You’ll want to know about the night of August seventh. It’s all that anybody ever wants to know about.

I always thought that people would forget, it was years ago, another life, another time. I always thought the world would simply move on.

But the world doesn’t move on at all. The world devours that which provokes its interest and it does not stop until it is satisfied. I know that now. And I know too that I have done myself no favors in keeping certain details from the public, in attempting to keep some semblance of my good name and my reputation. Somehow the world has always known that I was holding back, and that there was more to that night than ever I have admitted.

So I suppose now I shall simply tell it all, in the hopes that at last it might all be finished and I will find myself free from that night and those events that transpired. I see finally that there is nothing left to protect, no hope of moving on until the story is told.

But I will warn you at the outset: If I am to speak then I will hold nothing back, not for your comfort and for your sensibilities, and not for mine. If I am going to speak the truth now, then I will speak it plain, and I will say every word that I have so long hidden. I only hope that it shall be enough.

As you know, it was the first blush of autumn 1926. It was the season of lights and of galas, of the last hurrah before the light of summer fled and the long cold of a New England winter set upon us again. It was my debutante season, albeit late. I was twenty years old and fresh from the Academy in Vermont, at last free to make my rounds of the high society of Providence. I had always resented my father for keeping me so long at the girls’ school, for delaying my entry into the light of the real world. Across that glorious summer I believed I had at last forgiven him.

I was a long-whispered secret, some cloistered beauty long absent from the social set. I see now that my absence from Providence and its social life only served to enhance the desire for my return. Perhaps that had been my father’s plan all along, to keep me locked away until the proper moment, until all the best families were begging for my presence, until I was the most sought after prize in all New England. That summer it certainly seemed as if I was.

I had been courted, it seemed, by every swain of good family in Providence and Boston, and received no less than three proposals, which was enough of course to make my head spin and provoke the jealousy of all of my friends. It was not enough, however, for my father. He turned down each applicant with nary a thought. At first I imagined he was simply being cold, but by that August he had made it known that there was only one match he would consider for me, and that was to Timothy Hansen, son of Walter Hansen and the heir to the Hansen steel empire. It was a lofty ambition, even I recognized that, but my father was single-minded. He had designed the whole of my life for the single moment when Timothy Hansen might see me across some gilded room and feel at once a stirring in his heart.

Whatever my father’s failings might have been, he knew what he was about. At the Richardson Ball in Boston in the early days of July Timothy Hansen laid eyes on me for the first time. Though he did not approach me that evening, within two days he had presented himself at my father’s house to ask if I could be permitted to accompany him sailing on his family’s yacht. It was a proposition to which my father at once consented. Two weeks later he gave his blessing for Timothy and I to be wed.

What should I say of poor Tim? He has faded from the memory of the world now. His family fortune did not survive the crash of ’29. But once his family name was mentioned in the same breath as that of Rockefeller, Morgan and Rothschild. Of course, Tim was not there to see the fall of his family fortune. His own luck turned that night in August, at the party at Richmond Court.

I will say that my engagement to Timothy was the happiest day of my life. It was not for his wealth that I loved him, not for the fine value of his name, but for the man he was. So brave, so young and handsome, he was to me like a prince from the storybooks of my girlhood. I was young and inexperienced, but when he spoke to me it sounded as though he were speaking poetry, and the way that he smiled, the feel of his fingers when they brushed my skin… I knew from the first that I loved him, and that there was nowhere I would not follow him upon this earth. There was nothing he might ask that I would not be glad to give.

I believe that the whole world saw Tim that way. He was so fine and witty, with such abounding intelligence. He was everything a well-brought up young man aspired to be. I imagine that the announcement of our engagement broke many hearts that summer, and dashed the hopes of many great and famous families. During those first heady weeks I saw Timothy very much as I saw the sun, just as bright, and just as beautiful.

As I look back now, I know that there were parts of Tim that did not show through at the outset, sides of his nature that most never had an opportunity to see. He was rich, witty, intelligent and handsome, but I can say now that there was darkness too. There was in Timothy Hansen a desire that was not easily understood, and even now I struggle to place my feelings into words. He was a man who had the whole world at his fingertips, but the world was somehow not enough.

Many men of our class desire money, and can never have enough of it. Certainly that was true of my father, and also of his. But money meant little to Tim. Through the days of our whirlwind courtship and engagement I never knew what it was that really drove my intended. I did not know just what it was that he was hungry for. But even through the haze of my giddy adoration I retained enough of my faculties to sense he was driven by a desire for something other than money.

Had things gone as they were intended, I do not know if my life with Tim would truly have been a happy one. All things fade in time, and though in those days I was young and beautiful, time soon fades all that is lovely. I will never know if Tim’s desire for me would have outlasted the bloom of our youth. I have often thought that perhaps in a strange way I was spared by that night at Richmond Court.

…which I will get to now, as that is what you long to hear, what all the world has hungered after ever since that night in August when Timothy Hansen escorted me to the party there.

It was not a party like those to which I was accustomed. I knew that from the moment that Tim invited me. It was not some end-of-summer gala thrown by one of the great old families, not a festival of light and finery with the owners of banking houses and railways. No, the party at Richmond Court was a different sort of affair altogether.

“A lark,” Tim described it to me.

I was aware by that time that Tim had many friends that would hardly have been welcomed at the society dinners and dances I frequented. They were men from the working class, and scholars from universities–a ragged set of eccentrics, men whose interests and passions somehow led them far from the world of convention, who dressed rattily, who spoke roughly and who never had more than a dime in their pocket.

“Visionaries,” Tim had described them to me. “Pioneers. They are the future. We are the future. Someday it will be us who make the world turn.”

The party at Richmond Court was one thrown by the visionaries. I hardly knew how to dress for something like that, but Tim had invited me and of course I did not dream of turning down the chance to appear somewhere, anywhere, upon his arm. Even though it was not the sort of function I was accustomed to, I had no reservations at all that evening when Tim picked me up in his Rolls-Royce. It was just another party, another adventure in what I was sure would be a long life full of such things.

Even the sight of Richmond Court itself did not shake me, though even at that time it was quite old and much faded from its glory days. A sad story, the Richmond family. Their roots in Providence dated back before the Revolution. They had amassed a fortune based on molasses and the cotton trade. For five generations they had dwelt in the massive grandeur of Richmond Court.

Then, in 1880 the whole family had died within its walls. There had always been ghost tales in my childhood, rumors that the Richmonds had met their fate at the hands of an axe-wielding criminal, but at the ripe age of twenty I knew that it had been a pandemic that took them. The family had passed slowly and in misery, confined to their beds until one by one they faded and were gone. An awful thing of course, and a sad one, but nothing that could frighten me.

The house had languished in the decades that had followed, as no one wished to install themselves in a home touched by plague and ill fortune, no matter how long past. That August it had been purchased by one P. Arshinov, one of Tim’s eccentric set. Some said that Timothy himself had actually put up the money for the purchase.

That night the house was lit up with candles and oil lamps, a dull orange haze that spread weakly into the darkness around it, and it struck me as odd that there should be no electric lights in the place, that surely it would not be so difficult to run wires through the old walls. However, Tim assured me that the lighting was by design. It was for atmosphere, he told me, and as he led me towards the waiting door I did wonder just what sort of atmosphere was intended, just what I could expect within.

My first impression of the party was that it was quite a low and sorry affair. Tim did not knock upon the door. We just walked into the drafty old house, no butler or servant to greet us or to take our coats, no host to hail our arrival. We simply followed the sound of music scratching from a phonograph down the halls until we reached the large parlor where the other guests had congregated.

There were ten or fifteen of them I believe, all lounging around on old and much worn sofas and chairs, sipping drinks from thick glasses and speaking in low voices to one another as a record turned on the phonograph in the corner. Most of the guests, I saw at once, were men. They were of various ages, but united by a downtrodden and shabby appearance: longish hair and unkempt beards, dirty nails and clothing stained by labor.

I noted only two other women in that room, both of them some years older than myself and dressed in a manner akin to the menfolk around them. Nobody seemed to notice our arrival, or pay any attention to us at all. Tim led me across the room towards the lit fireplace and an old green chair, upon which sat in silence a wizened, middle-aged man, staring thoughtfully into the flames.

When I was introduced to Mr. Arshinov he offered me a smile, though he did not rise from his seat or reach up to take my hand. When he spoke it was to Tim and not to me, and though his name was clearly of the old world I could detect only the barest trace of an accent in his words.

“Quite lovely, young man, you have done well for yourself.”

This was a compliment that carried no real meaning, considering the disparity between the man’s station and that of a Hansen, but my dear Tim beamed all the same. He asked Mr. Arshinov if all was in readiness, and when the man told him that it was indeed Tim once more seemed as giddy as a child.

“Shall we begin?” Mr. Arshinov asked. “I suppose there is no need to wait.”

And he clapped his hands to gather the attention of the group and announced that all were now arrived, and that it was time to prepare.

I hardly knew what was to be prepared for—dinner, I supposed. Mr. Arshinov fixed his eyes upon me, and in a kind voice suggested that I might like to freshen up with the other ladies as the menfolk attended to some business matters at hand.

I was not eager to leave Tim’s side in such unknown and rough company, but within a moment the two other women in the room were at my side and gesturing that I should join them. It seemed rude to refuse, so I followed them across the parlor and beyond, only pausing for an instant in the doorway to look back at Tim. He was smiling sweetly, obviously very pleased.

I followed the women down another long hall, imagining of course that we were heading to a powder room to freshen our faces, and to entertain ourselves while the men smoked and did whatever business men do when not in the company of women. I was a bit surprised when I was led instead into a small, empty kitchen. No food at all had been prepared, and it appeared as if not a thing had been changed or added since the house had belonged to the Richmond family.

