#except the one i mentioned before today (decapitation/trophy) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mindpenis · 7 years ago

Text

ABYSS CHAPTER FIVE

Walking behind Damaris and beside Marion, my mind sought balance in mundane questions: how long ago had these walking-tunnels below the city been built, and given that they were now illuminated by gaslight, how had that recent work been kept secret? City government officials paid off or threatened? Workers eliminated and entombed, like the reputed end of those who built hidden chambers for Pharaohs in their monuments?As she had led us below, Damaris had simply said, “If you can't make the manipulators of gross matter do what you want, what purpose do they serve?”A sentiment probably shared by Miss Bama's slave-owning grandfathers.Damaris moved with her customary confidence along the tiled passage. As she approached each gas sconce her shadow grew darker and heavier, stretching back over Marion and myself, then as she passed the source of light, it leaped forward.Marion had walked to this point in silence, but she inclined her head to the side and upward to look at me, a twist of characteristic mockery on her lips.“You seem pouty, Dr. Wilder. Aren't you excited?”I did not answer her. Looking at her face snapped me immediately back to the moment I had plunged the iron dagger into her back, competing a double impalement. Could I take solace in the marginally-understood awareness that the sexually-charged murder had been an illusion? I could not see how. All of my convictions, my moral center, had been swept aside in seconds through the avenues of my aroused prick and Damaris' 'persuasive gaze'.“Don't feel unmanned, doctor,” Marion went on. “You were well and truly a stud, though it must have been a shock to have a pretty little girl butcher you.”“What?”“Look, I won't deny it, it was exquisite to stick that knife into your head, and then your heart, while you were fucking my brains out.”Apparently Marion's perceptions around our experience had been somewhat different from mine.She slowed her pace slightly, and as the gap grew between us and Damaris ahead, Marion edged nearer to me and lowered her voice.“Maybe you and I should have a talk.”I glanced forward; Damaris moved past another gas-sconce into the darkness beyond, with no break in her steady stride.“I'm going to tell you straight out,” Marion continued, “I'm mightily awed by Mistress Ruha, and our little rehearsal of things to come impressed me considerably, to say the least.”“But...”“But is she crazy as a fruit bat to your mind? I want what the Archons offer, but Jesus wept, she's kept her own son-in-law's head in a glass-fronted armoire for something like fifty years.”In my mind's eye, I once again looked at the decapitated head of Carson Xavier, preserved with such uncanny skill. Thankfully his immobile features had been arranged in an aspect suggesting peace rather than frozen in some moment of horror or shock. He had, as much as anything, resembled a Roman marble bust, though lacking the open but blank eyes favored by classical sculptors. His eyelids had been sealed tightly down, suggesting a state of conscious sleep.Damaris had said I resembled him. I could not see it in the lines of his face, but despite the ignominy of his end, he somehow still seemed possessed of dignity.She had talked about him with none of the scorn she invariably meted out to Grace. I thought, that if not regret, there was some melancholy...something that had a feel of being unfinished. In the aftermath of the feverish coupling between Marion and myself, I had noticed subtleties of behavior in Damaris toward her silent artifact: while speaking of other things, she had allowed her hands to stray unconsciously toward it...echoes of what seemed caressing gestures.I had asked her why she had included Xavier's taxidermied remains in the violent/sexual conditioning imposed on Marion and me, to which she had replied, “The dead hunger for fierce fucking...haven't you been paying attention?”Such waters were too deep, too bizarre for me to sound to the bottom.Marion, with her own form of perception, had simply said, “Not so different from having a statue of the crucifixion by the bed while doing one's lover.”After the extraordinary breakfast, Damaris had showed us other things. Tucking Xavier's decapiated head in the crook of her arm, she'd returned it to her library, placing it in the “trophy armoire” Marion had mentioned. The sight of lines of male and female heads, arranged on layered shelves, intermixed with what seemed very old-looking fleshless skulls, filled me with frank horror, even as prepared as we had already become to accept the trappings of Archon depravity.“Mostly notable losers of Depuration bouts,” Damaris had declared. “A few traitors, a few ancestral colleagues, but mostly aspirants like you two, who fell just a little short. If you comport yourselves with commendable fierceness and passion, you merit remembrance.”Should Damaris ever be hauled away for imprisonment and this house exposed to the authorities, I imagined its nightmare-contents would be the stuff of legend for centuries.She also brought our attention to primitive forms of weaponry – mostly swords, knives and spears – arranged on the walls above her bookshelves. Many of the cutting edges were well-notched; Damaris claimed to have wielded them herself during various stages of her career. And above her desk, a huge, detailed map of Africa. Nothing approaching the precision of it had ever been produced by the likes of Livingstone, Burton or Speke.