Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II (9 page)

Angela started sobbing, begging her father not
to.

“Wait,” Gloria said, extending her hand toward them.
Speaking was difficult, exhausting. “Don’t do it. Please.”

Vlad pulled the eyeball off the blade tip and popped
it into his mouth, chewing slowly, viscous fluid oozing from
between his lips. He flipped the knife around in his hand and
offered it to her shaft-first. “Do it now, Gloria.”

“Please don’t, Mom …” Angela cried. “Please!”

She raised the knife over the infant, stared with
her one eye at the innocent child lying on the cold table. As
horrible as the rape of her daughter would be, this was worse.

She slowly lowered the knife.

Vlad nodded, and Ryan pushed his hysterical daughter
to the floor. Gloria turned away, away from the noises of zippers
and tearing clothes and sex-grunts from her daughter’s muffled
cries from beneath a hand over her mouth. Then Ryan was moaning,
breathing hard. And Angela was sobbing.

“We can do this all night,” Vlad said to Gloria.
“And after we fuck her a while, then the real fun will begin. Can’t
you see yet? You can’t win.”

Gloria sobbed, pressed the towel against her eye.
The pain was excruciating but she would go through it again if
Angela didn’t have to suffer like this.

Vlad handed Ryan the knife as Ryan stood and then
replaced Ryan between Angela’s thighs.

“No!” Angela shrieked, and Vlad was inside her,
slamming hard, moving her along on the floor with his thrusts. He
reached up and viciously squeezed her breasts.

Gloria couldn’t feel her legs anymore and slumped to
the floor.

Vlad finished even faster than Ryan had. He pulled
away from the girl and stood beside Ryan. “You ready for another go
yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Okay then. We’ll have to do something else.”

Gloria looked up, shook her head. “No more. Please,
no more.”

“We’re just getting started,” Vlad said. He went
back over to Angela and dragged her across the floor by her hair.
The sobbing girl was dumped by Gloria’s feet.

Gloria reached down and stroked Angela’s hair,
wanting to comfort the child.

Angela cocked her head until she was facing her
mother, and said through hitching breaths, “Maybe you should do it
… I don’t think I can take any more of this.”

Gloria nodded. “I understand, believe me. But we
can’t kill the baby. We can’t!”

Angela cried even harder and wiped tears from her
cheeks.

“I think you’re ready for another round,” Vlad said,
standing over them. He had retrieved an item that he was now hiding
behind his back. He grabbed Angela’s thigh and pulled her toward
him, put the object on the floor so he could flip her around.

In Gloria’s line of work, she had seen thousands of
sex toys, including some custom made, some homemade, but she’d
never seen anything like this. An oversized dildo, at least
twenty-two inches in length and half a foot in circumference with
thick veins that appeared to be coursing with blood. Studded up and
down the shaft with small thorns that seemed to be growing out of
it rather than grafted on. It pulsed like it was alive, breathing,
in apparent synchronicity with Vlad’s own panting breaths.

“See, Gloria? We’ve got things much worse than
donkeys and giraffes in hell. Those worms were nothing compared to
what’s waiting for you. They’re the lowest life forms. What most of
your
kind become when they pass into inferno. But some
become other things. Bigger, nastier things.”

Gloria remembered the worms screaming as she tore
them apart, how she’d thought their cries sounded almost like
words. She’d attributed it to the drugs. Now she knew better.
Still, she felt no remorse for them. They must have been real scum
to wind up as giant maggots in hell. If only she was so lucky.
Whatever her destiny in the afterlife, it was bound to be far
worse. She looked back over at the dildo as it seemed to swell even
larger, growing more erect with anticipation.

She shook her head, couldn’t pull her attention away
from the huge phallus in Vlad’s fist. “You can’t do this,” she
whispered. “Oh god, you can’t do this.”

“Me?” Vlad laughed. “No, not me.
You
.” He
lifted it higher, and the strap-on harness dangled below his wrist.
“If you don’t do it, then this thing goes up her ass and then down
her throat. Am I clear?”

He tossed the dildo into Gloria’s lap. “Get
going.”

Angela shut her eyes and turned away her head, but
she didn’t protest, didn’t squeeze her legs tighter together.

