Lethal Experiences - Orpheus Orange

With her orange-tagged key in hand, Gwen set out to find the room that it opened and the promised costume for the evening and night. The room she found was not as fancy as she had expected, but she had to admit that it was several notches up from a plain dressing room.

Laid out on the bed was a muslin dress and a bonnet. To the side were a pair of button-up ankle boots and a device like a small hook on a handle. On the dresser was an envelope; the contents told her to dress in the costume and gave her directions to her dining table. She went to the phone and dialed zero-zero-one.

"Hello, how may I help?" answered a cheerful voice.

"I not sure what to do. The instructions say to put on the costume. I not sure how to. I've had a quick look and can't find any zips."

"Just to confirm, you are the lady in the orange room? The system does not always tell me which room is calling."

"If you mean the room with the orange door plate and the orange key tag, yes. Because there isn't much orange about this room."

There was a rustle of papers. "Good, got it! Your costume is meant to be a Victorian spirit medium, which would explain the lack of zips; it's done up with buttons down back of the bodice. It says here there's boots to go with it. They button up too."

Gwen turned over the dress and spotted the row of small pearl white buttons. "Ok, I can see the buttons now, but how am I meant to do them up? Because it looks like this will be pretty tight and I don't think that I'll be able to reach."

"You've been given a tool for the job, it says here. A button hook; it'll look like a small hook on a handle."

"I've seen that. I wondered what it was for. How do I use it?"

"It's quite easy. You thread the hook through the hole you want the button to go through, then hook the button and pull it through."

"OK, I'll try that, but if I have any problems I'll call again and maybe you can send someone to help me."

Gwen put the phone down and began on the rows of small buttons down the back of the dress. She stripped out of her modern outfit and stepped into the dress. She pulled it up until the front covered her breasts and thus at the level of the picture she had discovered on the back of the sheet of instructions. After struggling to manipulate the first few buttons through the first few holes, which tightened the dress around her waist and she no longer had to struggle to keep the dress up, she had the hang of using the button hook as if it had returned from some ancestral memory. With the dress buttoned to the top, she put arms into the shoulders straps and settled them on her shoulders, making a square neckline that displayed the tops of her breasts nicely.

Gwen moved on to the boots and found that the button hook was essential as she could not reach the buttons without its help, because bending at the waist was difficult.

She followed the note's directions to her private dining table, where she met a man in a tweed suit, who introduced himself as Edward. A waitress dressed as a Victorian explorer, long khaki dress and pith helmet, came to take their drinks orders and assure them that the meals that they had pre-ordered would be arrived shortly.

Edward and Gwen enjoyed their meals and each other's company. After dessert, they watched several magic acts with participants from other dining alcoves. The first three were trapped in a water filled box, transformed into an inflatable love doll and beheaded respectively.

It seemed that their turn was next. The magician invited them forward and talked to them about the Victorian trend for spiritualism and that some magicians of the time abused people's credulity. "So we are going to stage a fake seance." As he said this a curtain opened to reveal an area that resembled a Victorian drawing room with a round table in the centre.

"Gwen, as Medium, you sit in the big chair behind the table, Edward and I will sit either side. We need a fourth to make up the circle. JENNY!" he called, "Come and take up the fourth place in the circle!"

From the edge of performance area, the khaki clad waitress emerged and took up the seat with her back to the audience.

Under dim lighting the seance took place, but when it came to part where contacting the dead was meant to happen Gwen had a failure of imagination and could not think of someone to be a spirit guide, much less a dead person to contact.

"Ok," said the magician, "we need a dead person to contact. Jenny go and fetch the death chamber."

With Jenny out of earshot, the magician told the couple that the plan was to kill Jenny, but to get that to happen Gwen would have to cooperate. He told her that there was a gas mask in a compartment in the top of the chamber and that she should put it on quickly once she was in the chamber with Jenny.

Moments later Jenny returned with a tall cabinet with clear sides.

"So, who's going in the death chamber?" asked Jenny.

"As a matter of fact, I had not decided, but then I realised that I did not need to decided. Both you and Gwen are going in; the first to collapse will be dead and the other one I'll let out and we can continue the seance. It will just be a matter of who can hold their breath the longest."

