Chapter 15
Penelope fought tears the moment she awoke. Her blissful rest was over and another set of hours had begun. That was how she thought now; in hours. Without the sun, with only the same darkness to greet her open eyes that had sheltered them when closed, ‘day’ was just a word.
The hours had been hard on Penelope. By the Lord Almighty they’d been hard. But not because of the darkness. In her last set of hours, the demonic whispers had started when she woke and had hardly stopped until she’d finally fallen asleep. Not that she could really call such a fitful period sleep. It was more like a shortened coma.
And she’d thought her circumstances hard to take before. How naïve she’d been, how foolish. Her mind had expanded into the darkened silence, felt stretched, but it had still been there, still been whole. The cold was a physical pain, something that could be ignored with prayer and willpower. But being penned in by the constant snipes of the demons was so much worse; each word felt like a small nibble at her sanity, like a part of her soul was chewed away.
“Your rescuers have been killed,” they would say.
“No-one wants to pay your ransom.”
“Daddy has left you to die.”
“And you want to give in, you want to take part in the Bacchanal.”
As she ate, as she prayed, even when she relieved herself in that increasingly foul corner of her cell, the demons whispered and chattered and sniped.
Until the Bacchanals began, to use the demon’s terms. They had quietened then. But only because their prattling would have ruined the effect that horrible orgy, that queer revelry of things less than human, had on her. The dark man, that foul creature of Hell who’d set the whispering demons on her, must’ve known how delicate her sensibilities were and so knew she would not be unmoved by these noises.
Penelope was no prude. She knew what men and women did together in the bounds of matrimony; having owned horses, she’d seen how beasts did… that… and the principle as taught in her biology lessons was much the same for humans. When she’d asked about… such activities, her priest had preached that the Lord had given Man these abilities only so that they may procreate, that they were a sacred responsibility for both sexes to bear, one to only be exercised within the sanctity of marriage.
The dark man did not agree; every few hours there had been a chorus of whooping and cheering, words hollered in an unknown language that hailed the start of another Bacchanal. The dull pounding of skin against skin echoed down shortly after and grunts and moans would sing out like trumpets before a king. Horrible amoral pleasures were made centre stage and participated in by all who attended, no matter what they were…
Penelope shook herself to forget these horrible proceedings.
She stood. The cold tore at her once more and her legs nearly buckled as they shivered so she rubbed her shoulders vigorously, tried to get warmth back into her core. To ward off despair, she began a protracted prayer to the Lord; if she were to make it through this trial, to survive and come out in tact, then it would only be through the Lord’s grace.
It took her a few moments to notice she prayed in blessed silence. She finished then cupped her ears but there were no whispers to taunt her. Penelope tried to cage her hope but the feeling rose in her like flood waters. Had her prayers finally been answered in some small way? Was her torture relenting?
The answer came shortly and it was a no; for that day, the Bacchanals started early. This time drums were rolled out into the room above her and strong arms began a slow beat so loud the walls vibrated with each impact. Footsteps fell in time with the pounding, echoing above her in varying degrees of heaviness and… wholesomeness… as the revellers marched in some strange pattern. They gathered together just above Penelope before separating once more; ludicrous as the notion was, it seemed as though they were dancing at a box social.
Penelope moved to the far corner of the room to escape the coming assault. She cradled her head in her hands, forearms shielding her ears as best they could, and started to hum her favourite hymns.
The Bacchanal began in earnest and it was stranger and bigger than any before. All manner of gruesome and sinful sounds leaked through the floor and into Penelope’s twitching, drained mind; moans and biological squishes and dull impacts and less identifiable horrors. The revellers grunted and chittered and quivered above her, all in time with the drums. Incomprehensible voices cried out over the din, clearly intoning something like a prayer.
Penelope did all that she could to not imagine the scene but, perversely even for this setting, it was her Bible that provided the material as its woodcuts of the horrors of Gomorrah came to mind; men and women, men and men, women and women, women and beasts. All manner of unholy unions were being practised. She hummed louder, concentrated on these songs that praised the Lord, and begged to shake these images free.
The revellers’ pace quickened, building to a furious crescendo. The liquids running down the walls now flowed much faster, filling the air with unpleasant and organic smells. She wrinkled her nose and tried not to inhale but the stenches were too ubiquitous to avoid. They made her gag. They made her sick. But worse, they… woke something in her, something she’d kept carefully controlled, being a good Christian girl. This foul substance running off from the Bacchanal made that secret part of her throb, ache, beg desperately to be touched by the wandering hand that that had once earned her a rebuke and a beating from her poor mother.
The demons she could ignore. Just about. But her own body turning traitor was much more difficult to bear. This Bacchanal was much worse than any she’d endured. Or, rather, the pleasure was stronger; it fired up her spine and along her arms, through her breasts to nipples that had never felt so tender. She moaned, both in disgust and in sinful rapture, and prayed so as to keep her sanity, her soul.