“The recent English obsession with Africa is annoying,” Damaris had said. “But there still should be some decades left to play with, before we need to seal off the areas that will forever inviolably belong to us.”Later, consigned back to my room, I had stripped, and with angry resolution about the liberties taken with my body and mind, I had removed the bandage from my lower groin. The wound had been stitched, but the area showed no lingering inflammation and absolutely no supporation – some form of salve seemed to have been applied, traces of which remained. I lightly scraped around the stitches to acquire some if it under my nails, and brought it to my nose. The salve had no scent that I could identify, other than a vague impression of astringent cleanliness.The medicinal techniques of Damaris' Archons must be revolutionary.Both Marion and I had eventually been summoned back downstairs for dinner, which had passed without more debauchery. But upon its completion, exiting Damaris' dining room, we had passed the foyer and seen three individuals, two women and a man, preparing to go out. Umaru was with them as they departed into the street. Damaris had made no comment, beyond, “Now we set hounds upon hounds.”Then she had showed us the tunnels.“Grace doesn't know about these,” she had said, “Or she wouldn't have tried to pry the location of the Depuration out of you, James. Tonight we are invisible to the world, and you will see more of how the Archons do things.”Marion, still walking close beside me, has spent a few moments in quiet thought. “Dr. Wilder,” she finally said, lowering her voice even further, “was it true what you said, that before today you didn't even know your father's name?”“Yes, it's true.”“So there's nothing we might use, or recall to the gentleman's mind, to...revise our allegiances, should that become desirable?”“I think not. Let me ask you a question, Miss Bama. Your Lady Ruha compelled you with the touch of her hand to speak the truth to her. Were your answers the truth?”“Gospel,” she smiled. “I didn't even try to lie. But having no control over myself...I can't say I cared for that. However, what I said about killing and fucking? My particular lusts were indeed honestly stated. Never doubt that I'm truly enamored of Archon wisdoms.”“So what she offers is real to you.”“It ought to be to you too, doctor. It's got overtones of that Faust fellow, but what the hell. Souls are for preachers to carry on about.”“So tell me your thoughts, Miss Bama, on what we saw in the foyer of Mistress Ruha's home before coming down to these tunnels.”“You mean what passed for you, me, our mistress and her large boy going out for an evening stroll? That's simple. She wouldn't have let us see it if it wasn't going to involve us down the line. She's baiting a hook for her bad daughter, and undoubtedly we're going to take part in the fishing.”“But in a more immediate sense. She's isolated with us, and without her bodyguard.”“You thinking of making a run for it? Look doctor, I'm nobody's fool...I'm counting my steps and marking off the branches of this fine hole in the ground in my mind, because it's always good to know the lay of the land. But not to use for something stupid. The bodyguard? I'd lay the church collection plate against the likelihood that she could break big old Umaru in two should she choose to. As far as us, the breaking wouldn't even make her breathe hard, except because doing it would probably arouse her.”“She can't watch or control us forever. If we were to expose the horrors in her house to the authorities...”Miss Bama responded with a snort. “Dr. Wilder, let me give you some spook wisdom. You got Klan trouble, you don't go running to the police, odds are the chief's got a bedsheet with eyeholes in it hanging in his wardrobe. You figure out who the Giant is, the Cyclops, Magi, Monk and Turk of the Den. If you're desperate and have got the balls, maybe do some housebreaking and put a butcher knife up the ass of one of those fine dignitaries, that'll set things to disarray. But barring that, you keep your fool head down and do what you're told. Make no mistake, women are the niggers of the world, doctor. But there are ways and ways.” She regarded me with a smile. “Besides, aren't you the tiniest bit curious to see this murdering God spectacle she's been touting? I know it's your daddy, but it should be a sight worth seeing.”Damaris came to a stop ahead, turned, and waited for us. She had reached an archway. As I drew near and looked in, I saw steps leading upward into a heavy gloom.“Did you have an enjoyable talk?” she asked. “Working out the finer parts of your divergent philosophies?I did not respond, but Marion spoke in a convincing facsimile of guilelessness. “Dr. Wilder puts me in mind a bit of Jesus. I do believe he still intends not to raise a hand while I stick a sharp metal length into him.”“There are some addicted to the nobility of sacrifice in the history of the gnosis as well,” Damaris shook her head slightly. “But I believe we saw your true nature over breakfast, James.”“Is this the place?” Marion also peered into the darkness beyond the archway.“Welcome to our underworld, place of intriguing baptisms,” Damaris answered. “When the living fire mingled with the clouded water, due to the fragrance of the Garment of Living Fire powdered dust ascended from the Earth of Siniavis. Go up the stairs. You can't go wrong in your way.”Marion passed beneath the arch without hesitation, and I followed, with Damaris close behind me. The stairs went upward for about the equivalent of a single story, though given the depth to which we'd descended to reach the walking-tunnels, I judged we were still below ground. The gloom lessened as we went up. At the stair-head we went through another arch into a wide, circular space with a high-domed masonry roof.A gas chandelier suspended from that roof provided the light. In the center of the space a rectangular table – very much like an altar – had a number of objects placed on it: knives, identical to the iron daggers Marion and I had become acquainted with, as well as ornate keys.Around the circle of the ampitheatre were seven alcoves. Each had a low wall separating it from the central space, and within were benches for seating. Several other arches provided entrance and egress to the place; I presumed they led to other tunnels or other clandestine rooms. Again the audacity of constructing such a network below the byways of London was impressive.There were people in five of the seven alcoves. Couples...men and women seated on the benches, each pair accompanied by a standing individual.