then?” he asked, quelling his growing frustration.

She continued: “The accused are prisoners from our gaol in the village. A unique gaol.”

“Oh?” Chuck replied, curiosity growing.

“It is a prison where sexual offenders, rapists and such bad men or youths are sent. It is run completely by women, as a means of impressing upon them that women are to be respected.”

“And – and is this sentence because of their crimes?”

“In part, yes,” Margo explained patiently. “But there is a more important rule in the prison and I suppose they broke it. Most of them do, eventually.”

“What rule?”

She smiled at him, in apparent sympathy at his ignorance.

“The penis guillotine is the penalty for masturbation.”

Chuck’s face registered a simultaneous combination of shock and excitement. He found himself momentarily at a complete loss for words. To hear this beautiful young lady say the words ‘penis guillotine’ so matter-of-factly, as if she were describing a new kitchen tool for paring apples, or for slicing carrots, suddenly struck him as intensely and overwhelmingly erotic. A vibrating, tingling sensation raced from his head down his spine, to finally explode, with a burst of heat, directly in his genitals. He felt himself becoming even more aroused, and he feared it would be obvious to Margot and others in the growing crowd.

Watching him, Margot burst out laughing, and he found himself laughing too, almost overwhelmed by excitement and physical arousal. His mind raced and his heart beat faster with the prospect of what was about to take place, and simply knowing that so many women – including his charming guide – were there to watch the proceedings.

Margot studied him serenely, gauging this stranger’s reaction to the village’s seemingly-brutal system of justice.

“A man must not be ruled by his genitals,” she explained earnestly. “He must learn, first and foremost, restraint and obedience to social standards. The wardens of the gaol enforce such a rule and the male is expected to obey, to learn how to restrain and control himself. That is his test. If he fails, he does not deserve a penis – he is a danger to himself and to society. ”

“I…I think I understand,” Chuck replied, almost afraid to respond.

“In the gaol,” she added, “the prisoners are required to pleasure the Governess and the guards with their tongues, each day.”

"Really?”

“Yes,” she explained. “It helps to ensure their submission – and arouse them beyond reason – as part of their test.” She smiled. “Just imagine – so young, so virile – and required to lick vagina every day, while being permitted no relief. It is so delicious.”

Increasingly aroused by the beautiful woman’s perverse words – and entirely speechless for the moment – Chuck looked back to the guillotine. Suddenly all the things that initially seemed wrong appeared eminently practical: the victim naturally would be standing at the machine, his groin pressed firmly against the lunette - which had been modified to hold a man’s genitals, instead of his neck. In fact, a closer look revealed a three-part lunette, which created two circular apertures, one just above the other, when the three components were brought together. With the lunette sections clamped down, whatever protruded through them was trapped for the blade to take.

As if to confirm his guess, his enchanting companion explained: “His penis goes through the top hole, and his testes – balls, you say? – through the lower, if he is also sentenced for castration.”

“But it’s such a huge guillotine!” Chuck protested. “Surely a machine this large wasn’t built just to ... to only remove a man’s genitals!”

“Mais non, of course not,” she replied patiently. “This guillotine with the original lunette was built for ... to decapitate ... to take off a man’s – or a woman’s – head, just like the Paris guillotines. But our little village has always had a strict code of justice for sex offenders. The modified guillotine is a better way to do it – clean, quick, very simple.”

As Chuck stared at the machine with growing comprehension of its new function, he heard a commotion to the left of the platform. They looked over just in time to see three very scared Frenchmen – a man, and two youths - half-walking, half dragged by women in official village gendarme uniforms, being escorted toward the guillotine platform. It was obvious these were the condemned.

Chuck stared at them, trying to guess at their crimes and life histories, and as he watched them being dragged toward their fate, he felt the familiar tightness in his pants again. He couldn’t take his eyes off the doomed man and the two strapping youths. The latter appeared to be typical young males, farm boys perhaps, possessed of the slim, muscular adolescent body that a mature French woman might lust after.

He turned back to Margot with a knowing question. “You may have noticed that I am a stranger,” he began.

“Yes,” Margot replied. “Of course.”

“But I must ask you – what is this town? There is no indication of it on my map.”

Margot looked at him and smiled, devilishly. “There won’t be. Voile is a world unto itself. We are our own society. We are our own law.”

Upon hearing her words, Chuck was infused with intrigue.

“But how can that be?”

Margot smiled again.

“Out there, the revolution continues,” she said, indicating the tree-lined dirt roads beyond the town that led to the outside world. “But Voile has been here for thousands of years. Very few have discovered it – and of those few, none desire to leave …”

““No one wants to leave”?” he questioned. “But what of the criminals who are to lose their … you-know-what’s … today? Don’t they want to leave?”

“Let me re-state that,” she replied. “None who obey our laws have ever chosen to leave.”

Chuck turned his attention uneasily back to the guillotine as the woman’s words sank in. He watched the crowd of excited onlookers continue to gather. He couldn’t help questioning the reality of what he was witnessing. Was he dreaming?

Where on earth had he found himself?

Next: Chapter Two - Execution of Sentence I