The Book of Shadows (13 page)

We know what you are
.

There I stood, half-naked before this…
entity
. He looked like a mortal man, it's true, but he'd been dead these two centuries, no? And his touch was…he was
cold
and—

“I am the incubus of lore, my dear,” said he. “Do not fear.” Those were his exact words, accompanied by the broadest of smiles, the deepest of stares. I shut my eyes against his stare. He placed his hands upon my breasts. My skin contracted. His touch, so terrifically cold, somehow
heated
my blood. The porcelain white skin of my throat and breasts flushed. He teased my body with his fingers, he teased my soul with his smile.

When he bent to touch my shackles they sprang open with a rusted pop. Perhaps the old iron teeth of the lock cracked at his touch? Again, I cannot explain; and it matters not at all now.

I stood before the priest and did as he commanded. He did not always speak, yet his directives were clear.

I stepped free of the chains. I let the pink dress fall to the floor; it pooled at my feet and I stepped from it as I had from the chains, left a spill of silk there atop the rusted chains. Father Louis, the flatterer, said, “As Venus stepped from the foam,” naming the strange tableau before him. Was he mocking me? He shook his head to say no, he was not.

With every compliment, with every kind word, every sudden thrill, I was more and more his. Soon the seduction was complete. I would do anything he asked.

He bent and took up the dress. He ripped it, effortlessly, along a seam sewn from neckline to hem and, pushing the books back, spread the pink cloth over the oak of the table. With his hands on my hips, he lifted me and set me down upon the edge of the table, upon the pink silk. His strength was supernatural: he lifted me without effort, and it seemed he barely touched the heavy chair yet it skidded fast across the library floor. What
was
he? An incubus? Impossible! And then came this tacit question: friend or foe?

“Why, friend,
bien sûr
,” said he.

I was naked but for Spider's boots, the too-small pair of scuffed and worn white leather. Then I lay back on the table, for he asked me to.
Told
me to. He may even have shoved me gently backward, I cannot recall.

Standing between my legs, he reached up over my head—so that I felt his now rigid sex brush against my thigh; it too was cold, and I saw it like a great tusk, or horn; it scared me—and he took up the goblet and the wine.

He braced my head with his left hand so that I might drink; with his right, he held the goblet to my lips. I dared to stare into the ice of his eyes. He tipped the crystal and thin rivulets of red ran from the corners of my mouth; he took them up with his tongue. He lowered his lips to mine; from them I took more of the wine, drop by chilled drop. “Seems a shame to waste it,” said he, “precious as it is.”

I lay back. The priest set the decanter to the side, near my hip.

He took up first my right foot, then my left. He unlaced and removed the white boots, slowly. Everywhere he touched me I turned cold, but soon the icy shock would cede to…to
fire;
truly, it was as though my skin were being singed, but wonderfully so.

The priest held both ankles in his left hand now, balanced them there. I could not move; neither did I want to. With his right hand he reached for the wine. He poured it slowly over my feet, my ankles. He held my legs higher, poured more wine, and watched in obvious delight as the redness ran down my legs, stained its way over the shins to the calves, the knees, the thighs, and beyond.

Father Louis proceeded to pour the wine all over my thighs, my belly, where it pooled in a slight concavity, and my chest. At his touch the wine gelled, turned to a cold salve, which he smoothed over my skin. He covered me with it. I did not shiver, though I was chilled to the bone. I felt my nipples flood with blood, grow indelicate, hard, as the priest smoothed the salve over my breasts.

Soon I was completely covered, coated like a foal just-slid from the womb. Red-stained, as though my own blood coursed
atop
my skin. Father Louis knelt at the end of the table as though at an altar. I sat above him, propped back on my elbows, for he bade me watch. “Watch me work,” said he. His head was between my spread legs. He held the red goblet and the white candle, still burning blue. Smiling, his eyes locked on mine, he leaned in to kiss me. I felt the approach of his coldness. His kiss…. There. On the inner thigh. He took a deep draft of the wine, holding the candle flame too near my flesh.