“Ah,” said Damaris, coming through the arch behind us, “we are fashionably late.” She made a sweeping gesture toward the occupied alcoves. “My associates. Sabaoth, Iao, Heraios, Armouth, Eloiein.”I looked at the two standing men and three women. A diverse group: Caucasian, Negro and Oriental. Though the sitting couples were clothed, the standing figures were naked. They did not possess Damaris' perfection of body – one of the men was short, almost a dwarf – none struck me as having the bearing of some perverse but powerful modern god or goddess. But then, Damaris had described these five as being less than her equals – or the equal of Saklas, my supposed father.My heartbeat increased as I scanned the space for the personage of – what had Damaris called him? Their Demiurge. The first and seventh alcoves, on opposite sides of the circle, were unoccupied. At least it seemed so, until looking hard at the dark opening of the first, I thought perhaps I discerned a figure far back within, though if real, I could make out nothing of the person's appearance.“This way,” Damaris said, leading us to the seventh opening. “The first position is debatable, dependent on whether one looks at the alignment of the world from right to left, or left to right.”The eyes of those assembled followed us as we went to the end alcove, stepping over the dividing wall to enter in. I saw then that the bench was fitted with two single-chain wrist manacles, one on either side.“Sit, and chain yourselves, if you will,” Damaris instructed. “Before you demur, James, be aware that the key to these is on the central dais. When we are done tonight, I will bring the key to you both. Or if I am unable to, one of the other Archons will do it. Over the course of time, we have had experiences with candidates becoming unruly. Some, seeing what we do, have attempted to run away. I judge you both to be made of sterner stuff than that. Some, out of an excess of chivalry,” she took a long, hard look at me, “have attempted to intervene. I'll give you a thought, James...your desire to be a white knight toward women is the acceptable face of a two-sided coin. On the other side is the impulse to destroy us. It's far more enlightened to accept our power as equal and complimentary to yours. Marion, I'm not worried about altruistic impulses in you. We could perhaps forego the cuff in your case, except for the fallacy that might place in Dr. Wilder's mind that I consider him either more dangerous, or more rash.”“I don't rightly mind a bit of bondage,” Miss Bama readily seated herself on the bench, took up the metal cuff and clamped it around her wrist with an audible click.“Sensible girl.” Damaris, though speaking to Marion, kept her gaze fixed on me. “James, a scene at this juncture would be humbling for you, as I would have to deal with it severely. Something I have no wish to do. Please.”I also seated myself and applied the cuff from my side of the bench.Damaris inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment, then turned to look out into the ampitheatre. “These other ten candidates, like you, are here to watch. There will be no drugs, no mesmerism, no imposing of my body's energy into yours. Your experienced eye as a doctor, James, will be invaluable in judging what you see.”Damaris turned back toward us, then proceeded to remove her coat, followed in short order by all the rest of her clothing. She left the clothing in a discarded pile on the alcove's floor; an act of disdain that seemed natural to her, becoming in her nakedness infinitely more sophisticated and primitive all at once.The dusky tone of her skin, backlit by the gas chandelier as she stood before Marion and me, seemed to mingle night and day in her physicality. The curves of her body, upheld by lean muscles, gave her a lush, feline quality.Even bordello-princesses like Cathy seemed to harbor reluctance about total nudity, though aware in their way of the body's natural atavistic power; Damaris, by contrast, became like a weapon unsheathed.My own body responded to the sight of her with immediate arousal, and not, as she had said, prompted this time by drugs or other methods of coercion or force. I had always considered society's prudery ridiculous, but that did not mean I felt easy in this seemingly endless state of sexual encouragement, or rather demand.“Your father is notably taciturn, James,” Damaris smiled. “So it will fall to me to prompt things into motion. In case you hadn't noticed, I consider the mouth a tool to be used for a multiplicity of purposes.”She turned again, stepped over the alcove's low partition, and walked to the central table with its knives and keys. She picked up one of the blades, holding it out on her palm.