Gloria tossed it away. “I’ll do what you want,” she
said. “I won’t do that to Angela. I can’t hurt her.”

“You’d rather kill the baby?” Vlad asked, sounding
suspicious.

“I’d rather do neither,” Gloria said icily. “But
you’re not leaving me with much of a choice. I know you won’t stop
torturing her. And I can’t watch you do this to her any more. I
won’t.”

“Do it then. If you fail me again—”

“I won’t fail you.” She took the knife from him
after standing, and moved to the baby. Crying so hard she could
barely get in enough air.

She raised the knife over her head with both hands.
The towel fell to the floor, and the air hitting the wound brought
a fresh bout of pain.

“Do it!” Vlad shrieked. “Do it now! I won’t accept
deception one more time.”

Gloria tilted back her head, starting at the
ceiling. “God forgive me for what I am about to do … I’m sorry. I’m
so sorry.” She brought her head down again and looked at her
daughter. “Please forgive me for this. I’m too weak.”

“Mom, please—” Angela stretched out her arm, but
Vlad wouldn’t let her move from where she was standing.

Gloria brought the knife down, hard. Blood sprayed
from the wound, covering the table, the baby, her. She slumped
forward, her head resting against the baby’s chest, and dug the
knife in deeper.

“No!” Vlad screamed, rushing toward Gloria.

“Mom!” Angela cried, grabbing Vlad’s arm, trying to
keep him away from her mother.

Gloria collapsed, leaning against the table leg to
keep her upright.

The knife still protruded from her stomach.

Vlad slapped her hard across the face, and she
tumbled onto her side. He kicked her in the ribs, kicked her again.
“Bitch!” He started pacing, muttering unintelligible words,
throwing his hands up in the air.

Angela slid across the floor until she was beside
Gloria. She took her mother’s hand and pressed it against her
cheek. “I’m sorry, Mom.” She looked up at Vlad, at Ryan. “Did I do
okay?”

“You were wonderful, sweetheart,” Ryan said.

“What?” Gloria strained to ask.

“Same deal as before,” Vlad said. “Only we didn’t
think you’d actually kill the kid, so we came up with an
alternative to the original plan. Suicide works as well as murder,
Gloria. If it’s any consolation, you really did save Angela from
hell. But at this rate …” He chucked Angela’s chin. “She’ll be
spending lots of time with you. It’ll be quite a family
reunion.”

“Go to hell …” Gloria said.

“After you, my dear.”

Angela retrieved the grotesque dildo from the floor
and handed it to Ryan. “You promised we could try this out.”

Ryan wrapped his arm around her shoulders and led
her from the room.

Gloria felt her heartbeat slowing, had given up
trying to cease the flow of blood from her wounds. The chilly room
suddenly became a comfortable warmth, like a favorite blanket.

Gloria closed her eyes and her face settled into an
expression of serenity and peace … even as her immortal soul began
to scream.

Nothing begins and nothing ends
that is not paid in moan; for we are born in others’ pain, and
perish in our own.

Francis Thompson, “Daisy”

Today is bad, and day by day it
will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives.

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the
World

Gloria’s knees shook. The pain in her thighs wound
tighter and tighter, cramping, burning with lactic acid, melding
with the pain in her lower back, her neck, shoulders, and calves
into an absolute agony that washed away all other conscious
thought. Her world was only pain and confusion.

She knew where she was. The agonized screams that
echoed endlessly from all directions and her own ceaseless torment
told her all she needed to know about her surroundings. Even though
she could not see, Gloria knew she was in hell.

She was imprisoned in some sort of cage. A small
iron cell into which her body had been tightly packed; squeezed
into in an uncomfortable squatting position, sitting almost on her
heels, her knees pressed up tight to her chest, breasts squashed
flat against her. The confines of her prison were too cramped to
allow her to shift positions and take some of the pressure off her
calves. The muscles burned, the tendons strained beneath the weight
of her body. Her body shivered and shook. Perspiration trickled
down her skin in a steady stream as she bit her lip against the
pain.

