by Greg Herren
J. M. Redmann
The footsteps paused. They always did, a brutal tease as if this time he might open the door, might—but she could no longer imagine what was possible—offer her freedom? A moment when she didn’t have to stare at the closed and locked door? Sunlight? The smell of rain?
He had promised her eternity. It was she who forgot to ask what he meant. A lost soul in a locked room. She had stopped counting the passing of time—it was the one thing she had too much of. When she thought about her life slipping away, the torn and moldy wallpaper seemed a blessing, the thin gray mattress a place to find rest. The room was small, one tiny window, too high and dirty to see out. It only allowed a wan light to mark the time between day and night. Three paces across and three back. She had lost count; miles traveled three steps at a time. Now the wallpaper—faded yellow roses with each thorn etched so finely they could almost make you bleed—was a curse; if she never saw it again, it would haunt her dreams.
The footsteps started again.
Then paused a second time.
She knew every groan and creak of this misbegotten, miserable place. The steps always continued down the hallway. This was the first time they had paused a second time.
They came back.
Stopped at her door.
Freedom or damnation. She would take the latter to be released from this tiny, shabby room. No, hell could not be worse.
The door opened.
The clothing he wore was different, but his face had not changed one line or wrinkle over the passing centuries, his half smile one of someone who ruled over many and was in turn ruled by many. They had talked briefly as he led her here, before the door was slammed closed. A slaver, one who understood keeping beings captive. There was no room for mercy save that which furthered his own ends. He knew not how he came here, except that it was after unloading his human cargo on a sun-bleached island—those who had survived—he took his customary tankard of rum, stumbled off the dock into the blood-warm water, a hand had grabbed him, asking if he wanted to live. When he said yes, he found himself here. He kept the keys to these rancid rooms. He was as trapped by his captives as they were by him.
“They have use for you,” he said softly.
Finally! She wanted to exalt, but dared not give way to emotion.
“The years have passed; you must be willing to change with them,” he continued.
“Yes, of course.” Her voice cracked, timid from lack of use.
“If you succeed, you become…free.”
As she had not asked what eternity meant, she did not ask what free meant. There would be a price to pay; nothing was ever truly free. But she would pay it willingly to escape the numbing, bitter purgatory she was in now.
“You will send the weak and the damned here. As long as there are enough to take your place, you will not return to this room.”
“Yes, just tell me what I need to do.” Her voice was stronger now, the beckoning taste of wine and green of spring calling to her.
“They want women. You must bring them women. You must touch them and bring them to their final ecstasy.” His smile didn’t change, but his eyes gleamed; he knew each word was a blow.
“I can’t…” But those were not the words that would free her. “Why me? Why did they pick me for this mission?”
“Why do you think, Sister Mafalda?” A taunt.
“I did not live a sensual life. I was a woman of the cloth, chaste, a woman of…” A woman of God—but there were no gods here, no hope or salvation except this twisted offer.
“A zealous woman, indeed, serving your god. All too happy to do what needed to be done. Forcing novices to strip naked, throwing them into water chilled with snow when they disobeyed. Making them lick your shoes clean after you had traipsed through the stable. Clean your undergarments when your days came around.”
“They had to learn discipline.”
“Did you enjoy disciplining them?”
“No, it was my duty!” Her voice was loud in the tiny room.
“Perhaps it wasn’t just your shoes they licked. Did they lick you clean at times? While you bled?”
“No! No! I was chaste!” Her face burned. He knew; he knew everything, every shame, every secret.
“Why did you send Sister Ysabel to the flames?”
“I did not. She was found guilty by the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.”
“You gave them her name.”
“Her father was a converso, still holding secretly to his Semitic ways. She was his price to prove that he had converted. She confessed to me her doubts of the true religion.”
“Ah, and which one would that be? The one that conveniently confiscated all wealth and property from those accused of any crime?”
She remembered Sister Ysabel, crying her fears, her brother condemned as one who had not truly converted, her father arrested. Ysabel’s head was against her chest, their hands clasped as the young woman sobbed against her, hot tears soaking through her habit, until her skin itself felt aflame.
They had been seen, the torrid thoughts she dared not think ascribed to her by others. Her only defense was to tell the truth. Ysabel had doubted a faith that would so readily take her family and believe them still Jewish on the word of an unknown accuser. She had, she claimed, allowed the transgression, the too-familiar touching only as a means to hear the young woman’s confession.
“She did not die at the stake,” she defended weakly.
“No, she died in prison, before she ever went to trial.”
“God must have wanted her.”
“Or the devil wanted to get rid of her.”
That was her other curse, she could still see Ysabel, her delicate features, deep brown eyes, the yearning look in them. The yearning for her.
“But no matter,” he continued. “She is now dust and you are here.”
“And I have a chance for freedom.”
“One you will do anything for?”
“Anything, yes.” She did not ask what anything might mean as she followed him from the room.
*
Kerrie Keller held the phone away from her ear as she checked her text messages. She had no reason to listen to the conversation, as she had heard it all before.
