by Lola Swain
“No, thank you. You’ve already come into me enough this week,” I said and giggled.
James stared down at me and did not smile as he stroked my forehead. The others gathered around me and Céline stood behind me, reached over and held my arms above my head. Jonas Dashiell stood at my feet and grabbed my ankles.
“James?” I said.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” James said into my ear. “Just relax.”
“From the depths of thy pit where Thanatos lies, let thy chariot bear thee and rise to us!” Adelaide said. “Come Hades, come Thanatos, come Eros and Chaos! Come and take Sophia onto thee!”
“James,” I said.
“Sophia, close your eyes now,” James said.
I closed my eyes as a violent, hot wind kicked up around me. I felt Jonas Dashiell’s hands grip my ankles and pull my legs apart. Céline’s hands held my wrists tight as she pulled back on my arms as if I was stretched on a rack. My robe was ripped open and the sultry, ebullient wind pelted against my naked body as if filled with sand. Someone held my head down and I tried to resist as my scalp grated against the rough stone.
Claws scraped up and down my naked body and I kept my eyes closed, knowing I should not see what was about to be done. I felt heaviness on top of my body as if I was being pressed by stone as whatever was weighing me down crawled on top of me.
Jonas pulled my legs apart wider and something stabbed at the opening of my pussy and then slammed into me. I tried to rise up as I screamed and the hands of the others held me down.
I was being fucked, this I know, and the pain which was considerable soon melted into exquisite ecstasy as I tried to meet the crazed thrusts of the thing that impaled me.
“More?” A deep voice said from above.
“More!” I said.
He plunged himself in and out of me, inflating me with chaos and leaving chasms filled with ruthless serenity as He ravaged my body. He filled my hollow form with rapture, stuffing me until I felt I would burst. I met his every assault as the others called forth the Goddess Nemesis and the God Arawn to aid me on my journey.
I screamed as he drilled deep into me and he released, filling every space left inside my body with the courage and the will to do what had to be done.
The heaviness lifted and I opened my eyes as my arms and legs were released. I was no longer who I was. I was something different entirely.
James helped me sit up on the altar and stared into my eyes.
“Sophia, are you okay?”
Am I okay? I thought as I squeezed my arms, ran my hands over my belly and patted my legs. Am I okay?
I felt a current zigzagging through my body, as if charged tendrils of electricity pulsated inside me. It was neither painful nor worrisome, just distracting as I wondered if I was—
“Sophia, are you okay?” James said.
Okay. And I knew at that moment after I was fucked by the Gods that I would forevermore be—
“Okay,” I said and looked into James’ eyes and nodded. “I am okay.”
He lifted me off the altar and hugged me.
“Sophia,” Adelaide said, “meet your brothers and sisters.”
All of the others lined up in an orderly, single-file line and waited for me to receive them.
“Are you ready?” James said as he tilted his head down to mine.
I looked at the line and the smiling faces and shook my head.
“I am as ready as I’m ever going to be,” I said and touched my head to his.
“Excellent, let’s get started shall we?”
All of my new family members were exceptional. They greeted me warmly and, as in life, some were more talkative than others and excited to share their stories of how they arrived at the Battleroy Hotel.
I first met Dr. Hans Newlander, a psychiatrist from Germany and his friend Mr. Paul Greenly, a former elevator operator at the Battleroy.
On March 14, 1911, during an elaborate celebration, the Battleroy Hotel unveiled their exquisite new crystal and copper elevator car, boasting that it was the most ornamental elevator car in the world. The hotel sold raffle tickets to their guests and many hoped to be the first to ride in such an exquisite car. Mr. Newlander won the raffle and he, with Mr. Greenly at the helm, began their ascent as all of the guests looked on.
Suddenly, the elevator car flew up an entire floor and then bounced back down and came to a stop. The shaken Dr. Newlander huddled next to Mr. Greenly as he worked on the controls to solve the problem. The guests reported a terrible screech as Dr. Newlander and Mr. Greenly looked up the moment the 500-ton elevator cable and its drum mechanism crashed through the ceiling of the elevator and crushed the car’s occupants.