My companions, who had not yet offered me a single word, leaned against one wall. Both produced cigarettes from the pockets of the coats they wore and began to smoke. Through the smoke, it seemed to me, they studied me as I stood awkwardly in the doorway. I was quite unsure of what to say, still less of what to do.

“You don’t have to be nervous,” one of the women said to me at last, and offered me a cigarette which I quickly refused.

The woman who had spoken only shrugged and puffed away.

“I’m Leah,” she said after another moment had passed. She nodded towards her companion. “Sophie. Sophie doesn’t speak.”

That was a statement that I felt compelled to apologize for, as though the woman’s silence were somehow tied to me. Both of the women shrugged and said nothing more. Feeling completely unsure of myself I offered them my own name, which caused Leah to nod.

“Arshinov told us,” Leah said. “Eugenie Hastings. You’re rich and famous, right? Your father owns a transport company.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I nodded. “And you, Miss? What does your family do?”

It was a question which provoked a snort from the silent Sophie, and a chuckle from Leah herself, who answered they did nothing worth speaking of.

Once more there was a prolonged silence between us. My discomfort grew, until I felt compelled to say anything that would keep that empty hanging silence at bay. I asked them if they knew Mr. Arshinov well. Leah smiled when she told me that they did not know him nearly as well as I would.

“You don’t know why you’re here, do you, honey? That fiancé of yours, he didn’t tell you a thing. You ought to have a cigarette. It will calm you down.”

Once more I declined her offer, and though her words struck me as strange and even somewhat threatening, I had no earthly idea of what they might portend.

I was relieved when Leah dropped her cigarette upon the floor and crushed it out beneath her toe. She announced that we should all head back to the party, that it would not have taken the men long at all to ready themselves for the night’s entertainment. Happily I followed the two women back down the hall towards the parlor, towards Tim and towards a presence that I understood.

If anything had occurred in our brief absence there was no sign. The men stood or sat as they had before, quietly speaking among themselves and sipping drinks while the record played and the fire crackled.

I went at once to Tim who was standing near the phonograph, took his arm and asked him how long we were expected to stay here. When he gave me a questioning look I explained that I was a bit uncomfortable, that this was not the sort of place to which I was accustomed.

Seeing my unease he tenderly patted my arm, and assured me that we need not stay long, that we would have a drink and then soon after we would make our excuses and depart. I was quite relieved by his words. A single drink was something I could bear. Seeing the comfort that must have spread across my face Tim at once declared that he would fetch us a drink immediately.

I watched him as he strode across the room towards a small table on the far wall, poured two glasses of brandy and returned once more to my side. I did not notice until he was beside me once again and the glass was in my hands that all the others in the room had begun to rise. They looked towards the seat by the fire where Mr. Arshinov was pulling himself to his feet.

“A toast, I think, as we begin.” Mr. Arshinov called. He held up a glass in his hand, his action mirrored by all those in attendance, myself included.

“Tonight we drink to a glorious past,” said Arshinov. “And to the coming future. When the time has come to write the history of our brave new world, the historians will say that it began tonight. That it began right here, and with this bold company. And they shall relate that it began with a simple drink and with a pledge of eternal devotion.”

I saw Mr. Arshinov’s eyes fall upon me as he lowered his glass to his lips. As I brought the brandy to my own I saw that all present were looking my way. I glanced at Tim and saw that he was smiling broadly as he tipped the glass back and drank.

As far as I know, all those present drank after Mr. Arshinov’s toast. I know for a certainty that I did.

With the toast completed the gathering resumed its course once more. The low conversations struck up again, Mr. Arshinov returned to stand by the fire. If those present that night were going to change the world then they certainly seemed in no hurry to get on with it. For my part, I downed my brandy in a few quick gulps, eager to leave that strange company as swiftly as possible.

Yet, in spite of his promise, Tim seemed in no hurry to go. He sipped at his drink, he scanned the group around us, making no effort to join in conversation but not seeking an exit either. I was on the verge of voicing my desire to depart once again, when I saw Mr. Arshinov looking upon me in a way that made my knees shake ever so slightly.

He clapped his hands for quiet as he had done before, but when the room was silent and all eyes were upon him, he simply clapped his hands a second time.

I saw Leah and Sophie rise from their places and cross the room to stand before him. He spoke to them in a low voice. I could not hear their words but the result was clear enough. I watched as both women lowered their eyes to the floor and turned to face each other. Leah raised her arms and held them up as Sophie stepped close and began to undo the buttons on her companion’s coat.

When Sophie’s long fingers had undone the last button, Leah lowered her arms, shrugged her shoulders and let the garment fall to the floor. I gasped as she was revealed naked. Before the crowd of silent men Leah stood with lowered eyes, letting all take in her form and flesh, the generous curve of her hips, the shadows falling on her heavy breasts, and the gentle blush that passed across her skin.

Arshinov stood behind her. He placed a hand upon her bare shoulder, leaned close and whispered something into Leah’s ear. The woman nodded, and in one graceful motion she lowered herself down upon her knees, her eyes still cast to the floor. She placed her arms behind her back and held herself still as Arshinov turned his gaze upon Sophie.

He had no need for words. Sophie began to undo the buttons of her own coat. When she let the coat fall away and stood revealed in full I saw the marks upon her skin, upon her breast and her belly, and I saw the mark between her thighs, just above the glistening redness of her sex.

And then I fell to the floor and saw nothing more.

I have often asked myself if I was drugged.

For a long time I resisted the idea, for it would mean that Tim had been complicit, that he had known in full what would befall us within that place. I resisted because to admit it would have been to admit that the man I had loved had planned that night. For the longest time that was more than I could bear.

Now much time has passed. I have had a lifetime to ponder on those events, and to accept what must have been. The drink I was offered was drugged, and the whole purpose of going off with the women to the kitchen had been to allow the men to drug the brandy. The whole purpose of the toast was simply to ensure that I would drink it.

I know now that Tim knew. More than knowing, he desired that it should be so. He brought me to Richmond Court and to Arshinov fully aware of what would transpire. I was the price he was required to pay for his own admission into that place.

He delivered me so that he himself could be delivered.

I have said that I saw nothing more, and for a time I did not.

Yet I was not asleep. Though my eyes had fallen shut, my mind was awake. I could hear the sounds in the room around me, the movement of feet, the low and whispered voices, and the grunts and the curses of men. I could hear the moans of a woman and the strange rasp that issued from a throat too damaged to form the sounds it sought to issue.

In delirium my mind created images in the darkness behind by closed lids. I saw many things that could not have been.

I saw a woman nude and spread upon the floor before a fire, saw bestial men crawling all over her, shorn of clothes and all semblance of decency. I saw the rigid anger of their pricks as they rubbed them red and throbbing, burning against the pale flesh of the woman who writhed beneath their attentions. Tongues lolling from thick and heavy jaws, hanging long like the tongues of dogs and dripping madness as they sought to taste every inch of her flesh. Her moans rose with their laughter as a tongue pressed into her furrow between her wide spread thighs and tasted her there, moist and waiting.

I saw another woman, fair-haired and silent, her long lithe body down on hands and knees and mouth agape beneath eyes closed tight, breathless and red-faced as a pale shadow behind her gripped her by narrow hips and plunged forward with a guttural whine. Flashing forms all around her, a swirling mass of hands and cocks groping and mauling her soft flesh. Ears pressed close to catch the air that escaped her lips as though they might draw meaning or even pleasure from it.

Most of all I saw the third: a beautiful thing of auburn hair and the long green dress that she had worn. It must have been the way I dreamed myself, and I saw her silent on the floor asleep as the chaos raged around her, and I tried to cry out when the shadows fell upon her at last. Dirty hands clutched at the dress and tore it from her in rags, until she was laid nude upon the old floor boards, her form exposed to the hungry eyes of the shadows pressing around her.

I tried to call out to her as she was lifted, as those shadows hauled her up and bore her away with them, but the girl with the auburn hair did not wake, only flinched and shook in her sleep as dirty fingers pressed upon her goose pimpled flesh. I saw her bite her lip and I saw her shake as though there was something in her head she would drive away.

But the girl did not wake, and I could only keep on dreaming as the sounds faded from my ears and the images one by one began to vanish back to darkness

I do not know how long I slept, how long the drug kept me in its thrall.

When I opened my eyes I found I was alone in a dark room lit by a single candle, set on the stand beside the narrow bed upon which I had been laid. I woke to the chill upon my skin and the awareness that I was naked, and to the knowledge that calloused hands had pressed upon me. I took one deep breath and screamed out for Timothy with all the horror that had driven my dreams.

But when I had screamed and screamed again, when I had exhausted myself with screaming and lay gasping on that narrow bed it was not Tim who came for me. In the darkness beyond the candle light I heard the sound of a door creaking open, and through the dark I saw a shape against the greater blackness. And it was Mr. Arshinov’s voice that spoke out to me.

“Your fiancé is busy at the moment,” the man told me from the dark. “He cannot come.”

At once I sought to cover myself from his gaze but the man in the dark only laughed and he told me that there was no need for modesty, that it was all too late for that.

“I have seen you already,” Mr. Arshinov said. “I have seen you many times. You would not be here if I had not. There is no need to hide from me, and there is no point in trying. I am not one that may be hidden from. I will always find you, dear Eugenie. You were put upon this earth that I might find you.”

I could hear his movement across old boards, towards the bed upon which I lay. Exposed in the circle of my candle’s light, once more I rallied my strength to scream. But I only heard him sigh in the darkness before he told me once more that it would do no good.

“The others are busy,” Arshinov told me. “They are occupied. The first frenzy of their lust is passing now, the brute animal force that I have ordered you spared from. They have slaked themselves of the first on rush of madness and now gather themselves, ready for more refined fare.

“It is good that you are awake, Eugenie. It is time for you to join us.”

Like some frightened child I screamed out that I wanted Timothy.

