Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II (12 page)

“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.”

“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.”