“What about the theory that the book is actually a test; an audition to be a reigning demon in hell?”
Lord snickered and shook his head. He took a deep breath and began speaking in a tone like someone explaining a very simple concept to a very slow child.
“I’m an atheist my love. If I don’t believe in heaven or God than I certainly don’t believe in hordes of fallen angels waiting for death to deliver them fresh souls to torture for eternity. But I suppose if I did believe in such things than it would make sense that the number of sinners would soon grow beyond the ability of those original fallen angels to appropriately attend to. They’d only be able to service the very worst of humanity. The punishment for your average sinner would have to be just being there, forever a resident in that dark flaming world of misery, out of the sight of God. With Satan’s rumored hatred of humanity I doubt he would find that acceptable. He’d want to see every human that passed through his fiery gates suffer in unimaginable anguish and that would mean recruiting new demons. Of course . . . that is, if you believe in that sort of thing.” He smiled a savage and cunning grin that seemed to indicate that he knew more than he was telling.
“Very interesting.” Anja whispered, staring at the book in wonder. She turned and started to head out the door.
“Thank you Lord.” She said as she reached for the door handle, eager to get back to her own dungeon and leave Lord to his fun. Ideas were already forming in her head.
“I’m sure there’s no need for me to impress upon you the dangers of attempting any of the stuff in that book. You already know the thing’s history.”
Anja didn’t hear Lord’s final warning as she ducked out of the room and headed back down the stairs, past Bruno and out into the day. She wouldn’t have given a fuck if she had. She was convinced that she knew why the others had failed. They had made themselves a part of the acts. She knew that wasn’t what Satan wanted. He didn’t want to see how much his acolytes could suffer but how much suffering they were willing and able to inflict. She left Lord’s dungeon with a mission. That night she called all her slaves together; selecting only the most loyal, most perverse, most masochistic of the lot, those with the highest threshold of pain.
***
They stood around Anja’s basement dungeon, naked, excited, and mortally afraid. There were hot brands and pokers heating in a furnace and the acrid burning smell mixed with the odor of the various caged animals, which were new additions as well, and the smell of their own lush and humid fear. Anja opened her black doctor’s bag, which they all knew rather well and pulled out her surgical instruments. This too held a surprise or two. No one could remember the bone saw or the orthodontic drill being in there before. Then she pulled out the infamous Book of a Thousand Sins and they fell into a terrified silence. They had all known horrors in their lifetimes, willingly participated in many of them. They had seen and done things average folks would never believe human beings were capable of doing to one another, but they had all heard about the book and didn’t know if they were up for that type of horror.
Four of the fifteen slaves assembled in the room fled quickly, without apology or explanation. Slob, who had given Anja the malevolent text, was one of the first ones out the door. The rest stayed, eagerly awaiting their mistresses’ commands. Anja smiled.
“Well, let’s get started.” She began chaining them up. She didn’t want anyone resisting too much once the pain began.
***
It was the following morning before a distraught and agitated Slob contacted Lord, calling him at the crack of dawn with his voice choked with panic and tears. He was obviously in shock and his words tumbled down over one another into an indecipherable, multi-syllabic stew. Lord could make out only a few words. But what he heard was enough to get him out of bed and into his car, headed toward Anja’s basement dungeon.
“The Book of Sins! Anja’s gone! So many bodies! It’s horrible! I should have never given her the book! I only wanted to please her . . .”
When Lord opened the basement door, the combined odor of blood, semen, feces, and the smell of burning flesh immediately accosted him. Then he heard the screams and moans and saw a woman with big blue eyes like a porpoise, tears streaming down her face, cuts and brands over fully eighty percent of her body, crawling across the basement floor with a corpse dangling from her anus.
A man’s entire head had been inserted, presumably with a great deal of lubricant, into her rectum where he had suffocated. His head was completely engulfed in her large, flabby, dimpled ass with his neck sandwiched in between her buttocks and his body sprawled out behind her, limp and lifeless and covered in blood and feces. The woman’s face showed exquisite horror as she crawled toward the stairs dragging the corpse’s dead weight behind her. Lord could only imagine what the expression on the man’s face must’ve been.
