Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II

by Monica J. O'Rourke

  *

  The demon returned a short time later and dragged Gloria out of the cage, chained her to the wall. It retrieved several of its favorite instruments of torture: the razor-studded whip, the phallic club mottled with barbed wire, the cat o’ nine tails made of thick chain.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” Gloria said, “but please don’t send me away. Please.”

  The demon raised the whip and drew back its arm, its massive, bulging muscles flexing. Gloria winced, preparing for the pain. The moment seemed frozen in time. The agony of waiting for the attack was almost worse than the attack itself.

  The demon dropped its arm. Gloria exhaled, relieved just for the moment, waiting for the inevitable pain.

  “You weren’t lying,” it whispered.

  “What?” she gasped, almost tripping over the word. Had she heard correctly?

  “You don’t belong here.” The demon turned away, clearly thinking, clearly struggling with a decision. It turned back to her. “But that doesn’t matter. I have to do this. I have no choice.”

  “Yes you do! You don’t belong here either.”

  “There is no hope for me, Gloria. And there is no hope for you.” With that, the demon raised the whip and flayed the skin from her torso. It switched weapons shortly after. Even through her pain, Gloria sensed the demon was only going through motions. The usual joy it took from destroying her flesh was absent.

  As she lay on the floor a writhing, hemorrhaging pulp, she tried to speak. Words did not come easily from her crushed jaw and lacerated tongue. Blood gushed from her mouth in a steady stream. The demon smashed her skull with the club until the side of her head caved in, until green-gray bits of brain and bone decorated the weapon like a coat of paint.

  This time the demon didn’t throw her back in the cage. She was left on the floor, free of the chains, and slowly her body regenerated.

  A few hours later, she was able to speak again, but the demon was asleep on its bed.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. There was no answer. But she recognized when he was sleeping—recognized after all this time the signs: the change in the rhythm of its breathing; the pattern to the rise and fall of its massive chest; the disturbed twitching when it had one of its frequent nightmares. The demon lay still, but without signs of sleep.

  “I think you can hear me. And maybe you’ll listen this time.” She waited a moment before continuing, afraid that the demon would be angry and would lash out. Instead, it remained silent.

  “I’ve done awful things in my life. I’ve sold my flesh, I’ve experimented with every drug imaginable. I’ve caused heartache and grief. I’ve done so many things I regret … but I wasn’t an evil person. The only reason I’m here is because Vlad sold me out. I’m here because I committed suicide—but the only reason I did was to save my grandchild. It was either kill her, or kill myself. I know you probably don’t believe me … there’s no reason you should. But it’s the truth. I’m trapped here for all eternity but I shouldn’t be.”

  The demon’s head stirred, but it didn’t turn to face her.

  “My daughter Angela’s here as well. And I don’t know why. I don’t know if she was murdered, or tricked, or what. I can’t imagine what that child might have done to end up in this place.” Tears streamed down cheeks that hadn’t completely regenerated. “You don’t belong here either … do you?”

  “It’s not that simple,” the demon said, its back to her. “I’ve been condemned. There is no hope for me.”

  “The animal parts you graft onto your body, the tattoos and markings … what would happen if you stopped? What would happen if you refused?”

  The demon sat up and faced her. It looked heartbroken, she thought. Sorrowful. “I was tricked as well. I followed the wrong path. It’s too late for me.”

  “I’ve seen beyond your exterior. It’s not too late. You can save yourself.”

  “‘It is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven’.”

  “Do you rule?”

  The demon turned its head, almost in shame. “I can’t reveal myself. I would be destroyed. No place in heaven, no place in hell. Banished to nothing.”

  “It would mean the end of your torment.”

  The demon cradled its head in its hands, as if in anguish. “Stop!”

  “Please let me die, then,” she bluffed. “Please banish me to nothing. There’s no place in heaven or hell for me either.”

  “You don’t know what you ask! You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Do you?”

  “Trust me when I tell you, you’d rather spend an eternity here.”

  Gloria crept over to the demon, and gingerly touched its cheek. She waited for it to lash out, to break her arm or jaw or neck. Instead, it lay still. “You don’t want this,” she sighed, tickling his face with her breath. “You’re torn. You want to be redeemed.”

  The demon looked up at her, tenderness in its horrible eyes.

  “I imagine what you looked like, with gossamer wings and beautiful features. I imagine what you once were. But I can’t imagine why you accepted this. It seems cowardly, and you’re no coward.”

  The demon sat up, grabbed her upper arm tightly in its clawed hand. Blood tricked from beneath its fingers. “You say too much!”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

  The demon dragged her down the corridor, her bare feet scraping on the small stones, her knees ripped skinless when she tripped. They moved quickly, and she was too terrified to question his intentions.

  They reached the vast cavern that Gloria had stumbled into a year earlier. It was unchanged, still packed with shrieking, tortured souls dissolving into a boiling stew of white-hot effluence, equal parts molten earth and liquefied human flesh. A bubbling cauldron of misery and anguish, where the guilty and condemned melted into a noxious steaming sludge, its banks overflowing with the damned.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Redemption.”

  Gloria panicked. She had hoped to convince the demon to jump in alone, but now it appeared that he intended to take her with him.

