Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II

by Monica J. O'Rourke

  She searched, hysterical now, for a place to hide.

  There was nothing.

  The demon reached out and casually snatched her up, wrapping one gnarled, taloned hand into her nest of filthy, greasy hair. It yanked her from the wall, pulled her down onto all fours. The beast headed back toward the cave, dragging Gloria behind. She tried to fight its grip but it was like trying to pry open the jaws of life. She beat at its unyielding flesh with her tiny fists until her own knuckles bruised and bled.

  “No! No! Let me go! Oh God, please just let me go! Don’t hurt me! I can’t take anymore. I can’t. I can’t!”

  The demon ignored her. It didn’t scold or threaten—it said nothing. It barely appeared angry. There was no need to threaten. Gloria knew exactly what she was in store for. Her knees chafed and tore as she was dragged back to the cave, kicking and screaming the entire way.

  *

  Gloria was back in the cage. Her demon had not punished her yet, had simply shoved her back into her prison and collapsed onto his rotting bed of human hair and flesh. There was no hurry. He had all of forever to make her pay for trying to escape, for being a sinner, for being born. Soon he was fast asleep and Gloria was alone again with her thoughts.

  Tears dripped from her face and splattered onto the floor of the cage, sizzling and turning to steam. Gloria wanted to be strong but this was all so hideous, so terrible, so unfair. She had fucked a lot, used the body God had given her not as a temple but as a toilet, a receptacle for semen, drugs, and alcohol. She’d been a whore, a sinner, weak, gluttonous, lustful, proud. She’d taken the Lord’s name in vain, committed adultery. She’d done every terrible thing she could possibly do to herself. She’d given blowjobs to horses, donkeys, and pigs. Let them fuck her in the ass and ejaculate inside of her. But there were much more terrible sins. Sins that seemed much more befitting the type of punishment she was being subjected to.

  She hadn’t murdered anyone or stolen from them. She’d never raped or molested anyone. She had defiled herself but she’d hurt no one else. How could she deserve to spend eternity being raped, tortured, and mutilated? What kind of God would allow such a thing? Gloria moaned and wept herself to sleep.

  When she woke, the demon was staring into her cage.

  “God, no! No! Don’t hurt me! God, please don’t let him hurt me!”

  “Stop saying that! There is no God! Not for you and not for me! He has abandoned us both.”

  The sound of the demon’s voice startled Gloria. It was the first time he had spoken since she’d been in his possession, and despite the harshness of his words and the powerful volume, an obvious attempt to sound menacing, his voice was like music.

  That’s why the arch demons never speak … they still have the voices of angels.

  “Why do you say that?” It was a stupid question, but Gloria wanted to hear him speak again. Something about his voice gave her hope. A creature with a voice that beautiful had to have some good in it. Hidden beneath those adornments of tattoos and piercings and scars, beneath the hideous body art, those brands, burns, and surgical modifications, there had to be some sympathy and compassion. Some divinity.

  “Answer me. Please. Why did you say that? Why did you say that God—”

  The demon reached in and clamped a hand over her mouth. His claws pierced her cheeks. Gloria tried to scream but her cries were muffled by the demon’s filthy gore-streaked paw. His gnarled talons fished for her tongue through the holes it had gouged in her cheeks. When he caught it, he ripped it out of her mouth, yanking away the flesh from her cheeks and lips and the lower half of her jaw.

  Knowing that it would grow back did nothing to alleviate the horror of seeing her face dismantled.

  Her screams were a gargling hiss like the whine of a leaking gas pipe as he dragged her from the cage and tossed her against the cave wall. Her arms and legs were clamped into iron shackles. Gloria knew what this meant. He only chained her up when he was planning something particularly vile.

  “Never try to run away again.” His beautiful voice was no longer a comfort.