“Iron seeks the iron in our blood,” she said. “It's good to see you, my fellow Archons, and I like the look of the candidates you've brought. Divine killers if I'm any judge.” Moving in a slow arc there in the central pool of gaslight, she stared in turn into each alcove. “Tonight we will exorcise any doubt you may yet harbor about what you can possess in our service. You all fear being ruined by time or violence. We're going to show you that you need no longer fear either one. For the six that will join us on New Year's Day, we will ask a great deal of you, but we will give you everything.”Damaris returned the knife to the tabletop and walked back to us. Entering into the alcove, she moved with sensuous grace to sit on the bench right between us. The ultra-physicality of her presence was literally dizzying; my eyes roved to her long legs and her heavy breasts, to the somewhat cruel but amused lines of her parted lips. I smelled the musk of her own arousal clearly.She placed a hand on each of our legs. “Cock hard, pussy wet?” There was more of her arrogance in the hint of laughter under her words. “You better be. That's all the foreplay you're going to get.”From the other alcoves the five lesser Archons moved out into the central space. Each selected one of the daggers.“I'm sure you've done the math that there are twelve candidates who will become six acolytes. Saklas doesn't put forth candidates. In the old days he used to, but he's become rather full of himself, and seems to have no interest in seeking out those with whom we can expand the circle. But he likes this part, as much as he could be said to like anything.”A moment later, an obvious tremor of tension passed through the five naked, dagger-bearing Archons. So palpable I could clearly perceive it from where I sat. From the dim recess of the first alcove where I had guessed at the presence of someone, he came. Into the light of the chandelier stepped a man of proportions that outstripped even Umaru. A rush of adrenaline charged through me as I saw the bronze tone of his skin, so like mine. He had long hair, a heavy beard, and a black patch over one eye.He slowly moved his head from right to left, as if requiring the motion to take us in with his one good eye.“I can attest to the fact that there's an empty socket behind that patch,” Damaris commented. “Not so strange to you perhaps, until you come to fully learn what it means to be an Archon. The prevailing story is that he plucks out his own eye over and over – that the act gives him a form of special vision. It might even be true.”Henryk Xaus. As I resisted thinking of Damaris through the pretentious identity of her Gnostic name, so I was reluctant to think of this man as Saklas. Much less a Demiurge, given the divinity apparently attached to the title.His astonishing musculature...the hair on his arms, legs and chest...the man seemed one step up from a great ape, and they were calling him God.As Xaus looked into each alcove, his eyes did rest on me briefly. Did he know who I was? That one eye continued past me, taking in Marion, and Damaris between us, with an air of brief observation, followed by dismissal.Xaus did not go to the dais for a knife. He opened and closed his obviously-powerful hands, but seemed uninterested in any weapon. His phallus, immense even limp, began to rise, quickly gaining an almost disproportionate stature even when measured against the scale of his huge body.The five Archons spread apart, forming a semicircle facing him, daggers held ready. No one spoke.The possibility that this was some form of sham performance vanished as the first of the Archons – a woman with long brown hair, whose features looked Italian – lunged in, feinting a slash but then altering the trajectory of her intended blow to a stab. Xaus caught her wrist, stopping the dagger-point perhaps an inch from ripping his belly. He twisted and I distinctly heard the snap of her wrist breaking. The dagger clattered to the ampitheatre floor.“Eloiein is always impetuous,” Damaris sighed. “Always the first in. When she deals with conventional opponents, no one lasts more than a few seconds against her.”Xaus released her wrist. He drove his other hand, fisted, between her breasts, hammering her ribcage. Again I heard the results of the blow, a crunch that spoke of smashed ribs. Eloiein crumpled downward, but the other four were darting in.Both of the other male Archons were also sexually erect. The women displayed the more subtle physiognomy of arousal as well. These creatures fed on mayhem.The short man circled behind Xaus while the taller male, a black man with a pointed, almost Pharonic beard, and the women engaged the giant from the front. Attempting to hamstring Xaus, the small man received a sudden kick to his face, flattening his nose and causing it to spurt crimson. The taller of the two women, who had the face of a patrician Greek, grasped Xaus' protruding phallus and slashed downward at it with her dagger. Before she could complete the intended dismemberment he clubbed her in the throat. While she lurched back her gripping hand spasmed open, freeing his cock. The slash of her dagger went wide. The smaller woman, an Oriental, tried an almost duplicate attack, as if Xaus' organ was a prize they coveted. He clamped his huge paw around her head and swept his arm fiercely, shoving her away and causing her neck to wrench to a sickening angle.Xaus' engorged penis began to spurt. As did the black man's as he made his own rush at the giant. Neither man seemed overcome by this evidence of orgiastic sensation; the black swung his arm high and while his dagger flicked at the one good eye, he punched Xaus viciously in the kidney area, the first blow from one of the five Archons to actually land.He might as well have struck a granite pillar. Xaus had released the Oriental woman's head and swung his own fist upward, taking the black under the jaw and literally lifting him from his feet. An instant later he was flung against the dais, his head striking its edge and opening a ragged gash at his temple.The small man, trying to wipe blood from his face, could not evade another strike from Xaus' foot, which pulped his features further. He collapsed to the floor, twitching.How much time had passed? A minute? Two?All of the five Archons, broken, littered the floor. The smell of the air was suffused with blood, sweat and ejaculate.Damaris watched it all, the only change in her demeanor being slight intakes of breath – apparently signaling pleasure – at each instant of crippling violence.I raised my manacled hand. “I see why you chained me. You think I could otherwise sit here to watch a slaughter?”