Megan raised her arms, her fingers spread wide. “Guide this child still in the shackles of the Oppressor,” she said. “Help her break free from his tyrant ways.” Then she stepped out of the circle and stood to one side of the door frame.
Sonny stepped forward and into her vacated place within the circle. She ran her palms over her breasts and down her sides to her hips. “Entice her to take that precious bite,” she said. “From whence she shall be delivered.” She stepped out of the circle as well.
Lacy had stuck her hands underneath Heidi’s armpits. She hauled her to her feet and brought her stumbling into the circle, Heidi’s feet erasing and distorting the symbol. Sonny and Megan reached out and steadied her, while from behind, just on the outside of the chalk line, Lacy performed an elaborate bow.
“You are the Dragon, Lord Satan,” she said. “We hail the serpent and stand strong as warriors for you, both in this world and beyond.”
Heidi groaned. Her head, drooping forward, came up for just a moment and then fell back down again. With Sonny and Megan dragging her and Lacy supporting her from behind, Heidi shuffled forward, her feet effacing the remainder of the symbol. Slowly, and with great care, all four of them moved through the door and into the well-appointed room beyond.
For a moment they stood there, just inside the doorway, Heidi still unconscious and the three sisters peering about themselves as if in wonderment. And then, very abruptly, the door was slammed shut by an invisible hand.
Chapter Forty-eight
They held a mirror to her face. She was awake now, but what she saw she didn’t recognize: a dead white face, lips bloodred. They’d put a beauty mark on one cheek, a black pock. She was wearing an eighteenth-century gown, ribs of whalebone painfully constricting her waist and chest so that it hurt to breathe too deeply. The gown billowed out below the waist, quadrupling the size of her hips, crossing and interlacing, parts folded forward and back. She felt like Marie Antoinette, ready for the chopping block.
Where am I? she wondered. What’s happening to me?
Last she remembered, she had been in the apartment building, in her own room. This definitely was not her own room. Stretching before her was a gigantic rococo cathedral, draped in a low-lying fog that made it hard to see the edges of the space, as if it might continue on forever. In the center of it was a red velvet staircase that led up to a black cross. There was something wrong with the cross itself, the crossbeam lying too low, as if it were upside down. Sitting in a slovenly fashion before the cross, in flowing white robes that covered not only their legs but also their ankles, were three judges. The robes had long angular hoods with inverted black crosses on them that completely obscured their faces.
As Heidi watched, a half-dozen white-skinned whores, wearing doll-like makeup and nude but for powdered wigs, descended the red velvet staircase. They moved lasciviously, stretching like cats with each step. Slowly, they approached Heidi, tilting their heads as if their necks were broken.
It was only once they were drawing close that Heidi suddenly wondered why she was standing there waiting for them. But by then it was too late. As they came closer, she realized there was something wrong with them: their apparent beauty began to collapse and crack, and up close their faces revealed themselves as diseased, scrofulous, and even deformed.
As she tried to move to turn away from them, they grabbed her arms and bound her to an elaborate and quite beautiful movable torture rack, accented in gold and armatured with silver spikes. Or not quite a rack, because when they strapped her into it, the straps bent and twisted her in ways that she did not realize she could be bent. It didn’t hurt unbearably yet, but she could see the wheels and levers at the side and could already feel the pressure.
Where had the machine come from? Why hadn’t she seen it before? They had attached her to it with chains, shackling her wrists and stretching her tight. Once she was secure, they rolled her toward the black cross, throwing bits of confetti and glitter in celebration as they went.
The device moved slowly, rolling forward on awkward stone wheels that made the stone floor below them crack and pop as the machine moved. In the end, as they got closer, all the whores had to abandon throwing glitter and push in a concerted effort to make the device move forward, but finally they stopped before the judges.
For a moment Heidi stared at the judges. Perhaps they stared back. It was impossible to tell because of their masks, and even more difficult to know what they were thinking.
And then, the two judges to either side reached over and took hold of the center judge’s robes. They slowly drew their hands away, parting the robe as they withdrew and Heidi saw that what she had thought was a man was not a man after all.
Instead, beneath the robe were two stick-thin figures. Their skin was covered in a kind of mange. They were scabby and encrusted and looked more than a little sickly. They were wound around one another and hugged one another so tightly that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. They were, so it seemed, humanoid, but not human—too thin and long for that, and they gave the impression, perhaps false, of having too many limbs. From their bodies sprouted two long twisting appendages, intestine-like but outside the body rather than inside it, phallus-like but too long to be phalluses, and too motile as well. The appendages writhed and whipped back and forth as if independent creatures. It was terrible to watch.
The whores, though, moved quickly forward and managed in teams to trap the whipping objects and wrap themselves around them, riding them like horses as they cried in ecstasy or wrapping their arms around them. Four of them held them steady while the other two manhandled a funnel-shaped object and brought it forward, forced the ends of the appendages into the large end of the funnel. They began to milk them, working their hands up and down until a thick black liquid began to ooze from them and fill the funnel, and then began to drip from the funnel’s tip.
As soon as that happened, the whores became very excited. They gave off little shrieking noises and spoke in a language that Heidi could not understand. They brought the funnel close to her and began to tear at her clothing, slowly stripping her bare. She struggled, but shackled like she was there was nothing she could do.
Once she was naked, they forced the funnel between her legs. The appendages began visibly to pump, and as the black fluid began to fill her, Heidi’s body began to thrash back and forth, threatening to tear itself apart.
Outside the door to apartment five, Lacy, Megan, and Sonny kneeled reverentially, apparently in prayer. After a moment, they joined hands and began to speak in unison.
“We honor you through our actions and our thoughts,” they said together. “Each day we live upon this earth, may we grow stronger in wisdom and in our love for you, Dark Lord. You are our Father, our Teacher, our Muse, our Lover, our Destroyer. We have taken your mark in dedication.”
The door creaked open, revealing an impenetrable darkness. The women let go of one another’s hands and looked up, staring into the darkness, waiting.
Out of the blackness stumbled Heidi. She was expressionless and drenched in blood, perhaps her own, and she swayed as she came forward, barely able to stay on her feet.
The women rose and gathered around her, steadying her.
“You are transformed,” Lacy said to her.
“You have met the dark bridegroom,” said Sonny.
“You have become one of us,” said Megan. “You have betrayed your ancestors and joined the Dark Lord.”
Heidi didn’t answer. Slowly, the women began to lead her back to her apartment, supporting her. Heidi had trouble staying afoot and would have fallen without them. Even with them, she managed only slowly.