  He picked up the tiny whip that he’d held earlier. The one with the thin chains ending in rat skulls. The demon began to twirl its wrists, and the rat skulls whirled faster and faster until they were a blur as they rained down on her chest. Within seconds her breasts looked like ground beef. When he began brutalizing her sex with it, bludgeoning and flaying her cunt with the punishing rat skulls, Gloria dry-heaved. Her stomach cramped from the terrible pain. Her abdominal muscles contracted so hard that they nearly touched her spine, but nothing came up from her empty stomach. Blood spewed from her eviscerated face.

  The demon stalked off and came back with one of the candles from the wall and a scalpel made of sharpened bone. Then he knelt between Gloria’s thighs and began to cut. It was the worst pain Gloria had ever felt … right up until he brought the candle flame to her clitoris.

  *

  Gloria had begun counting seconds. There was no sunrise and no sunset. No clocks. No way of measuring the passing of each moment. So she counted seconds to keep track of time. Sixty seconds was a minute and sixty minutes an hour, so she figured she could track each and every hour, each passing day, by counting seconds. She wanted to know just how long she was in hell.

  She began counting the day she’d discovered Angela. Three hundred and forty-five thousand, six hundred seconds had passed. Nearly a year. She hadn’t kept track of how many times she’d been tortured, raped, beaten, and mutilated, though it seemed to happen every two or three hours. The demon would accost her after each of his naps.

  Gloria had spent a lot of time thinking about the demon. Wondering about his voice. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day she’d run away—and she hadn’t tried to run away since. But she remembered that sweet lyrical voice like a cool breeze whispering through trees. Like birdsong and church bells. She was sure that underneath it all, he was still an angel. And there was something else that made her wonder: she’d seen him alter himself. Seen parts of his flesh whither away and die to be replaced by new flesh that he’d grafted onto his body. She thought that his flesh was stolen, that those animal tusks and horns and fangs, those claws, his entire hideous body, was just a mask worn by the soul. That would explain why he slept so much.

  Since the day Gloria had begun counting, she hadn’t slept. Not an hour, not a second. Her soul seemed to not require it. The need for sleep had been a weakness of the flesh.

  But the demon slept. Because it was flesh. An unnatural marriage of spirit and flesh. The very thing the angels had envied in humans. One of the very reasons they had revolted in the first place and were cast into the lake of fire. Gloria was convinced that beneath that hideous facade of tortured meat was still the soul of an angel. She had to believe it was true. It was her only hope.

  For months now, Gloria had been trying to figure out a way to kill the demon. Murdering the thing was the only way she’d be able to escape, the only way to get out of there and find her daughter.

  She’d heard rumors about a way out of hell, a tunnel that led back to earth. Had heard the demons talking about it. There was a way out. If it existed she would find it, but first she had to get away—and that meant her demon had to be destroyed. She wasn’t going to try to escape, only to have him drag her back and torture her again.

  The problem with killing the demon was that nothing here seemed to die. She couldn’t die, and that demon had been here centuries longer than she had. How could she kill something that was immortal?

  Gloria watched the thing sleep as she sat in her cage. She stared at the decorative scars that zigzagged along its body. The animal parts stitched onto its flesh. Its skin was a tapestry of pain. But what if she could remove it all? If she could get him to see what he once was … what he truly is. But how?

  She looked around the room at the torture devices, the whips, brands, scalpels, knives, canes. Any of them sufficient to remove flesh, but all would take too long. The demon would
disarm her and have her chained against the wall, mutilating her vagina before she could do any damage. She needed something that could remove its flesh all at once.

  Then it came to her: the lake of fire!

  But how could she get him into it?

  *

  “Talk to me …” she whispered, reaching through the scorching bars of her cage. Her fingers caressed the top of the demon’s head, sank into the apertures and brushed along the jutting horned protuberances. The touch repulsed her, made her quiver, but still she stroked him. If he felt her touch, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Please talk to me. I need to hear your voice.”

