a boost

Your room is a state. It’s been two days of intense work and there is so much more to do. Orgy/trance left you with a mind’s eye full of streaks of light, points and broken glass. When you came round from the aching, roiling hours of sex you were gripped with revulsion for the physicality of it all. My house stank of sex, an entire woman converted by your womb into cum and sprayed from your cunt. We were both laminated with sweat and fluids, lying together in a tangle of limbs.

You had fled the scene, kissing me on the cheek once you had dressed but decisively leaving and climbing into your car. You stood beneath your shower for half an hour, alternating between hot and cold as you purposefully cleansed your body and activated your mind. The taint of the physical receded, leaving behind your vision of the faults among the stars and the clarity required to work.

But now, sleep, or its lack, fuzzes the edges of your vision and gnaws at your thoughts. You will not sleep—cannot—until you have wrung every scrap of meaning from what you saw.

So now your room is a state. A sandwich lies half-eaten on the bed and cups litter every surface. Books and grimoires cover your desk, nested crazily as cross-referencing trawls meant the most convenient bookmark was the open pages of another book. Papers covered in scribbles and automatic writing lie scattered on the ground from an accidental landslide. They cluster in a long arc where you swept then away from a temporary circle on the floor, part of an exploratory ritual.

Your phone buzzes, drawing you from a reverie disturbingly close to sleep. The realisation sends ice-water down your spine. You cannot explain the sense of urgency but you’re convinced that when you sleep the memory will be taken from you or lose potency. If all you have left is your notes, you need them to be perfect.

You might discover the identity of the entity who imprisoned you here. Get answers.

Find a way out.

Your hand spasmodically hunts your phone out from under a copy of The Kybalion. Blue light stimulates your retinas. Good.

It’s a message from me. You scan our recent exchanges.

A> I’m a little worried. Let me know if you’re okay.

R> do you have my copy of the black gates?

A> Think you took it back last month. Are you okay?

Then a few hours, until:

A> Rey?

R> im ok. Busy.

A> Let me know if I can help. Remember to rest, eat, drink: all of that good stuff. Your last meal wasn’t exactly a meal.

R> learn hebrew for me

A> !בסדר

Then there was this morning’s check-in message, unreplied; and now, this latest.

A> Ordered in for you. Hope you don’t mind.

Your lips twist with annoyance. It’s hard enough to think right now without having to think about others. If you could only figure out the pattern behind the faults…

There’s someone outside your room.

You spin in your chair and leap up. Your door, open for airflow, gives out onto an unlit landing. A familiar face steps hesitantly into view.

“Trixie?”

One of the surviving occultist girls from your cult of donors. Her friend Leanne had shown you obedience, so you took a snack from her. Trixie herself had shown respect, so you only drained her halfway to death. Their mutual friend did neither and ended up crushed and emptied like a carton of juice.

Trixie is wearing a black dress and only her nose studs and earrings—no necklaces or ear cuffs or whatever like she usually would. Visibly hesitant, verging on shy, she looks awkward in her tall, pale body.

“Mistress.”

She’s never called you that before. “What?”

“Excuse me.” She wrings her hands, looking around at the scattered papers on the floor. “Sorry. I’m just— I was just worried after you.” Her speech is strangely stilted, like she’s repeating it from rote.

You follow her gaze and scowl at your useless notes. “I’m busy. Did Andrew let you in?” A spasm of anger twists your face and pours out when you speak. “How dare he! How dare he bring you to my home!”

Your fury makes her blanch. Her eyes shine like she might cry. Her hands shake and you notice a streaming takeaway cup rattling in her hands.

You stare at the cup. An intuition tells you beyond doubt that the cup contains tea.

Trixie stammers as she speaks, working hard to get the words out. “Y— you’re so thin. Please le— let me cook you something.”

“I don’t have time,” you say. The anger is completely gone. When you gesture for Trixie to bring you the cup she carefully approaches, stepping instinctively around the cleared circle in the middle of the room. You speak words from long ago. “I need focus. Hunger helps.”

“No,” says Trixie, placing the cup in your hand. Relief rises from her like steam. Whatever she was told to expect, she’s much happier now you’re sharing a script. “It doesn’t.”

Like a ritual she reaches for your hands. You set down the untouched cup—it was tea, by the way—and let her take them. Your hands are not skeletal but they feel that way. You feel emaciated, ravenous, burning with a hunger so complete it blots out any other sensation. You sit when Trixie pushes you towards your seat.