The unseen drummers beat their skins faster and the smells grew stronger somehow, sending small jolts of unholy pleasure through her body with each shallow breath. Penelope dug her hands into her hair and whispered prayers, tried to think of her disappointed father and her dying mother, anything. But it was in vain; nothing halted the pleasure.
Just when she felt something building, something wrong and large and… amazing, the drums stopped. An almighty series of grunts filled the silence above her, adult and child, human and inhuman. The flow down her cell walls momentarily became a flood and the coming… crescendo in her body threatened to overcome her senses.
“Jesus, help me!” she cried.
Then there was silence. And peace.
Penelope collapsed. She wept as the cold stone wall sapped her heat. Her body urged her to finish what the Bacchanal had started but she could ignore it. She had control, had somehow maintained her innocence and her purity. But each time the Bacchanals pushed her that little bit closer to losing her mind.
Oh Lord but she had never imagined temptation so strong; almost every part of her had wanted to give in, to relent. It was a fight with her very body, her form, to not do so.
“Was this how Christ had felt during His last temptation?” she wondered. “The overpowering sin and the physical desperation?”
Slowly, she stopped her weeping her treacherous body relaxed. She was left with an uncomfortable dampness in her secret place and a coldness running through her that had nothing to do with temperature. Her tears were close to freezing on her cheeks but they would dry.
Penelope got to her quivering legs and pushed herself away from the wall, each brush of skin against skin sending waves of rapturous pleasure through her body. From experience she knew she would be this sensitive for hours.
Whereas before she’d thought the Bacchanals were being held to convert her to the dark man’s faith, now she started questioning this; why would he convert her if she was being held to ransom? Why try so hard when she was fighting every step of the way? Was it arrogant and prideful to think she would be worth such attention? Perhaps her temptation was a by-product of these evil rituals and the dark man either wasn’t aware of the affect they had on her or didn’t care.
She didn’t know which option would have been worse.
Footsteps interrupted her thoughts. She turned, skin singing with joy, and saw an orange light in the corridor beyond her cell. It slowly brightened as she watched. Someone was coming. It must be breakfast time. Penelope frowned. Though she couldn’t really know how long she’d slept, it felt too early for food.
The footsteps stopped at her cell door, leaving their owner just out of sight. Penelope turned away. What good would seeing more of her captors do beside scaring her if they were of the… unsavoury variety or sickening her if they were just men? And what good would luxuriating in the light they carried do when she would likely see no more for dozens of hours? No, better to remain ignorant and safe.
Then her visitor unlocked the cell door with a heavy key. Iron bolts slid out of place as slowly as the rising of the sun, booming when they opened fully. Her heart quickened; normally her captors put food through a hatch in the door so this couldn’t be breakfast. Someone had come to see her. The dark man had worn her down, had toyed with her and fed her God only knew what, and now he had come to talk to her.
Penelope kept her attention away from the door but her heart rose in terror. Nothing good could come of this. Penelope wasn’t sinful enough yet to pray for death but she did pray for clemency, for some kindness.
Light spilled in behind her when the door creaked open. The flickering amber glow could only have come from an old-fashioned torch, some rag soaked in paraffin. It cast a large shadow that stood over Penelope and her hovel of a prison chamber like a disapproving parent.
This visitor let her see her cell properly for the first time and little about it surprised her; it was low and stone, as she’d already found out, and indeed looked like a natural formation misappropriated as a prison. The only new detail was the colouring of the rivulets of foul liquids that ran down the walls; it was thick and white, like quality cream, and it slopped down the wall before entering a dark chasm below.
The light also showed her the corner she had been fouling for days. Seeing her own manure piled up like an animal’s, seeing a floor soaked with her urine, made her mouth twist in disgust. It left her with a shame that she treasured; in spite of the dark man’s efforts, in spite of the demons and the Bacchanals, she was still the well-raised daughter of a Senator. Though his cultists may taunt her and tease her, turn even her body against her, they would not change who she was.
Though Penelope treasured this realisation and the strength it brought, she ensured there was no pride in it. The Lord had given her this new-found resolve and He could take it away if He wished if she took it for granted. To find it in such a… strange way was a sure sign that He was with her still, even in the darkness.
Even in the depths of sin.
“So you would be Penelope Chalmers,” a smooth voice said. It belonged to a woman.
Penelope breathed as calmly as she could but said nothing.
“It’s generally polite to respond to a person,” her visitor said. Her shadow shrank a little as she stepped into the room. “And I assure you that you don’t wish to be impolite to me.”
“Are you a person?” Penelope asked, buoyed by the strength the Lord had allowed her to find in herself.
A smile entered her visitor’s voice. “I am. Just a person. Born of a woman, sired of a man, just like Penelope Chalmers.”
Penelope took a slow breath in. “That would be where our similarities end.”
Her visitor took another step forward, now stood mere feet away. “How do you know, if you won’t look at me?”
Penelope balled her fists, felt her rough and untrimmed nails digging into her palm. There was no pleasure there; she had full control of herself once more.