The woman reached back and tried to gently ease the man’s head out of her ass but it would not budge. The effort was causing her even more pain as well and causing blood to flow in a stream from her anus, down the man’s neck and over his chest. Extricating his carcass from her ass was a feat she was obviously unable to accomplish on her own. Lord doubted whether he could do it either and was not relishing the thought of explaining the predicament to a paramedic or a police officer. Suddenly her bowels let loose with another deluge of excrement, covering the corpse in a brown tide. Lord’s stomach lurched as the avalanche of liquid shit and blood obliterated the man’s features from sight. What waited for him below was even worse.
He stepped over the human butt-plug and continued down the steps into the dungeon where a menagerie of unimaginable horror unfolded before him. On a medieval rack lay a woman with her eyes, mouth, and vagina sewn shut. Some small hairy creature was already in the process of chewing itself free of her surgically sutured labia and her cheeks undulated with the efforts of yet another animal to free itself from its prison of human flesh. The woman’s eyes were glazed in horror and her breath came shallow and rapid as the nose and teeth of some type of rodent began to poke its way through the hole it had gnawed in her vagina. The woman began to thrash and buck as if trying to break free of the bonds securing her to the rack. She arched her back and spread her legs wide as her body continued to writhe and convulse. Abruptly a large eel ruptured the stitches that cinched tight her rectum and slithered its way out of her ass, across the table, and onto the floor, trailing blood and excrement.
Lord turned away in disgust but there were worse sights in almost every direction. He continued further into the dungeon.
A woman who looked like a powerlifter with tremendous muscles and fat in equal proportion caught Lord’s attention as his mind reeled from one vile image to the next. He knew her. It was Big Lucy, Anja’s sometime lover. All the skin had been removed from her tremendous DD breasts, the skin hanging in two long flaps over her belly, nipples and all. The sallow adipose and muscle tissue surrounding her massive mammary glands glistened with a sheen of blood. Blood dripped from her mutilated tits all down her body puddling on the floor beneath her feet. Still the jiggle and bounce of those tremendous breasts even in their current state caused Lord’s manhood to stir. She was performing fellatio on a man chained to a wall whose penis had been sliced lengthwise and peeled like a banana. He screamed over and over as her lips and tongue worked on his bloodied stump, which was still miraculously erect. Then, even more remarkably, he came and bathed her face and mouth in semen and blood which she greedily licked from her lips, scooping the primal cocktail from her cheeks and chin into her mouth and licking her fingers. Lord began stroking himself through his jeans as he stared at the impossible scene of torture and passion.
Another man whose penis had been sliced in half, cauterized, and stitched was fucking Big Lucy in two orifices simultaneously. One half of his mutilated organ slid up into her vagina and the other half fed into her ass while she continued to lick warm blood and cum from her fingers. The man’s arms were sewn together in back of him and his
eyes and mouth were stitched shut just like the woman on the rack.
There was a corpse lying on a gurney with several orifices cut into his chest, stomach, and throat, being serviced aggressively by several enraptured satyrs. The corpse was covered in bible pages pinned to its flesh by small needles like some sacrilegious form of acupuncture. One of the men was missing an arm and had a crucifix screwed uncomfortably into his urethra. He winced in obvious pain and discomfort even as he continued to fuck the corpse’s hollowed eye socket. He was arm in arm like a football team in a huddle with a small Filipino man who had a hand protruding from his rectum.
“If that hand waves at me I’ll slit my own throat.” Lord thought to himself. He’d never seen anything like it.
“She must have been really bored.” He thought.
There was no sign of Anja anywhere.
Lord walked past a couple entwined on the floor who’d been sewn together by their lips and sexual organs, forced to fuck forever, or at least until the paramedics arrived to separate them, or they suffocated to death. He picked up The Book of a Thousand Sins and crept back up the stairs, tip-toeing around the woman with the dead man’s head in her ass. Somehow she had gotten a hold of a hacksaw and was trying to saw the corpse’s head off. Lord paused for a second and considered helping her before continuing out the door. He didn’t want to be there when emergency units arrived. Besides, he had work to do.