It seemed I might faint. “Relax,” said the priest. “Breathe. Look into my eyes.
Feel
me.” I heard all this from him, but I don't know how much of it he actually spoke.

Only then did I realize that I was not in pain. Rather, what pain there was—the candle flame so near my skin, his cold weight and probing fingers, his tongue—what pain there was was delicious, sublime. I surrendered and I suffered it well. Quite well.

What felt like flame steadied to a sufferable fever.

But then, with his lips just slightly parted, their ends twisting in that sly and ever-present smile, I saw his tongue slide from the cage of his mouth. It came and came: it was too long.
Impossibly
long. It hung from his lip like red meat. He let it hang, let it hang heavily so that I might see it.

My head fell audibly back onto the oak table. With his fingertips, the priest closed my wide-open eyes, as one does with the dead.

The wine went thick, viscid, and cold at the touch of his tongue. It became a balm, an unguent; and he took to it hungrily. From the ankle he followed the flow of the wine…down, down, up over my body…. And when he kissed my face, ranged his tongue over my cuts, I knew he was healing me. The faintest of bruises would show in the days to come, a dingy gray-green where blood pooled beneath the skin; there would be no scarring at all.

I opened my eyes. My body was red from the wine, as though I bled from wounds I'd not sustained. And there he was, moving over me in the uneven flickering light of that blue-burning candle.

Finally, with his hands on my hips, and my legs hanging slack, the priest went down onto bended knee before me—a prayerful stance. He lifted my legs and placed them over his shoulders. His smile widened as he spread my legs and…

“My, my,” said he. “What
have
we here?”

The priest's cold hands rested on my inner thighs. He pushed my legs apart. Farther. I felt then the icy tip of his tongue.

We will show you what you are
. Words sounding so like a promise.

…Then, from the far dark corner of the library, beyond the meager light cast by the moon and the strange candle flame…there, deep in the shadows from which Father Louis had come, I saw something. Movement. A dark writhing…shape. What was it?

“Stay,” said Father Louis, sternly. He wasn't speaking to me, not then. But he was when, a moment later, he whispered:

“We will show you what you are.”

We?
…I sensed that same
presence,
had the same feeling I'd had before Father Louis had stepped from the shadows. I stared into the dark. Perhaps the moon slipped then from behind a cloud, perhaps the candle flame flared up suddenly…whatever it was, I saw a face take shape in the shadows. Beneath it the vague outline of a figure. Male or female, real or revenant…I couldn't tell.

Then it spoke. Though, in truth, to call it
speech
is too generous. Its words were unintelligible. Animal sounds, it seemed. The rasping grunt of something caught in a trap. It repeated itself, again and again, till finally I heard the words it whispered, madly.
The most beautiful rose
. It must have known I'd finally understood, for it stopped speaking. Still, I could sense it, could
almost
see it standing there in the dark. How long had Father Louis and I, lying on that oak table, been watched by this…this shadowed
thing
?

Just then Father Louis did something to me with the longest finger of his right hand and I forgot all about the shadows. For a moment…. I wonder, was I still reluctant to see what he was showing me? Was it the mystery of the shadows I wanted to solve, rather than my own mysteries?

“We know what you are. We will show you what you are.”

His words might have seemed a threat, had I not been looking into his face…. So beautiful, he was! All strength and sinew, sex and shadow…. I believe I returned his smile then.

Stop it
. That death rattle coming from the dark. That voice.
Stop your games!

“Be still,
ma mariée
,” said the priest. “This one is alive, and she likes my games.”

Hurry, Louis! The others…

“D'accord, tais-toi!”

But while you play your…your games, the others arrive and—

“Oh, all right. Damn you!”

Too late for that,
mon prêtre.

“Then damn them!”

Oui. Tous et tout, came the reply.

Father Louis took the candle from its holder. It was thick in his fist. Thick as his wrist. The light in the library suddenly shifted, and I saw something in the shadows.
It
was still there, whatever it was; and it spoke again:

Vite,
Louis! Hurry. Make it known!