They nodded; Jenny confident that she could hold her breath and Gwen that she could quickly find the gas mask. The magician opened the front of the cabinet and ushered the two women inside. Gwen scanned the roof of the cabinet and smiled as she spotted the hiding place of the gas mask. The cabinet proved a tight squeeze, especially with the volume of skirts that needed to be packed in to get the door closed.

"I'm going to start the poison generator, so take your last breath now!" A tap of the magician's foot against the base of the cabinet resulted in a hissing sound and a white mist began to fill the cabinet. Gwen was seen to open a compartment in the roof of the cabinet and clamp the mask that dropped free to her face. Jenny's face was the epitome of concentrating on not breathing.

There was a bang. The front of the cabinet flew open ejecting Jenny, who sprawled on the floor. The door bounced on its hinges and slammed shut. Inside the cabinet Gwen stood dazed while her dress was on fire. Edward stood there unsure what he should do, but the magician darted into the wings and returned with a fire extinguisher. He flung open the cabinet door and directed the cloud of CO2 into the cabinet. When the cloud cleared there was nothing visible in the cabinet.

"Oh dear," remarked the magician. "Instead of poisoning Gwen, we appear to have burnt her alive. Jenny get something to collect her remains, because we are going to need to make some attempt to get her back!"

Jenny got up from the floor and hobbled into the wings and soon returned, without the limp, but with a large glass jar and a dustpan and brush. While Jenny swept a pile of ash from the base of the cabinet into the jar, the magician went into the wings, fetching another clear walled cabinet.

The new cabinet looked very similar to the first, except that it had a ladder up the back and a small hopper on the top. On a strip at the top of the door was a strip with the lettering, 'Ectoplasm Materialiser'.

"Ok, we'll soon have Gwen back." Jenny handed the large jar of ashes to Edward and wheeled the death chamber back into the wings. The magician climbed the ladder at the back of the new cabinet and reached down to accept the jar from Edward.

While the magician tipped the jar of ashes into the hopper, he said, "Of course, there's no such thing as an ectoplasm materialiser, but we call it that to fit in with the theme. What it does is use some quantum filtration techniques to sort the mixed and burnt bits of Gwen and reverse the combustion and the drop them into the chamber to combine."

Edwards expression showed that he thought that the explanation was as much rubbish the description over the door.

Having climbed down and handed the jar to Jenny, the magician pressed a button, which caused something at the top of the cabinet to make a whirring noise. After a few seconds some sparkly dust began to float down from the top of the cabinet and a form began to accumulate at the bottom of the cabinet and in a minute the form was evidently the skirt of the muslin dress that Gwen had been wearing, a little greyer than before, but otherwise perfect in every detail. the next minute saw the building of the dress' bodice and shoulders and arms and then a head that resembled a pale version of Gwen's.

There was a ping. The cabinet now seemed to hold a greyer version of Gwen in a greyer version of the costume she had been wearing before the explosion in the other cabinet. The magician opened the front of the cabinet and invited Gwen to step out.

Instead of the clothed figure of Gwen stepping forth, a semi transparent and naked woman stepped out of the cabinet leaving behind the muslin dress that soon subsided for lack of support.

The magician told Edward to take the ghost-Gwen back to their dining alcove and they would sort things out as soon as the show was finished.

Edward tried to take Gwen's hand, but his hand passed straight through it, but Gwen also reacted to the contact. Edward offered his arm and Gwen rested her hand on it and followed Edward from the performance area.

Between them, although Gwen seemed unable to speak or to hear Edward, they discover that interpenetration felt good for both of them, so he guided her to his room and the spent most of the night exploring the new set of sensations that became available when two bodies can pass into and through each other. They finally fell asleep with Gwen lying through Edward, both with smiles on their faces.

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In the morning, they awoke to a knock on the door. Edward answered it and allowed the magician and Jenny to enter with a cabinet. Gwen floated into the cabinet through the door and the magician activated what looked like a lightning storm inside the the box. Gwen soon seemed less transparent and more substantial. The magician deactivated the box and opened the door to release Gwen, before he and Jenny left.