“I don’t need to see you to know you are ungodly in the extreme, a sinner without remorse, because you work for and with he who slaughtered fifty good men in the desert, he who tortures me day and night. So I know it intrinsically, just as I know that the Lord is different to a demon and that night is different to day.”
Her visitor paused for a moment. “You seem unhappy. How about I help you relax?”
Penelope stiffened when a hand graced her shoulder, one with nails long enough to be weapons and numerous patterns cut into its flesh with a fine blade. It rubbed the muscles it found there and Penelope felt that horrid lust rising in her.
She pulled away, turned so she would not be surprised her again but this didn’t last long; she gasped on seeing her visitor.
Naked, she stood in the cold chamber as though fully dressed. Obese with speckled rolls of fat tumbling from her skeleton and dark hair to compliment them, her eyes held an open threat of rape and her whole body was covered in those same patterns; round her swollen, misshapen legs, across her gut and down even to her… her own secret place. Though calling it that seemed ludicrous; a steady stream of wetness trailed from there, down her legs and to her ankles where it pooled, making it anything but secret. Unlike on her hand, the cuts across her body were open. They bled slowly, looked as though they would never heal.
Penelope’s eye was drawn to the fetish her visitor ‘wore’; it looked like a tooth taken from a cruel beast with suggestive shapes fastened to the thickest end with black twine. These body-parts were carved from a dark wood and highly polished so they danced in the firelight. The fetish was lodged in one of the witch’s areolae as though it had been stabbed there by a hated enemy and looking at it made her feel more wrong than anything in Penelope’s life ever had, the Bacchanals included.
“Do you like what you see?” the witch asked, cupping the pierced breast. She lowered her torch, some soaked rags loosely hanging from a length of pipe, to give Penelope a better view as she worked her hand across the nipple. Her eyes half-closed in pleasure. “I bet you do.”
“You are a heathen and a monster,” Penelope spat. She slowly backed away, though there wasn’t far for her to go. “The Lord shall judge you harshly and St Peter shall have no choice but to cast you into the pit.”
“Really?” the woman asked, still rolling her nipple between her fingers. Her voice held a worrying degree of confidence. “And you know this for a fact?”
“I do,” Penelope nodded.
Silence fell between them. Only the trickling of the walls and the stream from between the witch’s dense thighs could be heard.
Then the witch laughed. She dropped her hand from her nipple and laughed loud and deep, like a clown. “Child, you know so little,” she said, rubbing tears from her eyes with patterned hands. Then she straightened, her face serious and her eyes filled with cruel hatred. “That Which Sins is the only true goddess. Your Jehova and your Christ, should they even exist, were mewling in the sand when That Which Sins rode high across these lands and all others. That is why I came here, to make you an offer, but I can see you would only reject our kindness.”
“What offer?” Penelope asked despite herself.
The woman smiled. “That Which Sins is not cruel. She does not want to torment you. All she wants is for people to exult themselves at the feet of pleasure, abase themselves for their own enjoyment… and hers. She wishes to extend that opportunity to you; join her willingly and you shall have joys and powers and pleasures that you could barely imagine.”
The witch reached out with her spare carved hand and her fingers danced a complex pattern. Then, like when she’d touched her shoulder, Penelope’s treacherous body went into full mutiny; every part of her crackled with that pleasure the Bacchanals inspired. She panted and groaned, unable to contain herself. Her secret place throbbed almost painfully. Every inch of her skin tingled as though tortured and fulfilled at the same time. The pleasure rose quickly, soaring to so great a height that she felt as though she were dangling at the edge of an explosion, holding herself together with the very tips of her fingernails.
But she was Penelope Chalmers. That was who she was. She would not let the witch win. There was another surge of pleasure, taking her to within a whisker of giving in, but she was able to pull it back and keep herself under control. The feeling halted then, at the very precipice of its climax, and she was released. Penelope fell to the floor, her body unbearably warm and sensitive again.
God help her but part of her wanted to experience whatever it was That Which Sins was driving her to. She looked up at the woman and almost asked her to let that feeling come to fruition. But that was the demon’s vile magic at work and it could not overcome her resolve. Instead she held her tongue, which was dry as bleached bone, and stared at her temptress with as much hatred as she could muster.
“All you have to do,” the woman said, an easy grin spreading across her wide face, “is accept That Which Sins as your mistress and all of this ends. Just kneel to her. That is all. Nothing more.”
“Never,” Penelope croaked. “Never, never, never, never, never, never, never!”
A flash of delight crossed the witch’s face. “I’d hoped you’d say that. It makes things much more… satisfying when you struggle.” Then she rolled her fingers across her white skin and tipped Penelope a lusty wink. “Believe me, I know.”
Penelope spat at her. She had no saliva but the gesture felt important.
The woman licked her lips. Her tongue was black and forked, like a snake’s. “I’ll be seeing you soon, Penelope.”
With that, she left. The door closed and locked behind her and Penelope was left in the increasing darkness with a body she couldn’t control and the knowledge that the sinful woman would be back. And next time she may indeed have her way with Penelope. In more ways than one…