“But the damage wasn’t from the water; it was the wind. How could the flood have blown my roof off?”
“The flood shifted your house and caused the roof to come off. The assessor told you that. I’ve told you that and no argument you can make will change that. We’re not liable, we’re not paying.”
She had more important things to do than listen to him babble on endlessly about his lost home. He didn’t have flood insurance. His house had been flooded. That was his problem, not hers.
She had heard the same story over and over again. “But I wasn’t in a flood zone” only meant they were too stupid to realize that the entire city of New Orleans was a flood zone. “But we never flooded before.” Ditto, and also too stupid to realize that insurance wasn’t for what had happened before but for what might happen.
There was a good reason she lived on the Northshore, away from the quagmire of a city. She put up with the sacrifice of driving every day across the Causeway, twenty-four of the most boring miles on earth. Monday through Thursday, that is—she worked from home on Friday, coming into the city just often enough so her staff couldn’t get away with anything like leaving early. She had come in once at 4:45, parked across the street and watched. The office door opened at 4:55 and they were all out by 5:05. That meant they were packing up and getting ready to leave when they should still have been working. This was her business; she had built it into what it was. True, she had inherited it from her father, but she had worked hard, edging out her worthless brother. He didn’t seem to understand the whole point was to make a profit, not listen to people’s sob stories and give them money because you felt sorry for them. Insurance was a business. They bought a product. If they wanted really good insurance, they had to p
ay for it. Most of them didn’t.
Soon she was going to have to have secret cameras and keyboard monitors installed. She was the boss; she got to do what she wanted. They were the employees; they had to do what she wanted.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got another call,” she told the distraught man on the line and hung up on him in mid-sentence. She didn’t have another call; it was just an easy lie to tell.
Kerrie had a date. It was so hard to find suitable women, the ones who appreciated the finer things in life. So many lesbians seemed to have decided that the life of a selfless social worker was for them—student debt and working in homeless shelters. She couldn’t imagine coming home to cuddle with someone smelling of sweat and cheap peanut butter sandwiches. Kerrie had spent two excruciating hours with one such creature. She was pretty enough, but her clothes were cheap and the smell of her day job lingered. Kerrie had claimed a migraine and ducked out on the date.
Her circle of friends was useless at turning up appropriate women, so Kerrie had turned to Internet dating. She had scheduled two tonight, one for a drink after work at 5:30 and another for dinner at 7:30. If the first one was a bore, she wasn’t stuck alone on a Friday night. If the first one worked out, she’d skip out on the second. A tedious process, but as Kerrie had found out, you had to kiss a lot of frogs before you found a princess. So far it had been all frogs.
Her staff lingered, not wanting to leave before the boss. At ten after five she had to shoo them out. It wouldn’t do to have her staff see her putting on lipstick and her good pearls.
She had selected the bar, of course. It was a nice uptown one, not a gay one in the French Quarter. She didn’t like her women to be too dykey looking, and if her date wasn’t comfortable here, it was not a good sign. Kerrie had hopes for this one, a lawyer. A tax lawyer. The last lawyer she had dated turned out to be a gay rights lawyer, making less than a social worker and dressing about as badly.
As planned, she got to the bar a little early. She quickly ordered a beer and paid for it up front, then found a small table near the door.
Also as planned, she spotted the woman first. The car she got out of was a Honda or Toyota, one of those small, sensible vehicles. Kerrie cared for them as much as she cared for sensible shoes. The woman was short and her picture had done a good job of hiding the extra weight she was carrying. Kerrie sat down her half-finished beer and slipped out the back door just as the woman was entering the front one.
Maybe next time I need to define what I mean by height/weight proportional, Kerrie fumed as she started her BMW. This woman was a good twenty pounds overweight and had probably never seen the inside of a gym since high school when it was required.
She had an hour and a half to kill before her dinner date.
*
“That can’t be your name,” he said as he threw a stack of clothing at her. Her modesty meant nothing to him; she would have to change in front of him.
“Why?” She turned her back to hide what she could of her naked body. Then screamed when she saw a hag staring at her, an aged creature as close to death as one could be, hair white and wispy, the skull beneath the skin clearly visible, the flesh shrunk away. She moved her hand to her mouth and the hag mimicked her.
He laughed and she understood. “The years have passed, Sister Mafalda. The bloom of your youth has faded.”
A mirror. She turned in horror from her visage. “Who am I?” Her voice a low moan.
“Nobody,” he answered as if discussing the weather on a pleasant spring day. “A pawn in the game of others. You’ll get a new shell, a new name, and do what they want you to do.”
Or go back to the room. It was unsaid.
“What shall my name be?” she asked, carefully avoiding any glimpse in the mirror.
“Muffy, Maryann, Melva, Megan, Madison, Marigold. Anything that doesn’t sound five centuries old.”
“I only know the names of my time.”
A cruel smile touched his lips. “Isabel.”
“No!” She ripped off the tattered cloth covering her. He could have no carnal enjoyment of her withered flesh. “No. A new name, one of this time.”
“Malda,” he named her.