“You think you're observing a slaughter? What would you be doing right now, doctor? Attempting to stanch their wounds? Accept this, James: you are a bumbling, tribal, primitive in the presence of gods.”“And this is supposed to inspire us? I should feel a craving to serve Miss Bama as my supposed father has served your purported fellow gods?”“Of course,” she said calmly. “But I wouldn't aspire to his place, James. Aspire to theirs.”“Aspire to bleed out on the floor of hell.”“Aspire to a state of being in which you can survive almost anything. And revel in the vitality of it. James, you've forgotten that we are Nature. There's no evil in Nature's perpetual dance of destruction. When you look up at the stars, I'd venture you see cold points, eternal and distant. And when you look at living things, you see flesh and passion and immediacy. That is error. You should feel the stars breathe, hear them laugh. We are more than flesh-marionettes which can be smashed and should be pitied. We are as constant as those living stars.”“Arcane nonsense...bullshit.”“Which, I hope, will ultimately prompt you to think in ways beyond the lessons of an adolescent's schoolroom.”Xaus stalked for a few moments around his crushed adversaries. Then, enlarging my capacity for horror yet further, he crouched at each body in turn, spread their fingers, and tore one off. He was indiscriminate as to which – the middle finger from the woman with Greek features, the ring finger of the black man. When he had collected all five, he brought them to the central table and dropped them on top of the small pile of keys.Damaris let out a long breath. “The expected result. Still, I always wonder if some day an Archon will have the luck or develop the skill to be more than a toy warrior against Saklas. Of course if anyone did succeed in damaging him, they would need to face me next.”She patted each of us on the knee, and stood.“Going to do obeisance to your God?” I made no effort to disguise the abhorrence I felt.“In a way, but not as you think, James.”With perfect sangfroid, she stepped back over the partition and re-entered the ampitheatre. She made her way through the sprawled bodies of her fellows, went to the dais, and picked up the last remaining iron dagger.She regarded Xaus with her omnipresent smile. “Shall I kneel and suck your cock, Lord Saklas? I see it hasn't deflated, despite your paroxyms in the course of dealing with our fellow elites.”For the first time, then, he spoke. And I knew he truly was my father, as the voice was an uncanny duplicate in tone and resonance to my own.“Interesting crop of candidates, Ruha.”“The five generally choose well.”“And yours...very insolent of you.”She shrugged.“Doctor,” Marion whispered. “I do believe he's talking about you.”Damaris moved her dagger in a slow downward circle, indicating the fallen Archons. “You were easy on them.”At first he made no reply, but simply stood looking at her. A tower of flesh, his great muscles bunched and corded, his massive penis still dripping seminal fluid.Damaris transferred the dagger to her left hand, and with her right, extended her little finger.Marion chuckled. She was, apparently, enjoying this. “Insolent, he says. She is a saucy bitch and no mistake. I don't believe your daddy took the pinkie from any of the other five.”The goading was effective. Xaus abruptly charged at her, once again displaying preternatural speed for someone so large. Damaris pivoted away with the grace of a dancer; Xaus' arms, outstretched to grasp and crush, encountered air. As he passed her, Damaris employed her dagger to score a bloody line down the giant's back.He checked his forward rush, showing no concern whatsoever about the gash running parallel to his spine. He was more wary in his second approach, though. Instead of running at her, he moved closer slowly, step by measured step.Damaris had maneuvered herself so that the body of the Italian woman was between herself and Xaus. She planted a bare foot against the small of the prone woman's back, and shoved. Eloiein's limp form slid toward Xaus, Damaris following it, dagger extended.Xaus ignored the body coming up against his feet and grasped Damaris' wrist, just as he had the first woman's. But the result was not the same. Damaris used her own forward motion to come up hard against her adversary, her breasts flattened against his chest. With her free hand, she jabbed her thumb into his eye.Xaus roared, releasing her. Damaris hooked her leg behind his knee, bringing the top of her head upward against his jaw. His knee bent, and he toppled backward. Blood appeared at his lips – he must have bitten his tongue.As he crashed onto his back, Damaris flung her dagger down at him. It went in under his ribs, probably puncturing his stomach. She did not reach to extract it, but picked up a dagger that had been dropped by one of the other Archons. She threw that one as well, sinking it this time into his chest near the heart.