Patrick Lucien greeted me next and was Céline’s lover.
An extremely handsome writer from California, Patrick came to the Battleroy chasing down a lead as an investigative journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. There was a particularly gruesome and illusive Russian mob family in New York at the time and the Chronicle received a tip that the family dumped a slew of bodies in a flooded secluded cranberry bog located to the south of the Battleroy’s forest. But Patrick’s cover was blown as one of the Russian mobsters spotted him snooping around the bog on September 20, 1961 and followed Patrick back to the Battleroy.
That evening as Patrick showered, the mobster gained access to Room 424 and restrained Patrick in the bathroom. He injected Patrick in the neck with a syringe filled with dimethylmercury. The two paramedics who transported Patrick’s body, three morgue workers and the doctor who performed Patrick Lucien’s autopsy also died from dimethylmercury poisoning a short time later.
A man suspected to be the Russian gangster who injected Patrick with the poison was found dead in his car parked under the Sagamore Bridge on the Canal Service Road. The area was evacuated and the car, with the gangster’s body still inside, was incinerated where it sat until there was nothing left of it or him.
Next up were Tara Holderman and Jennie-Lynn Yardley, best friends and respectable housewives from Seabrook, New Hampshire.
On May 12, 1935, Tara and Jennie-Lynn left their children with their parents and lied to their respectable husbands when they told them they were going to spend the weekend together in Concord to attend a pie baking class. The only pie that was involved was the metaphoric flavor because Tara and Jennie-Lynn were lovers.
Tara’s husband Charles found their story suspect and followed the girls to the Battleroy. Charles was a police officer in Seabrook and was able to obtain the key to Room 218 easily from the front desk.
Charles waited outside the girls’ room for three hours before he let himself in, found his wife and her friend nude in their bed, muzzled his gun with a pillow and shot each of the girls twice in the chest. Charles Holderman then left the hotel and drove himself to a police station in Truro where he confessed to his crime. Charles never spent a moment in jail as the crime was brushed away and deemed justifiable homicide since the girls were found in what was called, a grotesque embrace.
As it turned out, Céline’s wasn’t the only botched attempted suicide at the Battleroy. Perry Alden was a seventeen-year-old, love-struck local boy who was in love with Mary McDonald, a young girl who worked as a maid on the sixth floor of the Battleroy.
Perry memorized Mary’s schedule and, armed with a bottle of his mother Althea’s Dilaudid, stowed away in the vacant Room 623 on November 26, 1960. Perry penned an emotional note professing his eternal love for Mary. He was certain that after Mary found him and took him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped, she would fall madly in love with the passionate boy. Perry who witnessed his junky mother knock back the pills as if they were Life Savers, completely failed to take his weight, or lack thereof, into consideration as he swallowed about ten pills too many.
Perry put the empty bottle of pills on the bedside table, arranged himself on the bed and laid the note on the pillow next to his head. After the hallucinations subsided, during which he saw the armoire in front o
f the bed morph into General Custer, Perry slipped into an unresuscitatable unconsciousness and died without Mary ever coming to the room.
Luckily for Perry, he did not die in the spirit of Shakespearean tragedy for too long. Seventeen-year-old Mary McDonald worked at the Battleroy for only three months after quitting high school to obtain a job to help support her poverty-stricken family. Mary took the bus in to the Battleroy from her Buzzards Bay home and was unaware that Perry Alden was the boy who sat behind her every day on that bus.
Perry’s death was big news in the community and even though Mary McDonald was not working on the day Perry’s body was found, she was questioned thoroughly as his love letter seemed to indicate she and Perry were in a whirlwind relationship. After it was ascertained that the whirlwind relationship was only a relationship in Perry’s whirlwind head, the wholly innocent Mary McDonald kept her job at the Battleroy. However, Perry’s despondent and junked-out mother Althea blamed Mary for taking her son away from her. On April 17, 1961, Althea followed Mary into the stairwell on the sixth floor of the Battleroy.