She did not protest.
“Now, you walk through the mirror; it will give you a new body—the illusion of one—to go with your new name.”
Mafalda—Malda did as she was instructed, his cruel laugh following her as she approached her decayed image, the shrunken eyes burning into hers until she walked through them.
*
Date number two had started on a more promising note. The woman wore an actual dress and had on makeup. But her slim legs were the high point of the evening. She worked as a secretary and was seeking a woman she could “pamper and take care of” quote/unquote. Kerrie’s side of the equation was to shell out for everything, including the pampering. Kerrie got stuck paying the entire cost of the dinner, including an expensive bottle of wine. She considered taking the woman home and fucking her, just to get something out of the evening. But the woman was “staying with friends” so they would have had to go to Kerrie’s place across the lake—or take a hotel room, which she would have had to pay for. In the end it wasn’t worth it. Kerrie used her migraine excuse and left the woman at the restaurant. She could find her own way home.
*
It sickened her, hunting for lost souls, as if some vile thing was growing in her with every one she found. She took the ones already close to death, insensate with drugs or alcohol as they huddled under a bridge. Only the thought of going back to the room with its faded wallpaper kept her going.
As she brought each one in, he shook his head in disappointment.
With her fourth victim, a scraggly homeless man, he grabbed her arm.
“This isn’t what they’re asking for,” he hissed in her ear. “Are you still a virgin? I can change that, you know.”
She shrank from him, but his grip was too strong. It was the clench of a desperate man; he, too, knew that as depraved as his role was, there were worse places in this hell. Kicking the homeless man into a slimy fissure, he dragged her down the hallway.
It will be quick, she told herself, compared to the endless eternity in the room. He would be on her for a few moments and it would be over. She had seen the endless stream of young servant girls, the younger daughters, all who had been sent to the convent to be out of sight, their tales of being grabbed in the kitchen or street, held down by men they could not fight. Some died in childbirth, but most had survived the rape.
But that was not his intent. He wanted her to bring in victims who were fresh and alive, not those on the edge of death. Ones who could still feel terror.
He brought her to an ornate door, tapped on it but waited for no reply before opening it.
“Your ladyship,” he said into a room so dark she could see no one. “I’ve brought someone for you. You can have her for the entire night. Teach her well.” He grabbed at her clothes, ripping most of them off before shoving her into the darkness.
The door closed, leaving her in utter black.
Then in the far corner, a scratch of a match and its flame lit a candle.
Standing before her was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen. Tall, Nordic, perhaps. Hair of newly mown hay and eyes the color of sky in the early morning. The woman said nothing, walked toward her with the candle held high, staring at her.
Malda looked down at herself. She had been given the flesh of a young woman, herself as a young woman, breasts high and full, the soft swell of thigh to full hips, her eyes a deep brown, her hair a dense, wavy black. A woman who would be considered handsome in any age.
The Nordic woman stood before her. A finger brushed Malda’s torn shirt away, then traced a path to her breast, stopping at the nipple. Malda started to pull away, but the woman pinched her nipple painfully, holding her in place.
“Don’t,” the woman said, “fight me.”
Malda nodded. Was it a sin if she had no c
hoice?
At her acquiescence, the woman let go of her breast, the hand suddenly snaking into her hair, dragging Malda into a harsh kiss. She again started to struggle, until she felt the flame of the candle close to her skin. She let the woman kiss her. Let the surprise and fear slide into enjoyment, a feeling she thought she’d never feel, hot, carnal flesh. Malda started to kiss back, to let her tongue and lips seek their own pleasure.
The woman broke off; with her hand still twined in Malda’s hair, she pulled her to a bed. It was not the thin cruel mattress of her old room, but a thick, lush bed, pillows everywhere, a red velvet canopy above.
The woman pushed Malda onto the bed and was quickly atop her, kissing, caressing, letting her finally feel all the things she had dared not think of. Her body turned hot and languid, as if she was pinned to the bed by not only the woman’s weight, but her own desires.
In a swooping stroke, the woman grabbed Malda’s wrists, yanking them above her head, swiftly encasing them in cold metal.
“I will teach you everything two women can do with each other,” the woman whispered in her ear. “Some you will like; some you won’t. I expect you to be a very good pupil. There is a high price to pay if you are not.”
In this purgatory, Malda’s screams went unheard. Or worse, enjoyed by those who could hear. Some were screams of pleasure, some of pain and agony, some both. The woman used her tongue between Malda’s legs, bringing her to ecstasy. Then she used a false cock, shoving it inside her, a mix of pain and pleasure. Then behind her, first “in your cunt—learn to say the word—both men and women like to do this,” the woman had instructed, then “in your ass, not everyone likes this, but you should know how it’s done.” Pain, intense pulsing as if something inside her was ripping. Then pleasure with the woman’s fingers stroking Malda gently, again bringing her to ecstasy.
Finally the physical pleasure and pain blended into fatigue. The chains were taken off. The woman, too, seemed tired, willing to quietly rest next to Malda until they both succumbed to sleep.