“Sweet Jesus,” Marion breathed. “Your daddy's fucked, doctor. He can't even touch her.”Xaus reached for the hilt of the dagger in his breast, but Damaris kicked his hand away. She then brought her foot down against the crosspiece of the blade, sinking it deeper into him. She stepped back, showing her teeth in a grin, then advanced and repeated the act with the dagger under his ribs, stomping that to the hilt as well.In the instant her foot remained pressed against the blade, Xaus clutched at and took hold of her lower leg, compressing his powerful fingers. Once again I heard the snap of bone. The skin of Damaris' leg erupted as her suddenly-splintered femur burst outward.She did not scream. She did not even gasp. But as she collapsed down upon her antagonist he took hold of her other leg, bending it forward against the joint. It too broke.Damaris tried to roll off him. He tangled his fingers into her hair, and as he sat up, held her head above his towering cock. I almost thought he would spear her with it, shoving her head down onto the crown and between her lips in an effort to choke her with the ramrod before she could bite it off. But he held her suspended above it, and laughed.He clambered to his feet, still holding her by the hair, but now turned away from him at arm's length. She flailed in his grasp, but her broken legs gave her no purchase. He carried her to the table and bent her over it.Spreading her, he hammered his phallus into her vagina from behind. Damaris growled, twisting her head from side to side, reaching back with both hands to try and claw at some part of his body. Xaus ignored this, fucking the Archdemoness of the Archons with brutal force. His dark humor and satisfaction, exemplified by his laugh in the moment of rendering her helpless, had hardened; his features took on a stonelike impassivity.Convulsions of Damaris' muscles showed her release into an orgasm, despite what must be an excruciating level of pain from her splintered legs. Xaus pulled out from her then, spurting a second time onto her ass and back. Then he re-entered her, straightened, and reached for the hilt of the dagger in his chest.He pulled it out, jetting a deep red splash of what looked like hearts-blood also onto Damaris' form. Then he yanked back her head by the hair, baring her neck.I could not sit and watch this. Despite the manacle I stood, pulling on the chain with all my strength. The gesture was useless; it did not yield, the cuff biting into the skin of my wrist.“Xaus!” I shouted. To what end, I had no idea.For an instant, the sound of my voice gave him pause. He turned, his good eye deeply bloodshot from having been gouged by Damaris. But he only looked at me for a second, and no emotion was readable in his expression.He turned back to Damaris, reached around her with the dagger, and cut her throat.A shocking spray of blood arced from the wound, soaking the top of the dais, the keys, the amputated fingers of the five Archons. Damaris emitted a wet gurgle, then collapsed, her lithe muscles going flaccid in an instant.Xaus continued to fuck her, now lifting her body up from the dais by the hair, showing her mouth open, her eyes rolled up in her head. The muscles of his ass tightened; he climaxed a third time, then dropped Damaris in an unceremonious sprawl on the table top, and withdrew from her again.Her fingertips were near the keys. He reached down, took hold of the little finger she had taunted him with, and twisted it from her hand. Instead of leaving it on the table with the others, he flung it with considerable force into our alcove. It struck the bench and fell to the floor between Marion and me.Xaus stretched, then bent slightly and pulled the second dagger out of his body. The extraction was accompanied by less blood than had followed the removal of the blade from his chest. He dropped it onto the floor.Once again he sent his one-eyed gaze into every alcove. Then he gathered up the keys and left the center of the ampitheatre, coming to us.Marion flinched back as he stood before the partition. He looked at her, apparently satisfying himself as to the degree of her awe and fear. But he did not even glance at me. Then he tossed in one of the keys, which came to a rest on the floor beside Damaris' severed finger. He turned away, repeating the delivery of keys to every alcove.No one moved to unlock themselves. Perhaps I was in shock, as I wanted nothing more than to free myself of the manacle, jump into the ring of light from the chandelier, and hurl myself at him. But before I could collect myself enough to act he walked away, speaking as he departed.“Look to your patrons,” he said. Then he stepped over the partition of the first alcove, and was gone from view.Damaris was unquestionably dead, but I could still do something for the others. I took up the key, trying to ignore the severed finger beside it, and unlocked the metal cuff from my wrist. I handed the key to Marion.“And just what are we to do now?” her voice, so exultant when Damaris had seemed ascendant over Xaus, was now filled with bitterness.I saw no sense in attempting to answer her. Our desires were completely at odds. My mind was racing with thoughts of – after attending to the five Archons as best I could – following my father. I would pry from him the reason for all of this, if any reason truly existed.As I stepped over the partition into the ampitheatre I looked toward the first alcove. At first no movement showed there. I guessed at the presence of some sort of door there which had facilitated Xaus' entrance and exit.A moment later that supposition was verified. From out of the shadows at the back of the alcove appeared no less than a half dozen men. They were hard-looking individuals, dressed in black livery, with pistols conspicuous at their belts. Adherents of Xaus, I was sure. Were we now to be summarily put to death at their hands, concluding this black joke?If so, I could do nothing to stop it. So I ignored the men and went to the nearest of the fallen Archons, the tall Greek woman. Xaus had struck her in the throat in a way that ultimately could be fatal, but wounds that occluded breath could be circumvented if I acted quickly enough. If her airway had only been partly crushed, a tracheotomy could restore her ability to breathe. One of the daggers had fallen near her body – I snatched it up, readying myself to perform the procedure on the instant.I had no more than turned her over, seeing the contusion on her throat and determining that she did indeed still live, when one of the black-liveried men came up behind me, placing a heavy grip on my shoulder to draw me back.