“Of course you do. So come with me. I am going to take you to him.”

I felt, more than saw, the outline of the hand that reached out towards me. I was certain that the hand was there, it was waiting, and there was no other way. God help me, but in that moment I did not know what to do. I reached out beyond the candle’s light and I felt that cold hand closing around my own, pulling me upward and urging me from the bed.

“Come,” the voice commanded, and the hand pulled me forward, away from the light and the candle that burned by the bed. I followed with bare feet across the cold boards of the floor as Arshinov led me away.

Once more I was brought to the parlor, but it was different. The music still played and the fire burned, but the men within it were not speaking or drinking. They lolled nude upon the floor, grunting like animals spent of their energy. I closed my eyes to avoid the sight of their soiled manhoods dripping pearly dew upon their bare bellies and their hairy thighs. None said a word as I was led naked among them. The men seemed not to have words left to speak, but I felt their eyes upon me as I still tried to cover myself in vain against their gaze.

I gasped when a hand closed tight around my ankle, and my eyes flew open to see the woman, Leah, smiling up at me from where she lay upon the floor. Her dark hair was soiled with the pollution of men. The wet essence ran thick and wet across her face, torso and belly, and leaked from the parted lips of her sex, where I saw her fingers playing with the bud of her clitoris. Her other hand clamped upon my ankle, holding me firmly in place.

“Would you like a cigarette now?” Leah giggled, as her fingers slipped around the shining wetness between her spread thighs. “Would that help you to relax?”

I could not speak. Leah only laughed as she released her hand from my ankle. Then her laughter turned to a long moan as she lowered it join the other at work upon her eager pussy. I heard Arshinov laugh as he led me past her towards the fire. There he stopped and stood beside me, bidding me to keep my eyes open and to take in the room.

In the candlelit parlor he seemed stronger than when we had arrived. His wizened form was more filled out, the lines upon his face had softened and color had crept into his skin. He was nude as all the others, and as I watched he dropped his hand from mine and placed it upon the hardness of his member, which struck me as unbearably long and fearsome. His hand moved swiftly along the length of his rigidity with a force that I was certain was enough to tear it from his body. Yet his voice was soft and calm as he spoke.

“The first act has finished,” Mr. Arshinov said. “Leah here has performed admirably, and she has slacked the first hunger of the beast. The door has been opened, it stands ajar. Now we ready offerings of another kind.”

I could not take my eyes from Leah as she lay writhing on her back, her fingers working furiously at the crease of her dripping snatch, her moans so loud as to drown out the words that Arshinov uttered beside me. As I looked on, a man crawled across the floor towards her befouled form, and Leah cried out as she felt his hands upon her hips. He roughly threw her over onto her belly and hauled her upward. Then he climbed onto his knees behind her, his wet and shining cock growing firm once more between his legs.

Whatever images had played in my mind as I lay drugged upon the floor of that room, they could not have come close to reality. I watched the man take his prick in his hand and line it up with the folds of Leah’s labia, tracing it up and down until he found the place that he was seeking. With a grunt he drove himself deep within her, causing Leah to gasp and wail, her face pressed against the floorboards.

The man’s hand crept down her back to wrap itself in her long dark tresses and yanked her head back and upwards, until her back was arched so much that it seemed that it must break. Her wide eyes found mine and we gazed upon one another as that assaulting prick drove deep into her belly, making her moan.

Beside me Arshinov seemed to notice none of this. Nor did the other men who sat or lay spent around the room seem bothered by the act. They simply stared at Arshinov and at me, waiting for what the host might say next.

“There is one who would join us,” Arshinov declared. “One who has come to us seeking answers and seeking a hand in the glory that is to come. We have received him into our ranks. He has committed himself to our cause. Now at last the time has come that this acolyte should join with the Lurker at the threshold. Even now sister Sophie prepares him for the act, for the sacred rite of union and all the vast secrets that it holds.”

With those words I tore my eyes from those of Leah and looked carefully around the room. Somehow in my shock at the events of the evening I had not marked before that Sophie was not present. Nor was Tim. In the pit of my burning stomach I knew at once that it was my own dear Timothy of whom Arshinov spoke. My eyes filled with tears at the sudden awareness that we had come into a wicked place. It would be our fate to be sacrificed in blood to the devil that these brutal men and that vile woman so clearly worshipped.

Yet Arshinov glanced at me, and seeing my tears he spoke for me alone.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “It is not death we have come here to celebrate, it is not harm that we intend. Our mysteries are beyond such things.”

My eyes fell again upon Leah, being taken roughly upon the floor, the way that a dog might be rutted by another. Watching her body contort and twist and seeing the wild look in her wide eyes I did not believe Arshinov’s words. I could see no intention in the act before me that was not harmful. Death surely lay beyond.

As I stared Arshinov stepped back and moved close behind me. My body tensed as I felt his hands falling upon my shoulders and his breath upon the nape of my neck. I started with a jolt of panic when I felt the hot touch of his penis against my lower back. His hands held me firmly in place as he whispered gently into my ear.

“I know that you have never seen such secrets as those we have prepared for you, Eugenie. But it pleases me to see that you do not look away. You have ceased to scream, you do not panic. I can feel in you a desire creeping. I can feel it here.”

He rubbed the head of his erection against the bones of my spine as he traced them with the burning flesh of his prick.

“I can feel it creeping through your bones. It calls to me, it has always called to me. You have longed for a secret such as this.”

If I could have spoken through the fear that welled within me I would have denied it then. I would have refuted his claim with every fiber of my being, screamed that I had never longed to witness such a thing as I saw happening that night at Richmond Court. It was nothing I had ever imagined, not even in the darkest of my nightmares.

The years have gone by and I am no longer the girl that I was. I sit far removed from the events of that night and I feel no need to lie, certainly not to myself. That night I blamed the attention which I gave to the act taking place before me on the fear I felt, on the sheer shock of seeing something so awful. I told myself there was no curiosity within me, no desire.

Now I am old, and maybe more honest. If nothing else the night has ended, and I can look back upon it with far more detachment than I possessed at the moment. I wonder now whether there was not something in that man’s words after all.

There was always a sort of fascination that gripped me when the topic of physical love came up, a thrill that came upon me at the prospect of learning that great and sacred secret. I had always considered it normal, and had been instructed by mother and by the ladies at the Academy that such thoughts were simply a part of growing up. It was just as normal to push them aside, to lock them away and to carry on the way a young woman ought. Yet I had always struggled to push such thoughts aside.

There were the games at the Academy, the small thrills and flirtations of young women sent away from the world and burning with the desire for it. The fascination that the young men who worked upon the property held for us, the fantasies we whispered to ourselves in our beds in the night. It had been innocent, always innocent. Yet it had been enticing too, a heady rush of passion into the dull mendacity of our cloistered lives.

It occurs to me now as I look back that perhaps I had indulged the thrill and fascination more than most.

That night at Richmond Court was not the first time I had seen a woman taken by a man. Not even the first time I had seen one taken roughly. And the first time, as with the second, I had not looked away, nor had I run, though there had been no hand then to hold me in place.

Her name had been Miss Penelope Smith, and she had been a French instructor at the Academy in Vermont. His name I had never known, but he had been a familiar face around that small hill town, and he had often been hired at the Academy to do work upon the roofs or upon the chimneys. One day my friends and I had been walking through the east orchard on a Sunday afternoon, late enough that we would be late for dinner. It was warm and it was spring, and we had been willing to risk the penalties of tardiness for a few more moments in the sunshine.

As we had reached the northern edge of the orchard, where the neat rows of apple and pear trees turned to the wild chaos of the New England forest, we heard a sound which drew us out of the neat space of our ordered world. Out we stepped into the dark beyond, to investigate the strange cry which reached us.

We saw them as soon as we stepped into the wood, Miss Smith and her nameless beau. They had not gone far beyond the orchard when their passions must have overcome them. We saw our young and lovely French instructor bent over upon a moss-covered stone, her dress thrown up around her hips, while the nameless laborer thrust roughly into her from behind, the force of his hips driving from the woman the cries which had drawn us to them. My friends turned and ran without a word, aware at once that they had stumbled onto a scene beyond them, something forbidden and never meant to be seen.

I did not run. Instead I hid myself behind the trunk of an elm, and with wide eyes looked upon them.

The man reached his large hand up and took Ms. Smith’s breast roughly in his grasp. She did not flinch from the words he called her, awful words that would have earned a reprimand for any who had used them in her classroom. He called her a bitch, a slut, a filthy whore. She agreed to everything he called her, her fingers clutching the stone. She was all of those things, all of those things for him.

The first penis I had ever seen met my eyes when the man had pulled himself free of her. I gasped when I saw it, red and angry in the shadows and the light through the afternoon trees. I heard her scream echo through those trees when he pressed that bulbous purple head between the cheeks of my instructor’s ass, and pressed slowly forward to penetrate the depths of her bowels. I heard that scream drift away across the forest and turn to soft and begging sighs of wanton lust.

It was only as the man pulled himself from her rear to spill his pearly seed upon the small of her exposed back that I ran. Even then I ran not from fear of what I had seen, but for fear I should be discovered when their passions no longer held them in thrall, deadening their awareness to my watchful presence.

I had touched myself between the legs many times across my years at the academy, but that night was the first time that I reached behind myself and pressed my slim finger against my tight rosebud there and drove it slowly inward. As I pressed that finger to the hilt in my back passage, as my other hand stroked my sweet bud and slipped inside my tender womanhood, I called myself all the names that man had laid upon sweet young Miss Smith. I imagined it was a rough man’s voice that laid those insults upon me, and as I worked my digit in and slowly out of my tender backside I had climaxed as never before and cried out in the throes of my lonely passion that I was naught but a filthy bitch, a slut, a harlot, a whore.

Is every young woman’s life like that?

