It had large wooden wheels in back, with wooden spokes, like wagon wheels though not nearly so large. The front wheels were very small and made of wrought iron. The seat itself was frayed and coming apart and the basket to hold the invalid’s feet had been awkwardly repaired with strands of wire.
She moved it near the bed and then nodded. Sonny and Megan reached down and heaved Heidi up to a seated posture but she still
did not wake up. Her head lolled loosely, as if she were freshly dead. They dragged her over to one side of the bed, then moved her legs so that her feet were resting on the floor. With each of them grasping an arm firmly, they forced her to her feet and then pulled her over to settle her in the chair.
For just an instant her eyes wavered open slightly, and then they closed again. The two sisters busied themselves positioning Heidi’s legs in the basket and crossing her hands on her lap, and then Lacy began wheeling her backward out of the room with her sisters following.
They went squeaking through the living room. Sonny and Megan darted out to hold the door open. Lacy maneuvered the wheelchair through and turned it sharply, directed its wheels toward apartment number five.
“Oh, Father,” said Lacy quietly as she went, her voice just audible over the squeaking of the wheels. Her face had taken on an unearthly glow. “You give us the venom… fill us with your essence.”
“Let it burn through our souls and our minds,” said Megan.
“We trample on the cross,” claimed Sonny.
All together, as if repeating a ritual, they intoned, “We spit upon the book of lies… We desecrate the virgin whore.”
Lacy stopped just before the door to the apartment and bowed. She released her grip on the wheelchair and walked around in front of it. Removing a stub of chalk from her pocket, she proceeded to trace a circle on the floor. In the center of it, she carefully and deftly inscribed the symbol for the Lords of Salem.
“We blaspheme his holy spirit and rejoice in his suffering,” she said, her voice thick with hatred now. She stepped back and bowed again, and then gestured. Megan came forward and stood in the middle of the circle, careful not to smear or obscure its design. From there she reached out and placed her hand on the doorknob. Slowly, muttering something inaudible, she turned it and opened the door.
The door opened not onto the empty rooms that belonged to the
abandoned apartment five, but onto another place entirely. Through the doorway was a massive room, bigger than the house itself and lavishly furnished. It smelled of strange incense and burned hair, and of something else as well that was impossible to place, something fetid. Heidi’s eyelids flickered open again, then closed. But her eyes kept moving back and forth beneath the lids, as if she were dreaming.
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.
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.
Lacy opened the door. “I will hold her here,” she said to the other two as she moved her head under Heidi’s armpit and grabbed her opposite hip with her hand. “You shall clear a path.”
As Lacy balanced Heidi in the doorway, her sisters entered the apartment, moving objects out of the way. They pushed the kitchen mats to one side, folded the carpet over in the living room. When they were satisfied there was a clear path to the bathroom and nothing that could be soiled permanently by blood, they came back out, nodded.
“Let her enter,” said Megan.
Lacy nodded. Slowly, they moved into the kitchen, leaving a series of Heidi’s bloody footprints behind. Lacy walked Heidi forward, Megan helping to hold her steady. Sonny came behind with a wet towel, swabbing up the blood.
They coaxed her forward, through the living room, past the bed, into the bathroom. They helped her climb into the tub. She was
awake but not awake, not conscious but not unconscious. She knew something had happened to her, something terrible, but she wasn’t sure what it had been. A moment later she heard the screech of the rings against the rod as the shower curtain was drawn closed, and then suddenly she was being sprayed with water, the women reaching around the curtain, touching her body, patting it down, washing the blood away, cleaning her. On the one hand, it felt comforting, as if someone was taking care of her. On the other, though, it felt as though she was being very casually molested.
She swooned and went down, striking her head on the rim of the tub. The women made clucking noises, gathered around her, pulled her up, getting wet themselves. Then one of them was there standing in the tub with her, naked as well, pressing her body up against Heidi’s and whispering in her ear. For a moment she thought it was Lacy, but when the woman began to speak she realized it was Megan.
“What happened to you was a privilege,” she heard the woman whisper in her ear. “Our Lord does not favor just anybody, only the precious few. Now you are one of us.”
“One of you?” Heidi managed to say. “What are you?”
Megan chuckled. “Ah,” she said. “That is the question, isn’t it? We have always been here and we will always be here. No matter how they try to do away with us, we survive.”
She felt Megan begin to lick the water off the back of her shoulder and then begin to kiss her neck. Megan moved her arm up and brought it down across her breasts, beginning to caress one of her nipples with her hand. Heidi struggled, but was too weak to do much. Slowly, Megan seemed to lose interest and then her arm slipped higher up, to wrap finally around Heidi’s throat. It tightened gradually, until Heidi found that she could not breathe.
She clawed at the arm, tried to bring it away, but Megan would not let go. Her vision began to be shot through with whirling points of light, like a swirl of flies, and then began to go black.
And then she passed out.
When she awoke, she was still groggy. Her throat hurt. She was lying in her bed, naked now, but clean, her body freshly washed. Her hair was still wet. Three women were there. Who were they again? They looked familiar, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember their names. Morgan, she was pretty sure one of them was called. One of the other two had hold of her blankets and as she watched she brought them higher, tucked them up around her neck.
“There,” the woman said. “Now you’ll be cozy.” And then for some reason, the woman laughed.
The woman reached over and turned off the light. “Sweet dreams,” she said, and then blew Heidi a kiss.