The Three Rites of Eugenie Hastings

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.