A quite unforeseen and growing number of you who are the regular and male readers of Heel! magazine and of Madame de Morville's decadent texts have written to the London offices of Stiletto Books with impassioned and urgent requests, demanding nothing less than the fullest and most complete disclosure regarding the shrouded history and location of, and the seemingly unnatural atmosphere surrounding the chateau of Morville, intending by these inquiries, we believe, to bolster your own male confidence, to provoke acts of masculine bravado so that you might some night dare to join the previous visitors, those fine and tragic examples of the nocturnal tourist, who, as we repeatedly warn you, do not subsequently reappear within this world.
We, as publishers, know them by their words, only, revealed to us by the female membership of Heel! whose appearance we can confirm as seeming very real, and whose polished stiletto boots more solid than the malleable tongue, though touch of their smooth surface remains strictly forbidden
The few pertinent facts and pieces of fictitious information cobbled together by the imagination into official truth, that we do possess here within our filing-cabinets, to give out in the form of a brief, final note, a guide and map for the astral and for the physical traveller alike, to be studied by the reckless and arguably, rabid reader, who forgetful of his own lack of affinity with the dark beauty of the fetishist's world, will stumble from closed book into black oblivion without stopping even to put marital affairs in order, or to pay off earthly debts for which the more exorbitant price of personal freedom is soon to be exacted... are as follows.
They should be read and appreciated, we would advise each of you, as a cautionary and forbidding tale for the novice and not therefore as a listing of possible errors through the avoidance of which you might gain advantageous entry into the formal gardens of ordered topiary, into the sunless interior of Chateau Morville. Be warned.
In the south-west of France, in sufficient proximity to the warm sea of the Mediterranean and to the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees such that both are linked by tunnel to the intervening chateau that is hidden behind a forest of densely-planted pine or fir trees which, were they separated one from the other, might appear to belong to some long extinct or perhaps futuristic species, lies an immense and sprawling castle fortified with multiple black-coned towers, of great and indeterminate age, in a state of perfect and polished preservation. Approached stealthily by night, by the lucid dreamer or backpacking tourist, the foliage, the needles of these evergreen trees, though the logic of their closely-packed, air-tight planting would deny what is then evident to both the ear and to the eye, rustles disturbingly all around the now lost and increasingly frightened visitor.
For he recognises by the dim light of a failing torch which is being pointed and swung in a wild arc at each of the murmuring trees, that many mangled and merged male forms, deformed, genetically entangled within the biomass of fat trunk and gesturing branch, are attached by mutant skin to peeling bark, their bodies enclosed within the tree's sappy wood from which with spurts and dribble a white sticky, latex-like raw material oozes from the wound into the waiting vessel nailed to the trunk by rubber-clad foresters in the employment of Heel!, the proud owners of garments made from this human latex dyed black and polished to a shine by other volunteers of the male sex.
to be continued...