It did not seem so at the time, and across all the years I have never spoken of such things, nor heard them spoken of in turn, not even now when the world has come so far and lost so much of the decorum that we once possessed.

I did not recall any of this that night at Richmond court. But even with the head of Arshinov’s cock pressed against the tingling skin of my spine, I did not tear my eyes from those of Leah, as the brute made her into all those names which I had once in fantasy called myself.

I said nothing, and the man behind me must have read in my silence some measure of agreement.

“You will want for nothing here,” he promised. “Here there shall be no secrets. There is nothing you will not be shown, no pleasure that you will be denied the experience of.”

Behind me I felt his fingers brush my skin. He had taken his right hand from my shoulder. He stroked himself while the tip of his prick rested upon my back. His left hand left my collar bone, and an instant later I felt the firmness of his palm pressed and cupping the cheek of my ass, and against my ear I heard him sigh. I was too cowed to pull away.

“It is so hard to wait, Eugenie.” He whispered to me. “I have been waiting for so long, but soon enough I will make you mine. Soon enough you will find yourself as our dear Leah here, a willing slave to my desires, and I will take you as I have longed to do all these long centuries past…”

His words confused me, but there was no explanation. His whispers ceased as Sophie entered from the hall. The mute woman clapped her hands for Arshinov’s attention. There was no sleep to overtake me then, no fresh drug to seal me away from the sight of her. When I saw her enter the parlor once more, still nude, in spite of all that I had witnessed already I still gasped.

It was easy to see the red and scarring welt that lay like a necklace across the base of her throat. Seeing it I had no doubt that Sophie had lost her voice in the slow strangling hold of a noose. The marks that I had seen in an instant upon her pale skin were the scars of lash and rod across her breasts and belly, her hips and the soft flesh of her thighs, thin and angry marks across her already pale skin.

The black mark I had glimpsed upon the arch of her mons was a tattoo, a symbol in jet black ink. It appeared to me to be the face of a black goat, yet somehow it was different from any goat I had ever seen. I saw too the heavy rings of gold that hung from her brown nipples, pierced through tender and sensitive flesh, companions to the thick ring that hung between her legs, the one I could not see clearly but knew had pierced the heart of her sexuality, hanging forever from the engorgement of her clitoris.

The sight of her took my breath away, and I pulled back, pressing myself against Arshinov’s waiting, pressing form.

“Do you like her, my dear?” he whispered. “Do you enjoy what you see in our own sweet Sophie?”

What I saw was the marks of a deep and lasting depravity visited upon the body of a young woman, the signs of which would never fade. What I saw was a woman branded for the duration of her years by the debauchery of men, men who had marked and branded her flesh and who had taken her voice away. What I saw terrified me, as I saw in the body of Sophie the prelude to my own fate.

She stood in the doorway to the parlor. When Arshinov told her that all was ready and to proceed, the woman nodded. She stepped back out of sight into the hall. From the darkness there I heard hurried whispers and the jangling of a bell, and one voice that spoke in haste. She emerged once again. Now there was a leather halter in her hand. At the other end trailed a woman veiled and in a fine white wedding dress, led by a collar affixed to her pale throat.

This bride walked with small and uncertain steps, led on by Sophie’s tugging of the leash. She held in her gloved hands a bouquet of white flowers, yet I could see that both of her wrists were tied together with thin rope, tied tight. I imagined how painful that must be. I could not see her face through the lace of her veil, but I imagined the fear upon it, the tears that must be in her eyes. As the woman moved I could hear the ringing of a small bell. Yet I could not see one about her person, and there was none present upon Sophie’s form.

Arshinov stepped away from me then, his nude form crossing before me. The man thrusting into Leah on the floor of a sudden pulled back and let her fall, exhausted. Arshinov spread his arms wide and spoke again to the waiting crowd.

“My friends, the time has come for the second rite. Sister Sophie has prepared her charge. The door has been opened, the Lurker stands upon the threshold. It is time for the rite of union and the revelation of the secrets to one who would join our ranks. Rise up brothers! The rite will now begin.”

All around the parlor the sprawling men began to rise wearily to their feet. There was something hungry in their eyes. I saw lips pulled back to reveal yellowed teeth, savage grins or the snarl of an animal readying itself to strike and to tear the flesh from off the bone. I saw Leah crawling across the floor, a milky trail of spent ejaculate trailing behind her across the boards. She reached the wall and sat below the lantern in the window, her legs spread wide and leaking. Her gaze alternated between me and the woman in the wedding dress. She was smiling.

The men pressed close around the woman in white. Their hands reached out to stroke the finery of her nuptial garments, which even through my fear I noted were of the most expensive cut and the highest of fashion. I am embarrassed to admit that at the time there was still a small part of me that recoiled at the sight of the marks left by grubby fingers upon the flawless white silk and the well-cut lace, as though such impropriety could contend with the sights that I had already taken in on that awful evening.

Arshinov turned to face me, a wide smile on his face, and he swept his arm outward to gesture toward the bride that Sophie had brought.

“Behold the bride of Azeroth, my dear Eugenie. Behold the feast that has been prepared.”

He turned again and stepped forward towards the woman dressed in white. I saw her shiver at his approach and make a muffled sound beyond the veil, not unlike the breathless rasp of Sophie. I imagined that this poor woman had suffered a similar fate. She drew back a tiny step, and then another, before Sophie silently snarled and yanked the leather halter forward, dragging the woman back into place. The men around her pressed closer still, their hands and bodies urging her forward, uttering the most shocking of profanities as though language itself was both lash and whip.

Arshinov stopped his advance with only a few paces between them. I saw him reach out with his left hand and run his fingers across the veil that hid the woman’s face. Though his back was to me I knew that his right still wrapped itself around the heat of his erection, stroked and kept at readiness as he whispered to the woman words I could only strain to hear. I heard once more the low moan of the woman in white, and then Arshinov raised his voice again and announced that it was agreed, that it was decided.

At the utterance of these words the crowd of men began to cheer. They pressed closer still around the woman when Arshinov called out that the time had come for the groomsmen to prepare the bride. I watched as the filthy hands of the unwashed crowd fell upon the finery in earnest, not to stroke or caress, but to rip and tear, each hand thrusting forward and then jerking back to pull away fistfuls of the fine brocaded silk and lace. The laughter of the men mingled with the faint jingle of an unseen bell and strange noises from the bride beset. Flashes of flesh became exposed as the woman in vain attempted to escape the grasping of their hands, her own bound before her, the leash taut upon her veiled throat.

The ringing of the bell…that bell….

Arshinov looked back over his shoulder to where I still stood, alone and naked, too frightened even to attempt to flee. He grinned at me and stepped aside so that I could see her plainly, even as Sophie stepped closer to the woman’s side.

It did not at first register with me what I was seeing. I saw the exposure of her pale white flesh, the dress ripped cruelly from her body to fly in tatters through the air and fall slowly to the floor behind. I saw the movements of the woman as in vain she sought to hide herself from the crowd. I followed her struggle with sympathy mixed in with the horror.

Yet I am honest there was again a small part of me that was relieved that it was her and not I who was obliged to feel those hands, who was the victim. There was a part of me that thought a moment would come when the crowd lost itself in the throes of its hideous passion, when I could flee from Richmond Court, when I could escape the dreadful night and all the horrors it had offered.

There was nearly nothing covering her when suddenly it struck me.

The body was wrong, that it was not what I had believed it to be. Beneath the silk and the lace the form that was exposed was not at all the one which I had expected. The breasts were too small, and I saw light hairs upon the belly. And though the veil remained in place, the dress did not.

When did I know?

When was the moment?

I would say that part of me had known all along. Part of me had known in the first moment, when Sophie had led her into the parlor. Even now it is difficult to describe it, that moment when I knew that she was not a she at all.

I beheld the long thin member, red in erection, and the taut skin below the swollen angry head pierced through, and hanging there the little bell affixed to the swollen and straining skin.

The nipples were pierced and adorned with same rings of thick gold which hung from Sophie’s pink flesh, yet in the case of the bride the rings were connected together by a long thin chain, which itself was connected to a silver ring in the collar upon the throat, and another chain that ran below, affixed to the base of the copper bell that rang upon the poor bride’s cock.

I would say that a part of me had known in the moment that Sophie led the figure into the parlor. For had Arshinov not already told me as much? Had the host of that function not already explained that my dear fiancé was being prepared?

Still I gasped at the final revelation, when Sophie leant down and raised the veil from his face. As the group of men tore the dress from his body Timothy Hansen whimpered and drooled around the knotted cloth that gagged his mouth.

He must have seen me upon his entry into the parlor, nude before the fire, removed from all the rest, and when the veil was lifted I could see that his eyes were fixed upon me, wide and frightened.

Perhaps you think I should have rushed to him, shielded him from the hands of those men. It is certainly something I have questioned in myself ever since. For I did not take a step towards where he stood. I did not even scream. I only stood, rooted in my place as though held fast by chains.

For although I could see the alarm in my intended’s eyes, and though I could see his straining against the bonds upon his wrist and the leather halter cinched tight upon his throat, I could also see the swollen state of his manhood, engorged and throbbing, plain as day between his legs. If there was alarm in his gaze then there was something else to behold as well, some tense excitement in his look that belied the sense of his victimhood and revealed him as something else–an accessory to his own humiliation.

If he strained against the tight constraints of his bondage, he did not fight hard to avoid the rough hands that fell eagerly upon his skin to tear away the dress. Nor did he shy away when those same rough hands lingered upon his skin.

Timothy’s muffled cry was less a scream than it was a mewling whine of anticipation, and it grew only more pronounced when there was nothing left to tear from his skin, and the men around him pressed close against his nudity, skin upon skin and heat upon heat. I watched as the distinction between each one faded, and they became one writhing mass of arms and legs and stiffened sexes.