Althea confronted Mary and in a fit of rage, lifted the petite girl and held her over the railing by her feet. When Mary refused to admit she was responsible for her son’s murder, Althea released her grip on the girl’s feet and watched her plunge the six floors down to her death.
Shortly after Mary’s transformation, Perry went to the girl and apologized for his role in her death. Perry and Mary became lovers and Althea Alden remains incarcerated in Walpole Prison for the murder of Mary McDonald.
Anthony Porcco lumbered up to me next and told me his tragic tale.
On August 10, 1928, the Battleroy hosted a strange contest they called the International Potato Eating Contest which was hardly international in scope and thought up to counter the newly opened Trident Hotel’s International Clam Eating Contest. As they’ve always been, those running the Battleroy were masters at rousing the interest of the media and the press descended on the Battleroy that day as if the hotel was hosting Queen Elizabeth.
Thirty potatoes were baked in the Battleroy’s signature manner—each raw potato slathered in butter and salt and placed on a bed of onions before it was wrapped tightly in tin foil and baked. One of the Battleroy’s employees weight profiled the guests on that day and chose a particularly unfortunate-looking, chubby boy, twenty-two-year-old Anthony Porcco who was vacationing with his mother, to compete among the other four participants of the contest.
The other three contestants chosen were Battleroy employees and were poised to lose the contest to ensure a win for their guest. Anthony, who never won anything in his life, was excited to be in the contest and hoped to make his mother proud. As Anthony inhaled his first baked potato, he commented to his fellow eaters that he thought the potato tasted like metal. The others noticed the same, but urged Anthony on, themselves never touching another of the foul things.
Anthony managed to stuff twenty-four potatoes down his throat before the paralysis that accompanies botulism attacked his facial muscles as he sat at the table. Unable to keep his head up any longer, the employees and guests figured he passed out from too much food and six men carried the unconscious man to Room 562 where they gave him some water and left him alone in his bed. As the paralysis overtook his body, Anthony Porcco aspirated on his own vomit. In the second freak gastronomical poisoning in the Battleroy’s history, the potatoes later tested positive for high concentrations of botulism after the spores were allowed to flourish inside the foil-wrapped potatoes.
I then met the esteemed Professor Judah Roderick who came to the Battleroy Hotel in 1949 for a symposium that was arranged by the faculty members of MIT where Judah taught Chemistry. The Battleroy hosted many esteemed members of academia, but this was the first time the revered professors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graced the hotel with their presence. But they never imagined what a wild bunch these men were.
Judah Roderick was a man for which the word dichotomy was created. Equally interested in thermodynamics and carousing, Judah invited some of the prostitutes who worked the Cape to stay with the men at the hotel. On July 21, 1949, he organized an all-night billiards and drinking party in the Games Room.
Things got out of hand as Judah and the head of the Physics Department, Michael Gold, got into a heated debate about whether billiard balls were still being manufactured with nitrocellulose. Judah Roderick stated emphatically that nitrocellulose was still used in the manufacture of billiards balls. Michael Gold said he was infinitely positive that the combustible plastic was no longer being used.
To prove his point, Michael smashed a billiard ball on the table. But Michael Gold made a grave error as the ball exploded in his hand on impact and he lost four fingers and most of his hand. However, he fared much better than his colleague Judah Roderick. A pointed shard of the ball became a lethal projectile and torpedoed through Judah’s left eye and into his brain.
As it turns out, Michael Gold was right. The manufacturing of billiard balls with nitrocellulose had ceased, however, the set of billiard balls that they had in their possession was the first set obtained for the Battleroy in 1891, when nitrocellulose was still being used in their manufacture.
The saddest I felt all night after hearing the stories of those who wanted to share at that moment, was when I met Andy Larabee.
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance, Sophia,” Andy said as he came forward to tell me his story. “I’ve heard wonderful things about you.”