  Perched on a cliff overlooking the endless river of burning sinners, he clutched her wrists tightly. There was longing in his eyes.

  Gloria hoped she could save herself. “You want to be an angel again, don’t you?” she babbled. “You want to return to what you once were. You want to be forgiven.”

  She wasn’t sure he’d heard her. He did not so much as turn in the direction of her voice. Just stared into the lake of fire.

  “He used to love you once. I’ll bet he still does. He loves what you were, when you were an extension of his will. When you were beautiful. How can he love you now? This isn’t what you were meant to be. This isn’t what God made you.”

  This time the demon responded with a wince, as if her words had wounded him. He looked down at his scarred and mutilated claws and then back across the burning river.

  “I bet you’re still beautiful. Deep down. Underneath all of that tainted flesh, you’re still an angel of the Lord.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not a fool. My decision to return here wasn’t impulsive—your words aren’t that convincing, Gloria.”

  She gasped, swallowed the lump in her throat. “I wasn’t—”

  “All I ever wanted was to be loved by him. As he loves humanity. I want to know that union of flesh and spirit that he gave you but denied us …” He spread his vast arms and looked himself over. His flesh was a tapestry of pain and rage. “And for that I have become a monster.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. This isn’t what you want—you can be beautiful again.”

  “Yes,” the demon whispered. He began to claw the flesh from his body, slowly at first, digging deep into the muscle and wrenching it free from the bone, and then with greater and greater vigor. The demons below stopped what they were doing and stared up as he raked away the hideous facade of meat and bone in long bloody stri
ps. Beneath those layers of muscle and fat, glimpses of pure unblemished spirit began to shine through. A spirit more radiant than that of any human, like the soft morning sun shimmering off a placid lake.

  The other demons began charging toward the cliff.

  “No!” They sang out with voices all as sweet and beautiful as windchimes, contrasting with the menagerie of hideous features that shaped their grotesque bodies. Gloria stepped away from the demon. Chunks of flesh fell at her feet as he continued to dissect himself. Blood sprayed from countless lacerations. The demon stared across the lake, as if transfixed, even as he tore out handfuls of flesh and cast them aside, now even snapping bone and pulling it out through the skin to pile at his feet.

  The other demons were scaling the cliff, still crying out in chorus. They had almost reached him when the demon that had tortured Gloria for months without relent cast himself into the lake of fire.

  Part III

  Punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

  Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

  Mathew 7:14, Holy Bible

  Gloria was consumed with a stillness at her core as the demon/angel sank into the burning river. She felt nothing for him. Neither the exaltation of revenge nor the sorrow of loss. She had no feelings to spare, ill or otherwise. Her emotions were now focused on her daughter.

  The cliff was crowded with demons. Gloria could almost feel the anticipation of the others as they watched the ancient demon slip further into the depths of the lake of fire, his flesh burned away, revealing the beautiful angel beneath. Skin a pale iridescent blue like moonlight. Eyes the color of liquid night, dark pools reflecting everything like tiny mirrors. Limbs long and lithe floating on the volcanic current as the flesh dissolved in large liquefying chunks. The demon/angel’s melodious screams were terrifying as the last of its hell-born flesh melted away.

  The demons crowded in closer to watch the spectacle, ignoring Gloria. The demon/angel sank into the flames, and the other demons sucked in nervous breaths. Their excitement and fear charged the air like static electricity.

  Gloria suddenly realized what the other demons were waiting so eagerly for. Not to see the angel unveiled, but to see if the fire would kill him; to see if he could die, if the flames would consume him.

  They wanted to know if they could die as well.

  Gloria looked into one hopeful face after another as they stared expectantly into the lake of fire. There was a desperation etched on their infernal features. Clearly, they hated it here, too. These torturers were every bit as captive as their victims.

  The reborn angel pulled himself out of the lake of fire and stretched his still-burning wings, and the demons’ hopeful faces fell in disappointment, twisted in rage. There went their last hope for release from this infernal torment. It had been better to not know and to still harbor hope for this agony’s end. But now they knew there was no way out. The revelation that not even death was possible. They charged down from the cliff and overwhelmed the angel.

  Their claws tore his wings, ripped them from their moorings in his back. They gouged out his eyes. Flesh exposed, revealed to the bone. His screams filled the cavern with an anguished wail that shook the walls and wrenched tears from Gloria’s eyes.

  Gloria’s last sight of the angel, her demon, was of him being dragged off to the caves. They cursed at him, spit on him, urinated on him. He was an angel but, like her, he was still in hell. No longer a demon, now only a victim, one more sinner to be punished. A former demon who had abandoned the others, had become a pariah. His sightless eye sockets roamed the cavern; his elegant angelic fingers pawed the air in terror. For a moment those sunless pits seemed to focus on her. His mouth formed her name. Then he was gone and all that remained were his screams echoing throughout the cavern.

  Not all of the demons had left the cavern. Some milled about, looking frightened and confused by the loss of one of their own. Then, one by one, they turned toward Gloria.