I watched as teeth began to nibble Tim’s exposed and youthful flesh, the base of his throat, the curve of his bicep, the gentle swell of his soft white belly. As tongues left their soft trails upon his flesh, probing softly to taste him, as his ears were nuzzled and heard the secret whispers of a dozen voices and his pale form colored into a heavy blush.

Sophie stepped forward, and she handed the end of the leather leash to one of the men. She took Timothy’s face in both of her hands, and she pulled the thick knotted gag from between his lips, pressed her own lips tightly to his mouth and inhaled the first word he might have uttered, and when she pulled away once more another set of hands was quick to turn his face, to turn his body and press hard into the eager wetness of his mouth.

There was no question then that Timothy was among these revelers, that the actions which he now found himself a part of were a match to his desires. He must have kissed them all, passionately. Never once did his prick lose a sliver of its rigidity, only changed in hue into an expectant and angry purple until I was certain that it would soon burst with want and need.

The crowd laughed uproariously as they began to fondle him there, hard and calloused hands wrapping lightly around the length of my fiancé’s prick, amusing themselves by making the bell affixed to his skin jingle more and more, to tug upon the slim chains and to make dear Tim yelp each time in heady anguish.

I simply stood there and watched in a stupor, seemingly forgotten in the excitement that the revelers felt in toying with my intended.

But I was not forgotten. Suddenly I felt a hand upon my ankle, and I looked down to see that Leah had crawled her way to my feet. She was using my body for support to try to rise.

Instinct took over and I reached down and took Leah’s hands in my own, pulling her to her feet. Her legs must have been like jelly from the force with which the men had rutted her. She leaned heavily upon me, body pressed to mine and her head upon my shoulder. At once I was covered with the filth that stained her, forced to turn away from the smell of semen and prick so thick upon her breath.

She laughed to see my discomfort and wrapped her arms around my body tightly, squeezing me tight as though wishing to meld her own flesh into mine.

“He wanted this,” she said. “They all did once. Every one of us for different reasons but united now. One by one we have found ourselves here and at last together. He is lucky. He has joined us now through a special rite. You too are fortunate. The lurker at the threshold has long set his eyes upon you.”

As Leah spoke to me, as I watched the humiliation of my captured, tumescent fiancé, i felt her begin to move her hips against me, slowly thrusting forward, her slippery and wet sex grazing my own.

“You want this too.” Leah told me, as she slid her breasts heavily across mine, causing me to gasp as her skin rubbed across the sensitive tips of my nipples.

“Maybe you do not yet know it, but every fiber of your soul is crying out to be taken, to be used, to be given over to the Creeping Chaos which tonight reveals itself. It is all right, Ginny. It’s all right. Tonight there is no shame.”

The sound of that name did something to me, I will confess. It was the girlhood nickname always used by the closest of my confederates, the one which I had always worn like a desperado with a bandanna tied across his face. It was the name that I knew myself by through girlhood scrapes and stumbles, through the riotous adventures of youth. I was safe in its anonymity, knowing that it saved the face and reputation of my prim and proper self: dear, spoiled, lovely Eugenie, who would one day wed and raise a family, whose lily-white hands had known no sin, whose virginal eyes had always been kept firmly locked, one step ahead of her upon the path.

It was Ginny that my friends had known on the day I spied upon Miss Smith and her common lover, and it was Ginny I called myself that night alone in the sticky shelter of my lonely bed. To hear it whispered that night through Leah’s lips sent a shiver up my spine. Suddenly within her grip I felt myself shudder, and something within myself began to tear and to break.

Leah must have felt it too, for she held me tighter, pressed her hot thighs more firmly against mine, and slid her hands up and down my back, finally dropping them to grasp me tightly by the globes of my ass and pull me more firmly to her. I looked into her eyes, but Leah shook her head, telling me that I must keep watching my intended, that it was important that I see.

Pulling myself away from her gaze I looked back to Timothy.

It could only have been a moment or less that I had been distracted, yet in that moment the scene before me had warped and twisted. I saw that Timothy had been pushed down upon his knees, that a brute held his young face firmly in two dirty hands, and was poking at Tim’s sweet lips with the head of his engorged prick. The breath caught in my throat as I saw Tim part his lips, as I saw him tentatively flick out his tongue to press it upon the head of the penis offered before it.

I heard him moan in the moment of contact, tongue upon foreign flesh. I saw his eyes lower as his mouth widened and the swollen glans of the brute thrust inward and filled him. The man threw his own head back upon his broad and hairy shoulders, and his sigh was like the end of the world, like a great stone breaking in a forest silence, the sound of a man having found a part of himself at last, a circle long rent at last coming closed.

Somehow, I found myself sighing too, and in that moment was aware that I wished that were me down there upon the floor. I was becoming excited by the horror of the night. Some part of me wished to know what it was that my fiancé was feeling, to be forced onto my knees and to hold and taste a prick upon my own hot tongue. It was frustration that smoldered within me that I should be so close at last to knowledge, to true understanding of the most secret mysteries, only to find them reserved for another.

In that moment I was jealous.

It pains me now to admit to such an awful thing, yet there it was. I was jealous of Tim with that prick thrusting in and out of his eager mouth. I wished that it were me.

A low moan escaped my throat, mirroring the gagging wet whine that issued from Tim’s. Somehow, over the murmurs of the crowd and the excitement of the men who pressed close with cocks in hand, Timothy must have heard me.

His eyes flashed to where I stood and locked with mine, and for an instant we held each other’s gaze across the space. Then I saw a heavy movement in my beloved’s jaw and throat. His eyes began to roll back in his head as he pressed himself deeper onto the cock already in his mouth and swallowed the heavy thing to the root. The heavy fingers of the man who held him curled tightly into Tim’s blond hair and he began to curse in earnest as he slid downwards, his prick sliding over the carpet of my true love’s tongue into the bottom of Timothy’s throat.

I began to squirm in Leah’s embrace, and felt her grip on me soften and relax, her right arm falling away from me, but only for an instant as she maneuvered her limb between us. Her palm slid down between my thighs and pressed firmly into the moistness of my virgin lips.

“You see, Ginny?” I heard her purr. “It’s all right. Shall I help you, Ginny? Would you like me to guide you to where it is you wish to go?”

I could not speak, and I could not pull my gaze from the sight of Timothy Hansen swallowing that prick to its very base, his pink lips pressed wetly to the hilt of his lover’s groin. It seemed that I did not need to speak, that the feel of my wet sex spoke enough, for Leah’s fingers began to slide along the length of my tender folds, softly pressing here and there.

“You do not need to speak,” Leah advised me. “You must keep watch upon what is before you… but I will help you if you wish me to. All you need to do is offer me a kiss, sweetheart. Just a single kiss and I will guide you to the place you have always longed to be.”

I did not speak a word but my lips parted. In an instant her mouth was pressed to mine, and I opened my jaws to receive her probing tongue into my mouth. I tasted salt and the sea as her tongue slid over mine and muffled my gasp of pleasure as I felt a long finger begin to slide up inside me, probing gently towards my soft core.

My head swam with the sights before my eyes and with a rush of memories, tumbling out of order like I’d had too much wine. Long nights at the academy, us girls in our cotton night clothes, daring each other to go further in a world that longed for men. The feel of Louisa Atkin’s lips pressed to mine, feeling her tremble as I forced her mouth wide to take my tongue all the way down into her throat where I longed to taste her, myself forever taking the role of a man, the man I longed for, to kiss my confederates as savagely and with as much wanton abandon as I myself longed to be kissed.

Or the flush on Julie Morgan’s cheeks when I gazed up at her, my teeth clamped playfully on her long brown nipple. My hand slid lightly over her trembling clit until she spurted forth in embarrassed delight, slapped me for want of knowing what else to do, and ran nude down the halls of the dormitory while I laughed in cruel satisfaction and lapped the taste of her forbidden joy off my fingers thick with her scent.

I suddenly realized that I myself, forced always to play the instigator, my own desire stronger than any of theirs, had never known the penetrating touch of another. If my fingers had probed the depths of a bevy of women, if I had sought in their submission to my touch some reflection of the caresses I longed for, the role I had taken had never allowed for my own satisfaction. I had never provoked a similar daring in any of my companions to probe my own sweet depths.

The depths of my desire had caused some of my chums to recoil from me in the long spring and summer nights, to label me as a bully and as something far worse. I did not mind, had never minded, thrilled in the desire I could induce in their bodies, drunk on their fear and the secret cloying desire that they exuded like perfume.

I had always wanted one of them to return the desire, to wrestle me down upon the hard bed, to lift my own nightgown up over my hips and to make me the woman in our nocturnal games, more even, to make me a dog with its belly rolled skyward in abject surrender, no strength and no fight left, only the need to submit at long last. Yet always my will, my desire, my force had been the stronger.

Now as Leah’s long middle finger probed my moist passage, as I choked on the taste of her tongue that swirled around the back of my throat, I felt that I was myself at last. The rigidity left my body and I melted into the woman’s strong arms, went weak and let her have her way.

I surely would have lost myself in the sensations of that instant, deadened to all else but the feel of that woman’s touch, had it not been for the soft ringing of the bell that tied me to the greater whole, and kept my senses tethered to the world beyond my stoking desire–the bell that rang on Tim’s stiff prick and guided my thought and my sight back towards him there on the floor.

As the sensation of a stranger’s invasion of my innermost self washed over me, I beheld the sight of Timothy Hansen, bound and chained, his spittle running out with the pearly white offering from the corners of his mouth as the man he sucked burst forth and filled him to overflowing with his seed. I saw that man fall back and another at once thrust forward to take his place.

There was no formality, no tenderness as the revelers lost themselves to their urges once again, and surely there was no romance as the second man pressed his cock into Tim’s mouth while he was still struggling to deal with the leavings of the first. The others could hardly stand the thrill of waiting. Most were stroking their pricks in wild fury at the sight of Tim on his knees, hungrily sucking.