  The demon swung its arm, splintering her wrist. She cried out and withdrew her hand. Still she persisted, risking excruciating punishment.

  “I’ve obeyed you since that day … when you brought me back. You’ve tortured me and I never tried to leave you. Can’t you show me any kindness at all? Please! I beg you—I need you to talk to me.”

  The demon lifted its head, slowly, and looked up at Gloria. It parted its bloated, misshapen lips, and for a moment, she thought it was going to speak. Its response was a low, warning growl.

  “Do you even know why I’m here?” she whispered. “Do you know what I did to deserve this endless pain, this eternity in hell?”

  It turned away, clearly not interested in her plea.

  “No more talking,” was all it said before collapsing onto its bed.

  Still, those words had been enough. The lyrical quality of its voice calmed her, entranced her, like raindrops hitting a windowpane. She closed her eyes and pretended she was back on earth, in her bed, snuggling beneath the comforter drawn up to her nose.

  The sensation of being watched was strong, and when she opened her eyes, the demon was staring at her.

  She puffed out her cheeks, mentally gearing up for what she knew was inevitable. Its torment had become predictable over the months; there were just so many ways she could be beaten or raped or flayed skinless. Just so many ways her vagina could be shredded, her throat torn open. The torture had become strangely commonplace, and as much as she hated it, she had learned not to dread it. Complacency had replaced dread. She was resigned to her fate and knew the more she fought it, the worse it would be. So she’d stopped fighting, and instead steeled herself against the pain.

  The demon reached inside—the cage doors were never locked—and yanked her out. No reason for them to be locked. No reason to attempt escape. And the demon knew this. She was sure she was being tested and didn’t want to anger the demon, because as bad as the torture was, it could be that much worse.

  It threw her down on the bed of rotting human flesh and knelt above her, its knees planted on the outsides of her calves, its massive cock aimed at her face like an accusing finger.

  She turned her head and waited for the attack. Instead, it leaned down until she felt its stinking, steaming breath on her face, and it licked her with a tongue like sharkskin, tearing up the skin between her mouth and cheekbone.

  “This no longer bothers you,” he said. “Why is that?”

  “It bothers me,” she gasped.

  The demon shook its head. “No …”

  It bit the tip of her nose off and spat it out. Her head throbbed from the pain, and blood gushed from the wound, but she didn’t move. She was terrified at what the demon might be thinking. At what it might be planning.

  The barbed choker around her neck, the ring adorned with her aborted fetuses, began to pulse, the metal heating, scalding her skin. Still she remained motionless, waiting for the attack to end. Waiting for it to begin.

  The demon reached up and unlocked the ring, dropping it onto her stomach.

  “Suffering is the reason for being. Suffering is your life force. Without agony, there is no redemption.”

  “Haven’t I suffered enough?” she cried. “Doesn’t this ever end?”

  The demon shook its head. “Not my decision.”

  “Then whose? Who decided I deserve this?”

  The demon shackled her wrists to the wall, and then stood back. “Your children,” it said. “They would have been your children.”

  Lying across her stomach was the ring of fetuses, hanging like aberrant charms on a bracelet. They were distorted versions of would-be children, contorted visions of damaged or missing limbs, of malformed heads and tiny jutting ribcages. One by one the four unborn offspring squirmed and struggled until they were free of the ring. They crawled in different directions, leaving behind slimy sludge trails of amniotic fluid and streaks of blood-specked gore. Two reached her breasts and latched onto the nipples, tiny briery teeth slicing into the tender skin.

  “Wait,” Gloria cried. “Wait! This isn’t fair!”

  The demon crossed its arms over its chest.

  The third fetus slithered down her stomach and over her crotch and burrowed its way into her cunt. It squirmed inside her, the heteroclitic creature now searching for its return to the womb.

  Gloria shrieked, lifted her legs, tried to push the fetus out, to expel it from her body as she had so many years ago. The demon whipped her legs with a razor-studded whip until the skin flew off in bloody chunks. Gloria stopped trying to abort the fetus.

