Exit to Eden by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

on the back of your neck."
    As I reached the top of the ladder, I heard the command "Eyes down" and "Forward" and yet I saw the blue water and the white beach.
    I saw the island itself.
    Lush low trees, roses trellised to the whitewashed stucco walls, and terraces stacked one on top of another, like the hanging gardens of Babylon, broken everywhere with bursts of fluorescent bougainvillea, deep tropical green. There were people at tables on the terraces, hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands. This is it. Really it. The lump in my throat hardened to a rock.
    Martin's many warnings came back, that nothing could really prepare you for a system that worked as well as this one. They could tell you all about it but the sight of it, the size of it, was always an incalculable shock.
    The commands were coming sharp and fast. Slaves right in front of me were running across the deck and down a broad gangplank. Perfect bodies, muscles rippling with the exertion, hair flying, the jiggling, prancing movements of the women in sharp contrast to the swift, powerful strides of the men.
    I couldn't accept or rebel against what was happening. And for an odd moment I doubted not the reality of what was going on around me, but the reality of all that had ever happened to me before.
    I had the positive sensation as I came down the gangplank with the others that all my comfortable life before had been an illusion, and that I had always been this. I can't explain how unaccountably real this was. I had always been this.
    And I had to keep up with the others, do exactly as I was told. The blond kid appeared again like some kind of demon (I almost said "You again, you little bastard."), his suntanned arm flexing as he hit me almost caressingly with his belt.
    "Good-bye, Elliott," he said in the most friendly voice. "Have a good time at The Club."
    I flashed him my most venomous smile, but I was disoriented. Clearing the gangplank, I stared up at the vine-covered walls and that endless stack of terraces, and the soft blue dome of the flawless sky.
    Another strong young menace was whipping the slaves up a zigzag path. There was nothing to do but pass him, to take the licks as I ran with the rest.
    The handler shouted impatiently for us to pick up speed. And I wondered why we obeyed, why it was so important to do what he said. I mean we'd all been brought here for the pleasure of the thousands up there on the terraces. And why wouldn't it give them just as much pleasure to see somebody stumble, and be singled out for the strap?
    But if anybody stumbled, it wasn't going to be me. That's the genius of it, I thought. I want to please them. We're not only acting like slaves, we're thinking like slaves too.
Lisa
Chapter 4
Love at First Sight
    It was dizzyingly warm, and the grounds were so crowded I could hear the loud steady hum of conversation even in the empty corridor as I hurried to my room.
    There wasn't time now for that quiet drink, or a walk in the garden, or even to see the slaves driven off the yacht.
    They would be in the receiving hall in an hour and I hadn't even been through the files.
    A complete description along with history and commentary is collected on every slave, along with detailed photographs, and I've learned to pay as much attention to the file as to the slave.
    As soon as I opened the door, I saw Diana waiting for me, unadorned, hair brushed free, the way I like her best. Some trainers think that subtle little adornments make the slave more naked. I don't agree.
    In rooms like our rooms, with the thick wool carpets and antique velvet draperies, and all the little accoutrements of civilization, a naked slave burns like a flame.
    Amid the dark flowing colors, and the video screens and the low sculpted furnishings, she is purely animalian and infinitely mysterious the way only the human animal can be.
    Put her in rooms as outrageously decorated as my own— among the Haitian paintings and the potted ferns, the barbaric stone