Even I could see that it could not last long, that there was simply not enough of Tim to sate them, that their frenzy would only build and build and could not be put off. Not content to wait a turn at his mouth, I imagined they would soon fall upon him en masse and tear him to bits in their abandon, destroying the object of their desire in the burning need to receive it. I saw in their bearded and furious faces the same madness that I had once glimpsed in the countenance of my French instructor’s paramour, and it thrilled me to imagine that in a moment I would see Timothy taken as she had been, that one of the ruffians would simply spread Tim’s white buttocks and use him as a woman, taking him mercilessly by what I imagined to be a virgin rear passage.

Leah broke her kiss to whisper into my ear. “Don’t you wish it were you dear? You’re wet with the need, a bitch coming into heat. If I wanted, I believe I could put you down on the floor and you would willingly let yourself be used in every hole and still cry out for more. Wouldn’t you, Ginny? Wouldn’t you?”

Her words punctuated by a second finger wriggling through my narrow lips to join the first, her thumb sliding soft across my budding clit, sending a jolt through the whole of my existence. I could not answer, yet I was not expected to answer. I was expected to do nothing but take what was offered and to watch. That is what I did.

I had lost track of Mr. Arshinov in all that was happening. Surely he had not gone anywhere. It was simply that he had stepped into the crowd, one form among the shifting many. My attention filled by other things, I made no note of him. Neither had I noted the presence of the woman Sophie since I had seen her pull the gag from my fiancé’s mouth. But as Leah worked her fingers in and out of my slick pussy, as Tim abandoned himself to the pricks that surrounded him, the sound of Arshinov’s voice suddenly caught my ear and drew my attention toward the corner of the parlor where the phonograph played. I saw them together, alone and remote from the crowd, and I knew them at once. Even so, it was not clear at first what I beheld.

As the crowd fought for turns to fuck my fiancé in the mouth, a few could not wait and began to shoot their hot seed upon the skin of his back and the blushing firmness of his expectant buttocks, as I felt myself dancing on the tips of Leah’s sweet and probing fingers, Arshinov and Sophie held themselves as though a world away, and I beheld a sight which I had not envisioned even in the wildest of my fantasies.

Sophie was on her hands and knees facing me, her eyes shut tight, her lips wide and aquiver as she soundlessly suffered through a delirium of pain and of pleasure that nothing in my life had ever suggested to me. Behind her Arshinov stood, his right arm raised above his head. In his hand he held a thick-handled flail that dangled with leather straps. The host was speaking aloud, yet it was not English he spoke. It bore no resemblance to any language I had ever heard.

There was no rhyme or reason to it, and none of the cadence or constancy that would mark it as a fathomable dialect at all, only the sounds that passed the man’s lips and the flail that fell upon the mute’s reddened back as a sign of punctuation.

Yet this was not what gripped me most about the tableau. The words and the flail were but a part of something else. The right hand was in constant motion, yet it was the left hand that fascinated, and the exquisite agony of the woman in its thrall. For as the right hand brought the flail down upon the woman’s flesh with a wet and heavy sound, the left twisted and slowly pulled. It seemed to me that Arshinov was drawing something by force from Sophie’s ass.

A string of oiled black pearls is what my mind made of them, a long string, an endless string and each one slightly larger than the one preceding it. The pearls themselves were onyx black, yet in the flickering light of candle and lamp it seemed there was a fire within them, some light dancing beneath the sheen of their surface. Each time Arshinov let the flail fall heavily across Sophie’s reddened back and buttocks his left wrist would slowly jerk back, and the length of the coil would grow by one pearl, and with each tug of that lengthening string Sophie’s face contorted, and I could imagine the dilation of her tight rear hole as it fought to keep itself closed against the pressure drawing forth another onyx globe from the confines of her secret chamber.

I was fascinated by the struggle clear upon her features, an exquisite and prolonged agony mixed with the sublime pleasure that I recognized only from the paintings of the saints displayed in the galleries of York and Providence. It was nothing I had ever seen on the face of any living person.

The mute woman made no move to escape from the pain. She held herself fast against the lash that fell, and bore the pain of each progressively larger orb drawn forth from her bowels. She held herself still for the pleasure beyond such things. When her eyes fluttered open in awful rapture they were the eyes of a woman who had somehow seen the face of God. How many pearls upon that string, and how large would they become? How long had she borne them heavily in her lean body against that moment of sweet extraction, and for what purpose was she delivered at this moment?

My mind burned with questions, even as my body burned with the desire Leah’s thrusting fingers were provoking within me. In the war between the two my reasoned mind was giving way before the heady lust of my longing. As a carnival of debauchery swirled before me I no longer feared death or the devil, no terror in the visage of the men who defiled my intended, or in the warped form of Sophie’s marked and mutilated body. I only felt the desire that spread up from the depths between my thighs, a hot burning need to feel it all for myself, to know each instant of the pain and pleasure offered to the rest.

I could feel my orgasm coming, building like a wave on the far horizon of the sea and rushing, growing, hurling itself to break in foam and thunder upon the shore, and the last of my reason flying away before it. My head fell weakly against Leah’s, and breathlessly I let my lips fall open to speak.

“Make me cum,” I whispered to her. “Please tell me that I am a slut, a whore, and make me cum. Put me down on the floor and let those men fuck me. I’ll take them in every one of my holes…please.”

But to my surprise Leah only laughed. I felt her fingers slide out of my pussy.

“Not yet,” she told me. “Not yet.”

I could have screamed in frustration as I felt my orgasm halt just before it broke. Desperately I sought her hand with my needy sex, but Leah was stepping away from me, grinning broadly at my surprise and my distress. She told me that I would have to wait.

“Please,” I begged her. “I am so close…”

But once again she refused me with a shake of her head, telling me that the time was not yet right.

Yet my pleading desire may well have been a sign. In an instant I heard Arshinov shout, and I saw the lash fall upon Sophie’s back. Then I saw his left hand violently pull back. Sophie’s lips split wide in a rasping whimper and she fell forward upon the floor, her face in her hands and her ass in the air as Arshinov dragged from her what must have been the final pearl. To my dazzled eyes it seemed to be nearly the size of my fist. As Sophie’s body wracked with silent sobs Arshinov threw his head back and screamed in pleasure and in triumph. It was a long and garbled sound that held no meaning; yet at its utterance the room fell into deep silence.

“Ia! Shub Niggurath! Ia! Yog-Sothoth! Ia! Nyarlathotep!”

Raising both the flail and the string of black pearls, nearly four feet long, above his head, he shouted these strange sounds once again. Then he let flail and string drop, to clatter on the floor beside Sophie’s shaking body.

The host’s narrow chest heaved with a sudden violence. Once more he seemed far younger and far stronger than he had when the night had begun, no frailty left in his visage, and his proud member still swollen with his passions. All eyes were upon him as Arshinov lashed out with an idle kick that toppled the phonograph from the table, sending it to the floor where it broke apart. All eyes upon him as he strode forth past the kneeling form of the silent woman, and I felt fresh thrill between my thighs as I saw that his eyes were wild upon my person, and his prick seemed aimed directly at my heart.

Was he the fate that I had been reserved for? Was his the prick would at last would pierce my secret and deliver me to the desired ravishment that had always lurked in the depths of my heart? Even though I had burst my own hymen long before on some sweet night and left my maiden blood upon white sheets, and had long known the pleasure of my own hands, now joined by the experience of Leah’s, I still considered myself a virgin. There was something I did not know, some gift I was still waiting to be given.

Looking upon his stiff prick bouncing with each step he took across the floor, I felt my mouth begin to water. My heart seemed as though it would break free from the ribs which constrained it, and I imagined myself thrown down upon the floor, my legs locking tight around the host’s hips as that heavy rod thrust deep within me for the first time and remade me into the woman I had so long desired to be.

Yet it was not to me that Arshinov strode, but to Timothy, still upon his knees as the men fell back around him. Timothy was a mess. I do not know how many pricks he had taken in his mouth, but his face was stained with thick splotches of jism. It rolled slowly off his cheekbones and pooled around the collar that cinched his throat. His back too was stained with the leavings of the crowd in the same way as Leah’s body had been. I wondered how Timothy would ever be able to feel clean again, but the look in his eyes as Arshinov stood before him made it plain that Timothy Hansen did not care that night if he should ever be clean, or if he would ever be able to peer in a mirror without seeing the creature into which he had been made staring back.

As Arshinov drew up before him, I saw Tim’s tongue flick out across his wet lips in needy anticipation, and he shuffled a few inches forward on his knees, reaching up to grasp Arshinov’s prick in his hands, to nuzzle his face against the underside of the host’s shaft and the wrinkled skin of his heavy testicles.

Arshinov laughed out loud, and he reached down to give a tug upon the chain which wound through my fiancé’s nipples and down to the bell that bobbed upon his prick. As Arshinov pulled the chain taut Tim cried out in surprise and pain, his back arching heavily to alleviate the sudden stress put upon his most sensitive points.

“You have done well thus far, brother,” Arshinov said. “You have come to us ready and willing and you have so far held nothing back. The door has been opened, the Lurker is striding forth. Can you hear his tread approaching, Mr. Hansen? Can you hear the thunder of his dread step?”

“Yes,” I heard Tim gasp. “Yes sir, I can hear it.”

“And are you ready to join with him completely, as a bride is joined to her groom? Are you ready now to abandon the last of yourself to the Creeping Chaos, knowing that once bound to it that there shall be no other way and no other course? Are you ready, Mr. Hansen?”

“Yes sir,” Tim answered at once, his head nodding furiously, tears forming in the corners of his eyes and running down to mix with the semen on his skin. “Please…deliver me.”