“Help. Help me. Oh God, I’m so sorry. I want to go
home. I’ll do anything, just let me go home.” Her voice was barely
more than a whisper. She’d been repeating the same prayers for
days, screaming them first at the listless walls and her hostile
tormentors until her vocal chords failed and she was reduced to a
hoarse squeak.

The bars of the cell were hot. Bits of her skin
stuck to it, sizzling and blackening from where she’d leaned
against it in exhaustion. She wasn’t allowed to sleep; perpetual
exhaustion was part of her torment. Sleep was a luxury of the
blessed. Gloria was damned.

Gloria’s head hung down between her knees from both
the pressure of the scalding hot cage lid pressing down onto her
cervical vertebrae branding stripes into the back of her neck and
the weight of the ghastly necklace locked around her throat.

It was a thick iron collar hung with tiny putrefying
corpses … fetuses. Another insult. Six in all. Each a different
size representing the trimester in which they’d been aborted.
Unwanted pregnancies had been an unfortunate occupational hazard.
Gloria could smell the fetid reek of their decomposing flesh but
could also feel their heartbeat fluttering against her chest. Their
tiny hands and mouths groped for her nipples, starving for
sustenance. Somehow they were alive, even while clearly rotting
away. Their touch was an abomination that made Gloria’s skin
crawl.

She had no idea how long she’d been in her cell. It
seemed like days. Her head was covered in some type of animal-skin
sack cinched tight around her throat with twine. In its sweaty
animal musk, she could smell the pain and fear the animal had died
in. If it had died. Perhaps in this place animals lived on without
their skin; raw muscle, and nerves exposed to the cruelties of
hell. Just as her own soul lay naked and exposed.

When she’d awakened in the darkness with the sack on
her head and her body folded nearly in half, she’d screamed in
terror, believing she would suffocate. She imagined that she could
feel her own breath steaming back in her face. But Gloria wasn’t
breathing. She was dead. And where she was there would not have
been enough oxygen to breathe even without the sack on her head.
The flames consumed the oxygen breathing nothing but carbon dioxide
back into the thin polluted atmosphere. Gloria’s lungs expanded and
contracted out of habit. She no longer needed oxygen to fuel her
body.

Gloria’s eyelids were pasted shut with tears; still
she was awake. Not once since she’d woken in her cage had she been
allowed to sleep. Whenever she dozed, she was cracked with a whip
or poked with hot metal. The harsh voice of her demon lover barked
orders at her, spittle flying from his lips and coating her in its
vile spray. Sometimes he cooed softly and seductively and then
would slide his enormous cock between the bars of the cage and
masturbate on her. Sometimes he would urinate or defecate on her.
The thick toxic sludge of his excrement coated her skin in a crusty
shell. She was grateful for the sack over her head. It at least
offered her face some measure of protection.

Gloria could not remember how long she’d been left
to rot in that cage before the sack was finally removed from her
head. How long it was before the day the demon released her from
the cage in order to rape her. How her relief at being able to
stretch her stiff tortured joints had turned to horror as the thing
had assaulted her, tearing up her insides, fucking her for hours at
a time until her body broke and bled. Then tossing her back into
the cage to wait for her to heal so that he could break her again.
Once it had begun, it seemed to go on forever. She could no longer
distinguish the monster’s first thrust into her torn and lacerated
vagina from the last.

She knew that she was no longer flesh, yet still she
bruised and bled, organs ruptured, and bones snapped and burst
through the surface of her skin. The spirit was not at all what
Gloria had expected it to be. It was not some ghostly wisp of
ectoplasmic energy. It had substance and weight. Lighter than her
flesh had been but still not the ghost she had imagined she would
be. Her soul remained in the shape of her body and seemed to have
all the vulnerabilities of flesh. She felt fatigue, nausea,
anguish. Everything seemed to bring pain. Matter and energy cannot
be created or destroyed but merely changed from one form to
another. This soul could not die.

After every assault, her spirit body gradually
resolved itself back into its original shape. Sometimes it took
hours or even days but eventually, regardless of the severity of
the injury, her body would reshape itself. Open wounds and
shattered bone knitted back together. Severed appendages reattached
or were regrown. Everything healed except the mind, which forever
screamed in anguish.