“Stand away from her.”“I can help her,” I protested.“She doesn't need your help. Mind your place.”I straightened fully to confront him. But at that moment I saw the black man, who had collapsed by the dais after striking his head on its edge, begin to stir. The livid gash at his temple had soaked one side of his face in blood – after seeing the force of that impact, I had firmly counted him among the dead. He looked around him, taking in the whole of the ampitheatre with clear eyes.Thus far I was the only one of the “candidates” to have emerged from the alcoves.“You don't belong to Armouth,” he said to me. “The guard is right, stand away from her.”“Are you people insane? I'm a doctor, let me help.”His expression became one he might offer to a slow child or an idiot. “You do not belong to her,” he repeated.Then, to my astonishment, the woman at my feet also began to rouse herself. Her breathing had a ragged, rattling quality to it, but she did not sway or stagger as she rose to her feet. She regarded me for a moment with very piercing blue eyes, but then turned away, going to the alcove where the couple who “belonged to her” sat and waited.All around me, the others were also rising. The short man, his face a pulped nightmare, flexed his shoulders as if working out a common crick. The Italian woman, whose chest bore a huge bruise where ribs had certainly been at least partly crushed, dealt first with her other wound, taking her broken wrist and calmly realigning its bones with a horrid scraping sound. Even more miraculously, the Oriental woman whose head had seemed half twisted off, placed her hands on the front and back of her own skull and straightened it.Only one Archon did not move. Damaris, sprawled in her blood on the tabletop.The guard had taken out his pistol, pointing it at me as I stood there dumbfounded. “I told you, mind your place now.”“Let him see to his patroness,” the black man said.The guard, who along with his fellows showed clear deference to the Archons, stepped back, returning the pistol to his belt. I looked toward the dais, seeing that Marion had left the alcove. Standing above the corpse, she reached, very tentatively, to touch Damaris' hair, her shoulders, her back.“Doctor, will you come here?”I joined her, seeing less the unmarred parts of that once-perfect body that Marion seemed drawn to. I looked instead at the smashed legs, and the grotesque stigmata of blood sprayed everywhere across the tabletop.“Get her coat, Miss Bama. Terrible as she was she should be given some dignity.”“Doctor, look.”Her tone puzzled me. I did look. Damaris' head, canted slightly to one side, showed her staring eyes and slack lips. The dagger-cut across her throat had ceased to bleed, as of course it would after death.Marion then jerked her hand away from where it had rested lightly on Damaris' back. I discovered the cause of her startlement: the barest, faintest tremor between Mistress Ruha's shoulder blades and spine...breathing. The woman was alive.“Good God.” I immediately worked my hand under her, pressing my palm to her left breast. The heartbeat was unmistakable. Every beat of that heart should have sent more blood squirting and oozing from her opened throat. But it did not.I levered my arm fully under her, lifting her away from the dais. I laid her on the ampitheatre floor, straightened her limbs, and brushed trailing hair from her face. Her death-stare ceased its frozen immobility; she blinked, and a moment later, causing Marion to gasp, her lips curled into a shadowy pantomime of one of her sardonic smiles.My mind strained for balance then; my thoughts became disjointed. The laws of the body, rigid as those governing the sun's path through the sky, had lost all sane stability.Marion did bring Damaris' coat and I wrapped her in it. Two of the guards affixed themselves to us, and as the other Archons communed with their candidates, ultimately departing through the ampitheatre arches, so we also departed the way we had come. The guards did not offer to assist me in carrying Damaris – they followed behind us through the walking-tunnel with their pistols out.At the sub-basement entry to Damaris' house, they watched until we were taken in charge by the servants we found waiting there, then the guards took their leave.Damaris, after her brief stirring into consciousness in the ampitheatre, had lapsed in my arms into what appeared to be sleep. I had not bound the wound in her throat; it appeared sealed, crusted with swiftly-dried blood. Though I had straightened her legs I had not attempted to set them. I had made no plea to the guards to allow me to take her to hospital – nor did I make that entreaty to her servants. I had learned my lesson in that regard.I did make it clear I wished to observe how they treated her, but in that I was denied. Umaru was apparently not present, but the Malay curtly refused to permit me to accompany them as Damaris was carried up and into the house proper. Instead I was conducted to the same room where I had first awakened, while Marion was separated from me, presumably brought to hers.As