  The ones suckling at her breasts had given up trying to draw milk and settled on blood instead. They’d chewed their way through her nipples and were now consuming the flesh around the areolas.

  The creature inside her cunt turned around, a breech birth correcting itself. It left behind slimy residue and bits of rotting flesh as it worked its way outward. Its tiny fingers clawed the walls of her vagina, and its tiny feet kicked her cervix. Its misshapen head jutted from the opening of her cunt, malformed fingers clinging to the labia minora. It slid backward and pulled itself out again, repeating this move. Then it turned, slithered around inside the gaping maw of her sex, and its barbed gums slurped her clit.

  The fourth aborted suckling slid across her thigh and plopped with a wet sucking sound onto the ground. It reached her perineum and bit into the tender flesh, chewing a hole above her asshole. She felt its tongue and teeth working the new hole, ripping at it until it was large enough for it to wriggle into. Moments later it was crawling around her bowels, digging and chewing its way into her intestines.

  Gloria moaned, beyond words, beyond crying. Her eyes rolled back and she fought against the agony, both physical and emotional. The demon’s attacks had been nothing. The past year had been nothing.

  “Please!” she cried, finally able to find her voice. “Make them stop!”

  But the demon ignored her plaintive cries. Of course she knew she would be ignored. Begging had been a last-ditch effort.

  One of the monstrosities that had been devouring her tit oozed across her chest, deformed digits clawing flesh for purchase. A thick, foul secretion filled her nose and mouth as the fetus rested on her face. She shook her head, tried to dispel it. It slid its insignificant protuberance of a penis into her mouth, its balls like raisins resting against her lips. It spasmed and jerked, fucking her mouth. Claw-like fingers dug into her cheeks. The fetus’s head rested against her damaged nose, the tip missing from when the demon had bitten it off. It seemed to like the scent and taste of her blood and chewed into the hole while its dick raped her mouth.

  Slowly, the fetuses chewed their way across and through her body, consuming first her internal organs, her breast, her face, her cunt, working their way through the rest until she was nothing but a pile of bloody bones.

  *

  When she woke, she was again whole. It was the first time she’d slept in over a year, but she’d had no choice. There had been nothing left of her, and she’d needed to regenerate.

  She glanced down at the demon, who returned her look. It stretched its arms over its head, as if it had just woken from a deep sleep. It probably had.

  “Now what?” she muttered. “What else is in store for me?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”<
br />
  “I want to know.”

  The demon stared at her for quite a few seconds, which made Gloria uneasy. It was usually at times like these that the demon dispensed its worst punishments—after it had time to be reflective.

  “I’ve grown tired of you.” The demon’s lyrical voice was soothing.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m giving you to another demon.”

  Gloria’s heart pounded. Despite her torment, she’d grown used to this demon. The thought of facing a new one was terrifying. A new demon might be even worse.

  “Or maybe I’ll just toss you into the lake of fire and let you burn there for the rest of eternity.”

  “But why?” she cried. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked! I haven’t tried to escape. Why would you want to get rid of me?”

  “Enough talking! Just shut your mouth.”

  “You don’t know why I’m here. Do you?”

  “It doesn’t matter why you’re here. You are here. That’s all that matters.”

  “Vlad sold me out. That’s why I’m here—because that bastard gave me to you. I don’t belong here!”

  “Stop talking!”

  Gloria twisted and contorted until she was at the edge of the cage, her fingers wrapped around metal bars searing the flesh from her fingers. “Listen to me,” she begged. “What if I really don’t belong here? What if I’ve paid for my sins a thousand times over? Does that matter at all to you?”

  “You’re in HELL,” the demon bellowed. “Nothing matters here!”

  And for the first time since Gloria had been cast into damnation, the demon stormed out, clearly unnerved by what Gloria had said.