“What else, Mr. Hansen?” Arshinov asked him, twisting the chain cruelly in his hand, pulling it tighter until the rings in Tim’s nipples seemed as if they would tear from the flesh and the bell on his prick had stretched the taut skin nearly an inch.

“What do you offer as sacrifice to the Lurker at the Threshold, what price do you pay to the Creeping Chaos you would join?”

I could not hear Tim’s answer, but I saw his eyes dart in my direction. Arshinov ordered Tim that he must speak louder, that there could be no doubt later, that he must speak for all to hear. And through the pain that the chain caused him, through the red humiliation on his face I heard Tim raise his voice.

“I offer my fiancée to the Creeping Chaos, sir. I offer her fully to the Lurker on the Threshold.”

Arshinov smiled. “And you understand what this means, Mr. Hansen? That all the days of your life you will never know her, not in the way that a husband knows a wife. You will never know the feel of her, the relief that her body may bring into yours. You will take her into your home but it is to another that she will belong. Pleasure she will know, but it will not be the pleasure of your touch. You shall watch her revel in the pleasure of others and always yourself be denied.

“In time she will bear children to the Creeping Chaos, and you shall raise them as your own, always knowing that it was not your seed which quickened in her fertile womb. Do you understand this, little one? Is this the offering you wish to make?”

“Yes!” Timothy cried out. “This is what I offer, the bargain I would strike. I offer Eugenie Hastings to the Creeping Chaos. Oh God help me, I offer her up!”

“Then it is done.”

Arshinov grinned, and at once he relaxed his grip upon the chain. Tim gasped at the sudden relief. It was short-lived, for without preamble Arshinov thrust forward with his hips and drove his stiff prick all the way to the back of Tim’s throat, causing my beloved to gag and to retch.

If the other men had treated him roughly, it had been nothing compared to Arshinov taking his mouth. Even now I can think of no other way to describe it than to say that Mr. Arshinov fucked him, that he fucked his face with all the savage force and sharp brutality of a stallion rutting a mare, without compassion and without mercy. There was no thought or care for Timothy’s pleasure or his comfort, he was simply a hole to be filled, a repository for the prick of Arshinov, whose intent it seemed was to choke poor Tim upon his weighty cock, to seal the air within his lungs until they burst in desperation.

Timothy sought to pull away, pushing against Arshinov’s legs with his bound hands and his face turned purple. Tears ran freely down his cheeks, but Arshinov gripped his head in both hands and held him fast, urging him in mocking language to take what was given, to take it all and to enjoy the taste.

“You are so talented, Mr, Hansen.” Arshinov laughed. “Such a sweet and giving mouth. I have no doubt that this will be a common experience in the life to come, you upon your knees, prick upon your tongue, a gutter for the cum of the Chaos. Rejoice in it now, Mr. Hansen, learn to love it. Love it until it becomes to you as wine and you are drunk upon it.”

So fast and so brutal I could not imagine that Arshinov would last long in Tim’s full mouth. I thought he would soon boil over and like the others drown my fiancé with his hot seed. All at once Arshinov pulled out of Tim’s mouth and stepped back, allowing Tim to collapse, retching and gagging upon the floor. The bulbous head glistened, yet there was no sign of cum. Clearly he was holding back for something else and something more.

His eyes once more found mine. Yet it was to Leah that Arshinov addressed his words.

“Is she ready, sister?”

“Yes, sir,” Leah nodded happily. “I brought her to the edge until she was begging to cum. There is no resistance left in this one. She will be happy to serve, will go gladly to the sacrifice if it means that she can know what it is to be well and truly fucked.”

“Bring her forward,” Arshinov ordered, and Leah reached out and grasped me by the hand. “Her time has come at last.”

I heard an excited murmur sweep the crowd as I was led forward on hesitant and shaking legs. There was no thought of resistance left within me. All of my reason was overcome in the face of my newfound need, the excitement that dripped thickly down my leg. What was going to become of me? What had I been offered up to?

I had heard the words that Arshinov has spoken to Timothy, the strictures he had made upon my life, and I suppose that I should have been terrified, should have fought and clawed to resist such things. Yet in the moment I could only feel anticipation. My world did not extend beyond the promise of my first cock, the edges of the orgasm that I could feel hanging in the wide spaces within me, ready to fall like a guillotine blade and cut me away from all that had been before.

As she led me forward I heard Leah admonish me not to be afraid. There was no need–there was no fear left within me. There was nothing left of Eugenie Hastings, there was only Ginny, and Ginny was eager to meet her fate.

I was led to stand before Arshinov, Timothy coughed, gasping for air at our feet.

“Is it true, my dear?” Mr. Arshinov asked me, a smile on his lips. “Are you ready?”

“I am,” I whispered, the words struggling to escape the tightness of my throat.

“The third rite begins,” Arshinov said. “It is not for the faint of heart. Will you do as you are commanded? Will you be brave and balk at nothing? Will you join yourself with us and with the Crawling Chaos that has almost arrived?”

“Yes.” I whispered without a thought. “Yes. Please.”

He reached out his left hand and he touched me gently upon the cheek, ran his fingers soft across my trembling lips.

“We have been waiting for you for so long,” he whispered. “And now you are here. At last…it is upon us.”

As he spoke I saw the others moving all around us, the naked men fanning out in a circle. Two of them went to Sofie still recovering herself upon the floor by the broken phonograph and tenderly they lifted her and set her upon her feet, led her forward to stand wearily in the center of the forming ring. There were five of us, Sophie, Leah, Tim, still gagging on the floor, Arshinov and myself. Our host took his hand from my skin as in low voices the men who surrounded us began to chant in the same strange tongue that Arshinov had spoken before.

“Hei! Aa-Shanta ‘nygh! Ogthrod Ai’f Yog-Sothoth! Nhah’ng Ai’y!”

And as they spoke they slowly began to stroke their hardons with their palms, their features set in ghoulish countenances. I shivered. Had the temperature of the room dropped a few degrees? Did the candles and lamps not throw as much light as they had but a moment before?

Leah’s body pressed close against mine, and once more her hand slipped down between my parted legs as her lips caressed my neck and shoulders. She nuzzled my ears with the tip of her nose. I saw Arshinov look to Sophie beside him, reach out for her and take her pale hand in his own, brought it to his lips to plant a gentle kiss upon it. I saw the smiles that passed between them.

“Are you ready, sister?” Arshinov asked the silent woman, a sweetness in his voice, a palpable excitement. “Have you strength left enough to finish?”

The woman smiled and shook her head. Releasing herself from Arshinov’s grip she lowered herself until she was kneeling over Tim’s form, and delicately she lifted his head and began to position his body.

She put him on his hands and knees, his ass high into the air. Then she slid herself into position before his face, offering her thighs and pussy on which to rest his face and head. With her fingers she spread wide the lips of her sex and I saw that the ejaculate of the revelers was still slowly leaking from her. There was a smile on her face as she nodded to Timothy. She urged him forward with her eyes until I heard him sigh and lower his lips to her gaping sex, beginning to lap hungrily at her with his tongue.

Leah took her hand away from my aching pussy once again, pulled her body away from mine, and lowered herself upon the floor, squirming on her back until she was between Tim’s parted legs. She reached up to take his still stiff prick in her small hand and slowly she began to pull upon him there, causing Tim to moan as the bell rang, until Sofie pulled his face tight once more to her snatch and muffled the sounds of his pleasure.

Arshinov stepped forward and he placed his hand upon Tim’s raised hips, the other hand stroking his glistening shaft. He looked at me and gave me another smile.

“The time is upon us, the final rite. You must wait a moment longer until your time comes. Do not fear, it shall be worth the wait.”

I gasped as Tim’s muffled scream sounded forth from Sophie’s wet and hampering thighs, as Arshinov pressed the head of his prick deep into the furrow of Tim’s ass and began to batter at the tightness of his hole.

Have you ever seen a man buggered for the first time? No, I suppose you would not have. So much poetry spilled in the description of a woman losing at last her innocence, in the tearing of that last sacred veil. Is it not the same for a man the first time a stranger’s cock seeks entrance to his ass? The desire to remain intact, to save something of one’s self, contending with the thrill of the coming change, the submission to desire and the dawning of a new life.

Was it painful for dear Tim? I imagine that he had never known pain to match it, I imagine that nothing in his life had ever prepared him for the feeling of Arshinov’s prick bursting through his defenses and driving upwards, deep, deep into his stomach. I imagine it felt like death. I imagine in that instant he hoped to die.

Arshinov took Tim’s bottom as roughly as he had taken his mouth, but Tim’s reaction to it was hardly the same. His mouth on a woman’s needy pussy, even as Leah reached up beneath him and sealed her lips around the head of his shaft, the bell bouncing obscenely off of her chin and the intense pain of the first cock that ever took him all blossomed into a pleasure he could never have known and I would struggle ever to describe to the uninitiated.

I knew the instant that his pain gave way to pleasure from the way that his body relaxed into the pounding thrusts that Arshinov offered it, and the newfound urgency with which his head bobbed between Sophie’s thighs. He had accepted it, he had been taken, and there was no coming back for him. His life would never be the same.

Watching my fiancé getting fucked in the ass I couldn’t help myself any longer. I fell to the floor and spread my legs, threw back my head and gave myself over to the lust that had claimed me, working furiously upon my clit with one hand even as my other explored further and my middle finger pressed swiftly into my own asshole. I wanted to feel what Tim was feeling, I wanted to switch places with him. My finger could never be large enough to satisfy me after watching how Arshinov’s organ broke my fiancé’s soul to pieces and recast it in a fresh image.

Arshinov had been right, it did not take long. Neither he nor Tim had cum that evening, and they had been hard since the first. His prick buried in Timothy’s ass, Leah’s lips suctioned around the head of Timothy’s prick and sucking hard, none of it could have lasted long. Yet it was Sophie who came first, her mouth falling open and her body falling back as she made her rasping sound and came upon Tim’s lips and tongue. As she fell away from his probing mouth, there was nothing left to hold back Tim’s moans, and I could hear the pleasure dripping from his voice as he neared his time, as he thrust himself back against Arshinov’s prick, harder and harder, faster and faster to match the scholar’s brutal rhythm.