the door closed behind me and I heard it lock, I stood there in a state of intellectual and emotional numbness. The easy conviction that I had fallen into a web of criminal charlatanry had been forcefully hammered out of me. The thought that Damaris, even now, was being brought back from the edge of violent death by techniques that in her own words rendered my own skills downward to the level of a tribal shaman's, was both humbling and disturbingly inspiring.For a moment I merely continued to stand, my own engines of motivation as broken, violated, yet somehow re-fired with a frightening vitality, as Damaris' body had been.I half-thought of breaking the door-lock and leaving the room to seek out Marion's – she would likely be inclined to process what we had seen by surrendering herself to the utter carnality she seemed to crave. I imagined she would find fucking her intended consort in the murder-climaxed re-enactment of the Archon Depuration we had witnessed, to be thoroughly appealing. Should I now be craving that time of sex and death myself? Given over to its promise of some sort of mystically exalted transcendence of fragile life?A sound in the street outside broke me from my frozen posture. I went to the window, to see that a carriage had come to a halt outside the house. From it alighted the hulking figure of Umaru, as well as the doppelgangers of Damaris, Marion and myself. Whatever errand they had conducted was apparently concluded.Light snow was again falling. Soft, lazy flakes drifted past the window as the four figures entered the house, leaving my view. I let the curtain drop.Turning back to the room, I noted something on the bed. An envelope, closed with a wax seal. Obviously it had been placed there for me.I sat on the bed, holding it on my lap for a few moments. Whatever its contents, it would surely be more lunacy, and I felt a heavy weariness, a desire to try and escape, of only for a short time, into sleep and oblivion. But in the end I did not lay back on the bed and close my eyes. I broke the seal and opened the envelope. Inside I found a folded sheet of good parchment. On it were lines written in a bold and flowing hand, the ink a rich indigo.Dear James,I write this as you sleep here in my house, recovering from what my daughter has done to you. My servants will place this in your room on the first night of the Depuration. I do this because you have decisions to make, and I wish you to make them knowing that we are not monsters. I admire honor, and though I may seem cavalier and mocking regarding it, your possession of a kind of personal nobility is a large part of why I wish you in my life. I've no wish to stamp out who you are. My desire is to reorient you into a world of possibilities beyond anything you knew could exist.There was reason for my not shielding you better from Grace. In fact I was well aware she observed us at the Narcissus. She follows me a great deal, and was there, uninvited as I was, but less obvious in her presence, playing spy and dreaming of being an avenger. I wished you to know her before coming to know me. Because she and I have run a gamut of wife, mother, lover, daughter, wife, with a man of some nobility before. She has chosen to style herself a champion of the common man and woman, wishing to elevate them in Promethean fashion. Better that you see her as a venal creature before being seduced by such dreams, as you have something of Prometheus in you as well. There are concepts above those of spirits that are blinded by yearning – which she cannot see, but perhaps you will.She is the daughter of Ruha, you are the son of Saklas. Among the four of us is an alchemy yet unrealized.This may become moot, depending on events. But though I permitted the traumas that have initiated you into our circle, I will repay that.Miss Bama, who you have certainly now met, I chose specially for you, as her rapacious nature may ease what I suspect is a distinct capacity in you for restraint based on the strictures of guilt. She will – I'm sure with enthusiasm – attempt to kill you, and with none of the righteousness which my daughter affects. Granting Marion the gift of death in a fever of passion not only has great overtones of justice, but it is what she wants, as much as she will claim to want eternal life.Your greatest curiosity, naturally, is toward your father. Unfortunately he is the most impenetrable of us. He has no interest in the sons and daughters he has thrown. I, on the other hand, have great interest indeed, and I believe you do as well. I have watched you for a long time, and am aware of your belief that through strong children we may bring about great change – in fact, precipitate revelation.You will find, James, that among those whose lives extend to touch the eternal, that the roles of passionate bonding are changed. If we are wise we should view ourselves as ingredients to be placed into a crucible that is aimed to yield the ultra-human. We must be merciless with flaw, but cognizant that within flawed vessels are sparks that we can harvest and re-purpose. We have generations for this great work.If you are not dead after New Year's Day, you may find a wife worthy of you, in ways both mystical and practical, to craft the future with. I lowered the paper. Was this then, what comprised a love letter from the dark queen of the Archons? Zealotry and madness, reason and philosophy, promises of violence, threats of death, given like a gift. A wedding gift, at that, if her last words were to be taken literally. Because there seemed little other interpretation than that the woman I'd just observed attempting to butcher my father – instead being butchered and pitilessly fucked by him – had proposed something very akin to marriage.

0 notes