  *

  She was not running for her life. She would have stopped by now and accepted her fate if that’s all it had been. Gloria was running for salvation, and for that of her daughter. Running from an eternity of rape, torture, and mutilation. But the demons were catching up. Their thunderous tread pounded the ground behind her. Their fetid breath steamed on the back of her neck. She imagined what they would do to her if they caught her, so she ran faster. In hell she was spirit, and they were flesh. Gloria knew she could outrun them.

  Gloria’s abused and exhausted soul took flight through the winding catacombs, hurtling like a leaf in a hurricane. The ruckus from the demons’ pursuit slowly faded as the weight of their flesh slowed them. Soon Gloria couldn’t hear them anymore, couldn’t feel them breathing down her neck. When she finally turned and looked, she was alone.

  She slowed, and stumbled along through the dark corridors, unsure of where to turn, no clue where her daughter might be. No idea how to find the cave where she’d seen her daughter tortured more than a year ago at the hands of Bill Vlad, and there were countless thousands of caves to search. It didn’t matter. Gloria had forever if that’s what it would take.

  She lifted a torch off the tunnel wall and walked in the direction of the loudest screams. Gloria winced as the sounds of metal striking flesh, blood splattering against stone, shrieks of purest agony, and cries for mercy grew more intense.

  The winding catacombs presented danger. Any demon she passed would know she’d escaped, and any one of them might decide to reclaim her. But there was no turning back.

  Gloria peered inside one cave. A spear-like dildo was being rammed into the asshole of a rather flabby, sweaty man. He was doubled over, his head and arms locked into a wooden frame, his ass exposed and jutting upward. The head of the dildo was a spiked battering-ram. The demon put his shoulder behind it and forced the long phallus in to the hilt. Blood mingled with a large portion of his internal organs exploded from the man’s mouth. The man turned towards Gloria with wounded eyes glazed in agony and screamed, blood sprayed from his lips onto the cave floor. Gloria recognized him.

  He was older than when she’d last seen him, but there was no mistaking that acne scarred face and long oily hair. It was Colin, one of the geeks who’d enticed her into having sex with farm animals for money and had gotten rich doing it. She wondered if the spear punching into his anus was as long as the giraffe cock he’d wanted her to take. It was definitely a hell of a lot longer than the donkey’s dick.

  “Serves you right you son of a bitch,” Gloria said.

  The demon’s smile seemed to extend around to the back of his head, like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow a rodent. He withdrew the battering-ram dildo from Colin’s prolapsed rectum and slammed it in again. Colin’s flesh split with a wrenching squelch.

  Gloria turned her head and crept quietly past.

  Each cave possessed a sight more hideous than the last, but Gloria had no choice but to check them all. She had to find Angela.

  It seemed that hours—perhaps even days—passed. Time meant nothing here. Her mind reeled from the hundreds of atrocities she’d witnessed. Gloria stumbled into another large cavern.

  Other lost souls, like her, were huddled at the mouth of a long tunnel. Gloria’s heart stuttered. Her knees wobbled. A smile crawled tentatively onto her face, which had not known happiness in ages, as she staggered toward the tunnel, reaching out desperately, like a drowning man grasping for a lifejacket.

  Light was coming from the tunnel. Sunlight.

  Nearly a dozen others were huddled at the mouth of the tunnel, but they didn’t look as ecstatic as she expected. In fact, they looked even more miserable and terrified than the tortured souls she’d left behind.

  “I can’t do it. I didn’t know it would be like this,” a woman sobbed. She appeared to be yo
ung enough to be Gloria’s daughter—except for her eyes. They were ancient. Something in those eyes told Gloria that the woman had been dead for a long time, suffering ceaselessly for years upon years. She may have been a child when she died, but not anymore. Her childhood had ended here years ago, perhaps even decades or centuries.

  “But isn’t this the way out?” Gloria asked, perplexed.

  The girl didn’t look her way. She muttered to herself, hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth.

  “Yes. The way out.” This voice belonged to an aged soul, one whose astral body looked as if he had been nearly a hundred years old when he died. His eyes looked even older than the girl’s. Who knew how long he’d been in hell.

  “Then why aren’t you going through? Why don’t you all leave? Why stay here?”

  “Because God is in there. That passageway takes you right past heaven. He’ll see us if we try to leave. I can’t face him. Not after all the things I’ve done—after all that’s been done to me. I can’t face him. I can’t do it.”

  “But how can that be? Heaven is above, and we’ve got to be in the center of the earth somewhere.”

  “Heaven and hell are everywhere and nowhere.” The old man answered with a defeated shrug.

  Gloria looked at the dozens of broken souls that littered the cavern and then glanced back at the tunnel. She thought about the sins that weighed on her own soul, and the atrocities she’d been subjected to since her death. She looked at her spirit body, which was still tacky with dirt, demon feces, blood, and semen. Her every sin appeared as yet another stain on her tarnished soul. Even after centuries buried beneath that mountain of stolen flesh, the angel had looked less disheveled than she did when he emerged from the lake of fire—and he probably had a better chance at redemption.

  “I look like a whore,” Gloria mumbled. But it was worse than that. It wasn’t just her appearance. She was a whore. And God would know it. He would see it and he would reject her and send her back to inferno.