He could guess where Anja had gone. And he knew that he would someday be seeing her again and unless he did something to turn the tables, this time she would be holding the whip.
Lord remembered the cruelty he’d discovered hidden deep within Anja when he’d allowed her to top him. There was a vengeful spirit inside of her that had threatened to consume them both. It had come boiling out of her in a savage fit of sadistic violence. He’d been chained helpless to the bed when all the years of abuse had erupted. Lord saw the hatred and pain roiling in her eyes as she pulled out the cat o’ nine tails with the razor barbs at the end. He dropped the bell that he’d had clutched in his hand to signal Anja to stop but she was too far-gone. Ignoring the signal, she continued to flail and slash at his flesh, lost in her hatred for her father and uncle and every man in her life who’d followed their pattern. Including Lord himself.
Lord had not allowed himself to cry out. He’d withstood her wrath in silence. Penitence. He would give Anja her pound of flesh but his dignity would not be part of the bargain. He had lost about half an hour before she realized that he’d blacked out from the pain. She patiently revived him. Then she began to cut on him. He still bore the scars from their play.
They tried switching several more times and each time Anja had lost control. Then, when Lord again topped her, he would punish her for her transgressions. Their S&M play soon began to resemble a war of spite. It wasn’t long before Anja left him, saying she could no longer be his slave and knowing that he would never submit to being hers. Still they had remained passionate for each other; a passion that had warped into a friendship based on mutual lust, envy, and resentment.
Lord’s mind was working overtime. He didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell except where they could be found in the pleasures and agonies of the flesh but he could think of no other explanation for the horrors he’d witnessed down in that basement and Anja’s disappearance. Lord knew that if Anja had somehow found the key to The Book of Sins and made her way to hell, she would be waiting there for him. He shuddered, imagining what she would do to him once she had him in her grasp with an eternity to devise new ways to make him suffer. He had to make sure that when they met again it would be on equal terms and that meant unlocking the secrets of the book himself. Only he was in no hurry to go to hell. God or Devil, Lord wanted his reign to be on earth.
He stalked out of Anja’s home and back to his car; a sleek black Mercedes owned by one of his closest friends and wealthiest clients, a photographer by the name of Jacque Gabriel Willet. Jacque was renowned for his disturbing photos of human oddities, freaks and perverts, mostly nudes, mostly in bondage, mostly procured and posed by Lord. In San Francisco he was more famous than Warhol and his photographs cost nearly as much. He was in love with Lord.
Lord raced through the streets with a sense of urgency speeding him toward his destination. He feared that Anja might not be content to wait for him to join the ranks of the damned via natural causes. It was probable that she would want to drag him down to hell with her right away, before he could unravel the mysteries of The Book of Sins. Lord knew that if he wanted the power of hell he would have to do something more spectacular than merely aping the acts described within. He had to take the book to the next level. He would translate Le Livre Des Péchés into English.
Lord’s ego swelled as he imagined linking his legacy to those of the book’s past translators. Damien Augustus had gone on to found a religion. De Sade had become one of the most infamous writers in history. Before dying alone in an insane asylum. Lord imagined himself the head of a new religion or an artist whose name would forever resound through the chronicles of history. His translation had to be so grand as to eclipse those that had come before it. He decided to not only translate the decadent tome but to capture each act described within on film using live subjects. Each gruesome contortion illustrated by black and white photographs to replace the crude sketches penned by De Sade. Lord’s ego roared like a conquering lion as he gunned the engine and sped off toward Jacque’s studio, his destiny calling out to him in chorus with his ambition.
***
Anja did not know what she’d been expecting but this certainly was not it. The Hell into which she’d tumbled was an endless night of fire and flesh, agony and the screams of the damned. The lake of fire overflowed with more bodies than lava and flame. Anja panicked as she felt herself being crushed and suffocated by the naked weight of innumerable sinners writhing in agony. These were not the ethereal disembodied spirits she’d been expecting. They were physical beings of living flesh, their corporeal forms restored so that they might suffer forever in nerve searing anguish.