“I shan’t eat till I’m done,” you intone. “Not even if it takes another week. … What do you expect is about to happen, Trixie?”

“Then don’t eat,” she says, ignoring your improv. She settles herself down in your lap. You’ve supped upon her several times before in exchange for knowledge—a pleasingly classical occult exchange—but you know for a fact that on this occasion she has been tricked. This is not an exchange. She makes of herself prey and will receive nothing but destruction.

Still she tugs at her collar. The sound of little plastic buttons pinging off your dark monitors is a ridiculous mundanity inside the lion’s den. Your mouth floods to see her throat, its complex highways of muscle and vessels coordinating to display the rapid but even beat of her heart. In her manner you detect fear and resolution, but you know she does not want to die. Oh God, I’ve told her you’ll make her a vampire, haven’t I?

She looks into your eyes as she leans herself across your breast, gracefully presenting her long throat to you. The intense search for connection in her gaze is thrown when your tummy suddenly growls. What it must be to prostrate oneself to a creature one believes will share a blessing, but to find her body preparing to make of oneself her meat and drink?

Regardless, Trixie holds still, obedient to the script. In the crook of your elbow you gently take the weight of her head. Her eyes screw shut as you lean down.

“Perhaps I should turn you,” you murmur, mostly to yourself. If you were being honest with yourself by this point you had mostly forgot she was a person who could hear you. When she stirs and tries to sit up the supporting elbow is instantly replaced with a fist gripping a handful of her hair. Your other arm pins her body in place while you muse. “That would show him. Two of us to feed at once. He wouldn’t feel so clever then.”

You don’t turn her, though. Her scream is ignored. Stately, pensive, you bow to place your mouth upon the pulse-point. Just before touching, your lips roll back to reveal fangs precisely long enough to penetrate those arteries—long enough to tear a path from life to death.

Her scream goes up half an octave as your ineluctable bite forces those fangs past skin, fascia and artery wall. The moment her blood spatters your mouth she begins to sob, but you forgive her this departure from script given your own earlier deviation. You drink so slowly, actually stemming the flow of blood by raising your tongue at the back of your throat, that she has time to compose herself and beg, tell you about her life, beg again for you to answer or listen—all of which you ignore.

You’re tasting her. You’ve tasted her before but her blood speaks more eloquently as her heart becomes more frantic. Thick, sweet, salty, metallic—yes, all of those things. But her fading hope is communicated to your tongue by the cream of dopamine in her system. Her fear and pain make you salivate with sharp adrenaline and cortisol. Her body is a marvelous and complicated machine and it is your pleasure to devour its inner workings as you shut it down.

She stretches out your stomach before she dies. The transition from drinking what is given, to sucking out what you can, is bittersweet. You love it when your prey feed themselves to you and you can just grow fat like a leech.

When she dies you see a flash of light, a fragment of you still in trance. The cadence of your swallows does not change. What does Trixie, a newly-released soul, see in that moment at the precipice of an afterlife? Angels? Psychopomps to carry her to get final rest? Loved ones greeting her and telling her everything will be okay?

It doesn’t matter, of course. A newborn soul is easy prey when it is born with your fanged mouth pressed on it. You siphon away the light and pull her down the same meaty corridors her life’s blood still lubricates. Her awareness dwells a moment among churning, frothing chaos in your gut; and then your astral body finds a secret pocket to squeeze her into, where you can feel her squirm but no entity in existence will ever hear or see her again.

She is dry, dead and empty. Blood and life course through you, lifting the fog of sleep. Everything seems so clear again as you cast aside her desiccated corpse, letting it scatter and foul the circle. No matter, you have what you need now.

Your pen lays down confident lines and curves as your intuition carves meaning out of all that you have witnessed and experienced. A seal, many-parted, with motifs appearing again and again throughout. A clockwork nightmare of a seal, pulsing with insane regularity.

This is how it will go, you think to yourself, laughing with a sudden joy. You, a prisoner, will claim and transmute your cellmates into a key. They will free you with body, blood and soul. And when you are free, there will be nothing to stop you from building your court anew. Perhaps you will build it here.

But time enough for all that. For now you lie back in your chair, flushed and warm. Squirming with pleasure. You know what the script now demands. With your head laid back to rest on the chair back and your throat open to the heavens, you utter an obscene victory cry: eulogy of the conquered woman now gurgling in your tummy and screaming in your soul:

~guh-bwoOOOooAAaaARp!~