Andy Larabee came to the Battleroy Hotel on November 12, 1918 from Lynchburg, Virginia with his parents Marshall and Geneva Larabee.
One afternoon while his parents spoke to the manager of the Battleroy in the lobby, Andy walked outside and stared at the fall leaves swirling around in the swimming pool. He spotted a particularly large, golden leaf and decided he wanted to present that leaf to his mother. But he underestimated how far the leaf was from the edge of the pool and as he bent over to grab it, he plunged into the water. A combination of the fact that he wasn’t a strong swimmer and the frigid temperature of the water caused his unfortunate death by drowning within minutes and before Mr. and Mrs. Larabee realized their son was missing.
After he told me his story, I studied Andy Larabee in his odd-looking suit as he walked away.
“He’s a midget,” I said.
“No,” James said and chuckled, “he’s a child.”
“Impossible,” I said craning my neck as I tried to locate Andy in the crowd. “He speaks like a man.”
“Because we can still be taught and we still learn. Andy is educated by some of the most brilliant thinkers here. Seriously, the kid can string scientific theorem together faster than Judah Roderick—they have contests.”
“But, he’s just a boy. Don’t tell me he’s left on his own, that he has to fend for himself.”
“No one here fends for themselves. We all take care of each other. But make no mistake, Andy Larabee is not to be pitied. He’s a very well-adjusted, loved and extremely bright child.”
“He’s just a boy,” I said. “Death shouldn’t come for children.”
“Death comes for children,” James said and put his arm around my shoulders. “Always has, always will. At least he’s here where he has a chance at this life and not in a place where the best he can hope for is to be compost for someone’s vegetable garden.”
“His parents must have been devastated,” I said.
“That’s not for you to worry about, Sophia. There is nothing left for you to worry about. Get used to it. Come on,” James said and dragged me toward the party, “it’s time for fun.”
“Your daughter is old enough to do what she pleases…she likes to fuck, loves to fuck…she was born to fuck, and if you do not wish to be fucked yourself, the best thing for you to do is to let her do what she wants.”
Marquis de Sade
We stayed in the rose garden for hours…drinking with friends, dancing, laughing. It was like, well, a party
.
An impromptu stage was set up and Mica Morrison, who was much more comfortable communicating through music than words, played his fiddle while everyone danced and his equally non-verbal girlfriend, Sherry Finnegan looked on adoringly, as if Mica were Mick Jagger.
Every time that niggling notion that I shouldn’t be having fun tried to burrow into me like a worm, I tried my best to back it off.
“So, what do you think?” James said over the noise.
“I think this is the first time ever where I didn’t spend the majority of my time scanning my brain to find something that I should be worried about.”
“Huh?” James said and leaned into me. “How’s that?”
“Well, did you ever feel guilty for having fun? Like you didn’t deserve it because you’d done something bad or you were wasting time or there were starving babies in Pago Pago and you had no right?” I said.
“You met Dr. Newlander the psychiatrist, no? Perhaps you should talk to him,” James said and winked.
“Man, not even understood in death. I thought you got me,” I said and pushed my arms inside James’ suit jacket and wrapped them around his waist.
“Oh, I got you alright. As a matter of fact, I think we should go back up to the tower so I can get you some more.”
“I like that,” I said and looked around the garden, “but now? I mean, everyone is still here. What will they think if I leave my own party before they do? It’s rude.”
“They will think,” James said and raked his fingers up and down my robe, “that we’re going to fuck and they’ll be deliriously happy.”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to make anyone angry on my first night.”
“A neurotic ghost,” James said and rolled his eyes as he stepped up on the stage.
“Excuse me everyone, may I have your attention?” James said over the noise. “Thank you. Sophia really appreciates all of you, but she wants to go back to her room now and I’m going to fuck her until she passes out. Is that okay with everyone?”
They all cheered and clapped and after a quick round of goodbyes, James and I were in the lobby and waiting for the elevator to take us up to the tower.