All at once Timothy cried out as his prick burst forth into Leah’s mouth, filling her throat once more with seed. The release of his pent-up jism seemed to drain the vitality from his body, and his arms buckled as he sagged to the floor, prompting Leah to crawl out from beneath him. His ass was still held up by Arshinov’s gripping hands, and the man was still pumping away with an animal fury on his face, grunting hard with each stroke into Tim’s now passive form.

Meanwhile I pleasured myself and again felt my orgasm building, as the men in the circle all around us tightened and closed in. Still stroking their now raw and tired cocks, still chanting that same strange speech over and over and their voices rising even as the lights of the room flickered and danced.

“Hei! Aa-Shanta ‘nygh! Ogthrod Ai’f Yog -Sothoth! Nhah’ng Ai’y!”

At last Arshinov’s head rolled back and I heard him roar, a cry that rose above the chanting of the circle and echoed through the long corridors of the empty house, echoed too I imagine far into the darkened streets of Providence beyond.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

As he offered these words, as they burst from his throat, I saw his body tremble with his climax. The odd words faded into the general roar of a bull in passion as with one last furious thrust he drove his full length into Tim’s ass, shaking with the violence of his orgasm.

Several things then happened at once, and I am not certain that I saw or felt what occurred correctly.

I am sure that I saw Mr. Arshinov pull his prick free from Timothy’s now un-virgin ass, falling back in exhaustion from the strength of his orgasm. Tim simply dropped to the floor and lay there shaking, beside Sophie and Leah who themselves seemed at last at the end of their resources. For my part I felt strong hands grasping me by the arms, pulling my fingers away from the domains of pleasure, and I know I screamed as I felt my pleasure denied once more. Two men had broken from the circle and now dragged me closer to where the trio of well-fucked revelers lay and rested, while two others approached from the other side and lifted Tim roughly to his feet and held them there between them. These things I saw and these things I am certain of.

But I was also somewhere else, someplace I had never seen and did not truly know, and when I was robbed of my impending orgasm for the second time my scream echoed across a vast and utter blackness which somehow I knew to be alive. As my scream died I stared into that living dark and from somewhere far away I heard the jangle of a bell, or the memory of the sound that such an object had made. All at once the dark dissolved into a hundred flashing images, a kaleidoscope of sound and color, and I was filled with something that was like memory, the memories of a dozen lifetimes pouring through me and with no break for time or proper placement, every instant of eons existing all at once.

What did I see in that instant, gleaming and cutting like the razor’s edge? I hardly know anymore. So much has faded, so much lost in the second that the instant passed and so much more has bled away across the long years since. What remains I can describe…but still there was then no sense of what it might mean.

I saw a beauty with long and auburn hair, and I saw her reeling through the whirlwind of an eternal confusion, and knew that it was myself, and always had been. I could see her as though I stood somewhere off behind her shoulder, yet in that same and lasting breath I saw through her eyes and felt what she felt. And in that moment I knew the depths of myself and I felt at once the eons of pleasure and of tormented pain that I had been born for.

I felt my virginity torn away by the thrusts of six thousand straining cocks, of all shapes and sizes, all creeds and every color as I was passed around the whole globe. I felt myself in a tent in the Sahara, chained to a post while a hulking Nubian filled my ass with a burning spear of ebony flesh, semen filling my belly so full that I was afraid I would drown. I tasted six thousand pussies upon my lips, felt soft tongues upon every inch of me.

Most of all I remember the final image–the last to come and the strongest now, the one which has not faded at all.

I saw myself older, my body sagging but still lovely, my red hair flecked at last with streaks of gray. I knelt before another auburn-haired beauty, her face an odd distortion of mine, who grinned, holding a whip aloft, as I lowered my head to kiss her sweet cunt, to lick the rose water from her beautiful lips. My ass and pussy were stuffed full with phalluses of Indian rubber, my wrists were tied tight behind my back, and bells danced from the rings that pierced my nipples and my clit. I licked that young and beautiful goddess for all that I was worth and still the whip fell and lashed down across my ass as she laughed, and laughed…

All this I saw or felt in the blink of an eye, and then the bell was ringing, it was ringing from Timothy’s dick where two men held him up, bent forward at the waist. I was behind him on my knees, my lips sealed upon his gaping and ravaged ass hole, my tongue driving deep within his burning form to drink the cum that Arshinov had deposited within.

The hand that held my face there was Arshinov’s own. I could hear him whisper through the screaming chant for me to drink deep and be full, as Timothy mewled like a kitten in the pleasure of my act. We both knew that this would be the only time he would ever know me, the only moment we should ever be so intimate.

As I sucked the jism from my fiancé’s ass I reached once more between my legs and the sight of my need was at last too much for Arshinov to bear. Suddenly I was thrown onto my back and I screamed in delight as at last the man fell upon me and thrust his stiffening prick into my pussy, stretching me wider than I had ever been before and filling me up all at once.

I wrapped my legs around his skinny frame and held him tight, forcing my hips upward to catch his thrusts to drag him ever deeper, feeling as though his prick might pierce my screaming heart. In a single instant the wave that had so long pent up within me crashed home, and I was carried off on the throes of my own delight as he showered on me the secret names that had always been mine.

All that I had been was lost in the sea of that rush of pleasure, and all that I would be was dancing before my delirious eye as I felt his scalding seed shoot deep within my belly. The shriek of my climax shattered the moment. At once the circle dissolved all around us and the revelers rushed forward and fell upon each other, screaming the words of their dark deities as they descended into an unquenchable madness and the world dissolved.

I imagined I heard the sound of thunder in the distance as Arshinov pulled himself free from the embrace of my thighs and rolled me over, so that I could see those who were watching while he lined his still ready prick up against my asshole. I bucked against him, screaming my wild pleasure as he filled my tiny ass with that cock, as I watched the revelers falling on each other in a heap of cocks, asses and mouths, as I saw Timothy between two men, begging for more between the cocks they forced into him, as Sophie and Leah squirmed together and locked, faces buried in each other’s portals. And then I simply closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the footsteps coming closer and to the sound of Arshinov’s voice as he rode deep within me, closer and closer to the cliff that I felt sure must be waiting.

“I will see that you are pierced as Sophie is pierced, rings for tits and clit, and I shall set you high among my brides. I will fuck your every hole as I see fit, I will fuck you into madness and beyond, a beast made for naught but pleasure and for pain. Would you like that, my dear?”

And without opening my eyes, and through the moans I offered to his pounding of my ass I told him that I would, that I would love it, that it was all I had ever wanted.

And when he had shot his load deep into my bowels, when he was spent and limp and could fuck no more, I crouched before him and took his softened prick into my mouth and tasted our union and the promise of it there. I sealed the bargain with my tongue as behind me the doors of Richmond Court burst open and the night flooded in.

I don’t remember anything beyond that, nothing of the day that followed, or the night that followed that, that long expanse of time where I lay filthy and used upon that floor. When I awoke it was the dawn of the second day, and I lay among the dead there in that awful place, their bodies crumpled where they had fallen, struck down in the act of their desires, naked and crude even in their death. All of the men who had participated that night lay there, with no cause of death at once apparent. It was as though their souls had simply up and gone away and left their mortal forms to fall where they may. I have heard that the doctor’s report suggested poison, that somehow I must have taken a lesser dose and so alone survived. I do not know. Perhaps that is what occurred.

When the police found me there, delirious, naked and clearly defiled, there were only the dozen men. No sign of Arshinov, Leah, or Sophie. No sign at all of Timothy Hansen, my intended.

It was investigated as a kidnapping. Mr. Arshinov, a foreigner after all, being the prime suspect, Leah and Sophie as his accomplices. They had poisoned the guests, they had raped me, and made off with the son and heir to a steel fortune. It was salacious but it was simple. Once again, maybe that is indeed what happened.

Rewards were offered, and a manhunt was launched. But no ransom demand was forthcoming, and no sign of those four has ever been found. The details of my assault were kept secret, of course. The police who found me were bribed well and frequently for their silence.

I lay in a hospital bed for five days. On the sixth my father came to my side and he told me that he was sending me to San Francisco, that he had found a match for me there, a boy of sixteen whose family had prospered in land and in dry goods. He did not know for sure that I was pregnant but he was taking no chances. The wedding was held before the month was ended. I am sure that there were rumors and gossip in Providence, but I was not there to hear them. In any event, as long as my father grew ever richer he did not much care what was said or hinted at by his peers.

So I was wed to a hapless child and some months later gave birth to my daughter, Eseme, about whom you already know a great deal, her own life and scandals far outshining my own. As far as the world was concerned Eseme is the daughter of my late husband Albert Bellows. On that score, I know the truth. I have always known it.

What do I believe happened that night at Richmond Court?

I believe that the group which met there tried to call forth their god, a being whose name I do not know, but whose face I have dreamt all these long years since. What transpired was a ritual that was meant to invite a deity to walk the earth, and walk it did. I believe that it was all successful, too successful even. They called upon something and made to it promises—yet I do not think they truly understood the promises that they made. I am sure they sought power and wealth, and control of the coming world, but instead they received something else. As for the four, long missing, I do not believe that they are dead as you or I would conceive of it. For that is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die…as the old book says.

My daughter could tell you more of course, if she is of a mind to. She has learned a great deal about such strangeness, but I have said enough. I believe I can hear her calling in the rooms upstairs, and so if you will please excuse me, I shall leave you.

xxxxx

The fate of Mr. Arshinov and the eldritch terrors of the unknown shall become clear in “The Curious Case of Eseme Bellows”. Coming soon!