Anja was surrounded on all sides by a running river of meat and fat. Endless legions of the damned grabbed and pulled at her in an ecstasy of terrifying agony as molten earth pored over them, turning their meat and bones to a thick sludge, a boiling meat pudding. The press of millions of pounds of corpulent matter smothered her. Anja was drowning, swimming through fathoms of melting skin, muscle, and fat, a sluggish lard running like taffy under the fierce heat of myriad sins. Their blood, sweat, and liquefied flesh dripped into her eyes, nose and mouth, down the back of her throat gagging her.
The damned were pulling her down into the lake of fire in their own efforts to escape. The flaming lava washed over Anja and her own screams joined the terrible chorus of mortal shrieks and cries. She knew that God could not help her here. So she called out to a different master.
***
Jacque was a short anemic-looking Parisian who wore his hair pulled back in a ponytail despite the fact that much of it had abandoned the top of his head. He had frightened eyes that darted about as if he suspected some predator was lurking just out of sight and he was preparing himself to run for his life at any second. His smile would burst onto his face beaming like the sun for no apparent reason and then just as quickly die away into a fit of nervous grins and ticks or even a scowl. His most annoying habit was that of screeching like a skinned cat when angered, his eyes watering up as if he was about to burst into tears as he berated the victim of his wrath in a shrill falsetto. When his tirade was over his face would relax back into its normal pattern of ticks and grins. He looked like someone who had spent much of his life getting his ass kicked and was still waiting for the next blow to fall. Even his expensive suits and manicured nails could not hide the fact that he was a victim. It had not surprised Lord one bit the first time the man took off his clothing and revealed the lace panties and bra he wore underneath.
Jacque knelt with his nose inches from his model’s genit
als as he carefully posed him for the next series of photographs. He had tied the young model’s genitals up with dental floss so tight that it bit into his skin and drew blood in places. The boy’s testicles turned blue from the blood restriction and the tip of his cock was already turning a purple that was nearly black. Jacque was having a difficult time figuring out what to do with the rest of him. He had enough pictures of the boy’s genitals in various states of torture. Now he needed a full body shot. He needed the inspiration of his lord and master. As if on cue the phone rang. Lord was on his way and he had some good news. Jacque squealed like a girl. He loved surprises.
Lord knocked on the door. When the door flew open and the ecstatic photographer spilled out into the hall, Lord had to slap him to the floor to get the fawning little queer off of him.
“Stop pawing me and listen! I have news that will shape both of our destinies forever.”
Lord had to concentrate all his will to keep from strangling Jacque when the girlish squeals and endless chatter began to tumble out of the man’s thin-lipped maw in an inarticulate jumble. He growled out his words slowly.
“Shut the fuck up and listen before I cut your fucking tongue out!”
Jacque abruptly snapped his mouth shut. He had seen enough of Lord’s handiwork to know better than to take the man’s threats lightly.
He quivered with excitement at both the sound of Lord’s voice and the content of his words as Lord relayed his intentions in graphic detail.
“How will we get the models? Even your clients won’t go for this. Those sick enough to get off on this type of thing certainly won’t want to be photographed.”
Lord reassured him. There were ways of acquiring anything in this town. San Francisco was a haven for the perverse.
“I’d like to be in it.”
Timothy’s meek and tender voice startled both of them as the effeminate young model tiptoed up between them. Timothy was Jacque’s flavor of the month. He was one of the prettiest boys Jacque had ever had. As pale as fresh cream with long slight limbs, big trusting eyes that seemed to brim with pain and sorrow, and full bow-shaped lips, like a gangly adolescent girl. Timothy looked every part the willing victim and it was far more than an affectation. He was the star of Jacque’s most recent photographs and as such had already been subjected to horrors that would’ve turned the stomach of even the most debauched masochists. They had both nearly forgotten he was in the room.
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 20