Father Louis lowered the candle, held it so near my face I felt the heat of the steady flame on the softness of my eye, blinding me, burning me. Please, no…

“I won't hurt you,” he breathed, and, smiling wide, added, “Not like that anyway.”

He stood over me. Leaned into me. His weight, so cold…. He had form but no density, no mass; rather he felt like the figure of a man made from papier-mâché, yet supple. Something held me to him. I could not move, not even if I'd wanted to. I was as bound by him—by his will, by his strange alchemy—as I'd been by the chains.

Father Louis kissed me. He licked my lips; I felt him spreading them, prying them apart with his tongue, working his way into my mouth. Again, the ice and the fire of his entry. He was filling me. My mouth went wide to receive him. My eyes were tightly shut; first in fear, soon in stupefaction and ecstasy…. His hands, no less cold than his tongue, settled on either side of my neck; he held me as a strangler would; he pulled me up toward him,
into
him. His tongue went deep into my throat. Impossibly deep. Was it growing? It seemed to be
expanding
within me. My mouth and throat were verily
clogged
with his tongue and I couldn't breathe and as I started to choke he…

He withdrew and…

Laughter in his bright eyes, so near mine.

My soul shuddered as my eyes went wide, wider.

That voice, again, from the dark:
Slowly, Louis. The uninitiated
…

Then, slackening the muscles of my body's chilled throat, I rose; striking like a cobra, I took the priest's tongue deeply down.

He tried to pull his trick-of-a-tongue from my mouth. (I'd surprised us both with my avidity.) I held as best I could to the icy root. But then I felt its thickness dissolve in our mouths, devolve to a mere man's tongue, which still I worked with mine. When finally he wrested his tongue free of my mouth, Father Louis said, “Know it or not, these are the tricks you want.”

Was that possible? Had I the
will
to want, the presence of mind to…. Indeed, I was
mindless
though my senses were heightened now to the point of pain; the pain, and the accompanying pleasure…. My resistance grew weaker and weaker; through all that followed I did not,
could
not resist the priest. “Yes,” he said again, “these are the tricks…”

And with that he dipped the candle flame into the wine. It sizzled and hissed, but the blue flame did not die; it simply lit the cut crystal of the goblet. The priest's hands were aglow; it seemed I could see through his lit flesh. Yes, I could! No bones. His flesh as plain, as supple as gloves of kid. He twisted the candle, nearly as round as the goblet, and it seemed to take shape. Turn from a taper into…into a member, a member to mock the priest's own, which rose full and hard.

He drew the wax phallus from the goblet. He kissed me,
there
;…the icy tip of his tongue and its trail of fire…

My lips.
There
. Curved and pink and wet as a shell freshly drawn from the sea, or so he said…. How he teased me!

Up, up a bit farther and he swallowed
me
, swallowed my sex as I had his tongue. I was in his mouth. Growing. The bloodrush! I felt the tug of his lips on my…flesh. His tongue tripping over the tip.

“Never,” he said. “Never before.” He spoke admiringly. Appreciatively.

They are coming! Be done with it!

Louis lifted my legs higher. He flicked a kiss at my wine-wet anus, laughed, and said, “The Osculum Obscenum! They call this the Devil's Kiss.”…How he worked upon me! My nether mouths. My flesh, my sex. With his fingers, icicles all…

I writhed in pleasure and pain. The two were one, fused.

He teased both my lower mouths with the warm, thick, wine-red candle.

He stood. He held the candle…he brought its waxen head up to my mouth. I opened my mouth to take it, but the priest deprived me. I could not help but smile.

He worked against my reluctant flesh. Prying. He dipped his fingers in the wine, sucked them and slipped them, one by one, inside me. I opened. Slowly. He pushed and I opened wider. I opened to him and to the candle. I opened to the pain and to the pleasure.

The sun was rising. Dawn. The indigo deep of the night grew ever more shallow, and soon the sun would fade it full away. The mullioned panes of the open window drew the day's earliest light; I watched the glass—glistening, glinting, set with small gems—from where I lay I watched the glass give back the light.