She laid the osculum infame on him and his will drained away — a tender kiss, nothing more, and he was lost. Her tail lashed him, cut him as they fucked, his soul forfeit. Without God all things are possible and all things permitted, she whispered.
He went to her apartment. The door was open, and inside all her stuff was thrown around. It had been a couple of days since he had seen her, but that wasn’t unusual. She rarely called him over unless she needed something.
Something had been burned in the kitchen sink and the place stank of ashes and copper. He stood in the center of her bedroom and looked up at the pentagram she had drawn on the ceiling, a circle around it. It had taken her weeks, pressing handmade intaglio blocks of glyphs and ancient letters into the plaster, mixing ink into menstrual blood gone black. Art, she said. She had torn him apart under that sigil and laughed when a crack formed in the chafed skin of his penis. She rouged her nipples with his blood.
He called her friends to try to find her, three ugly girls who referred to themselves as witches. Two didn’t answer, and the other cackled and said, You’ll never find her.
The only other guess was the dealer. She’s gone, Johnny told him, whispering into the phone like she might be listening. It was a promise and an apology. No one’s seen her, man.
Hanging up the phone, he thought about what he wanted to do. He moved in and cleaned the place, scrubbing the sink, putting all the notebooks of scribbled feral obscenities back on shelves, feeding her black cat that wandered from room to room looking for her, crying and pissing everywhere. It hated him, and would crouch on a bookcase, staring at him with blame-filled eyes. It disappeared eventually, clawing its way through a window screen. He wondered it if had gone looking for her.
He settled into her life like a ghost, haunting her. He waited there for weeks, keeping up her rent, higher now because she was no longer milking her landlord with occasional handjobs. He had known about it, of course, always the junior partner in the relationship. She told everyone in fact, a cruel gleam in her blue-black eyes, laughing about flicking his rank seed off her hand onto his wife’s car, laying a curse.
He went looking her — tattoo parlors, the dirtiest bars, back rooms in bookshops where dark secrets were sold, and finally graveyards. Nothing.
The dreams began after he started sleeping on her bed under the pentagram. Dreams about her being beside him, her warmth, her weight on the mattress, the curve of her iliac crest under the thin sheet. In some of the dreams they had sex, she screamed at him harder, harder as he took her from behind, looking back at him with the vertically slit pupils of snakes.
He lost weight and went pale, skin almost grey from only going out at night, eating dodgy food from the stalls down on the square. He began to run out of money. He let his own apartment go, took temp jobs: washing dishes, sweeping up, making smack deliveries for Johnny, getting cheated by junkies, nearly stabbed, beaten and robbed a few times. Johnny gave him a knife and sent him back out. Johnny didn’t leave his house much anymore.
She was my best customer, Johnny told him, as if he didn’t already know. She lived in the junkie abyss, buying for the both of them, but he barely used and stopped when she left. No coming down, no puking, no sickness at all.
He was close to just giving up, leaving, when she returned one rainy miserable day, wet, scratching at the door like a stray. She rushed past him.
Do you have anything? she asked, pawing at the box where she kept her works. She stank of sulfur and sex.
No, I quit.
Quit? No one ever quits.
I did, he said, something like embarrassment coloring his voice.
She smacked him, full on in the face, and he barely felt it. She was so skinny and weak.
Where were you? he asked. Where were you?
Where am I? Where am I? Hollow. She stood in the living room like a crumbling statue.
He finally dragged her into the bathroom, stripped off tattered clothes and washed her. She struggled like an angry cat, scratching at him, trying to bite. He dried her off and flung her on the bed.
Sleep it off, he said.
Johnny, go see Johnny, she whined until she finally fell asleep.
He kept her in the apartment, cooked her food and made her eat it. She was dull-eyed and weak, but eventually stopped begging for drugs. She used the bathroom and and fed herself, but not much else. He’d make deliveries while she slept or when he had parked her in front of the TV. She spoke rarely and used a dead monotone when she did. She shivered while she slept. He would hold her and she’d kick him away.
Where were you? he’d ask.
I think you know, she’d say.
I hate you, she’d say. I hate you, then beg him to fuck her.
After a couple of days, stronger, she began going out when he was asleep. But getting out of bed always woke him and he would follow her, dog-loyal. He thought she would score, take up the needle again. But she just walked, favoring anonymous crowds in the neon-drenched red light district, talking to no one, radiating hostility, thin, angular, dopesick.
The fifth night of following her, lack of sleep wearing down his mind, he missed some turn she made. He checked her usual haunts and couldn’t find her. There was one place so unlikely he checked it last, the empty Catholic church in the sinner part of town, wedged between a strip club and a store with window displays of inhumanly-shaped dildos. There she was, alone in a middle pew. He sat behind her and listened to her say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, alien sounds, harsh.
I can feel you behind me, she said when she finished. Light a candle for me, she said. She handed a black candle over her shoulder to him. He nestled it between the others on votive rack. It was a prayer for the lost, a prayer for herself. No, the candle was black, the reverse. She was praying to become lost. He lit it with a taper and watched it long enough to see the wax under the black coating was blood-red as it dripped down. Blasphemy. But he didn’t believe in blasphemy.
When he turned back she was on a kneeler, hands clasped, she muttered something in Latin and then vomited.
Stop following me, she said, wiping her mouth.
Reverse again, she starting following him to work, to Johnny’s, fucking Johnny for smack again. She always got into the shower afterwards, the hottest shower the crappy apartment could muster, and cried as she scrubbed the top layer of her skin off with pumice soap. Raw-red, she’d cook up. He told her he could get her all she wanted without sex with Johnny. I want it this way, she said, I deserve it.
She lost more weight as he watched. He encouraged her to eat, brought her favorite foods to her, the only temptation she refused. Her arms began to look like they were constructed of jute and pulleys, her legs like sticks that he didn’t think could support her, her cheekbones jutting from her face. Then, like flipping a switch, she stopped heroin and Johnny simultaneously,
It wasn’t enough, she told him when he held her in the night. You aren’t either.
She put on weight and filled out, and her manic energy returned.
She began writing in her notebooks again. She would hide them but he knew where. He’d read them when she went out. She was creating an entirely alien cosmology, new gods forged from pieces of old ones. There was one god that created many gods who in turn created many gods themselves and so on until every atom had its own god that kept it together. Vast genealogies of gods filled the pages, working down to the nameless gods of nuclear strong force. It was mostly gibberish.
Warmer now, nearly summer, flies began to swarm the cunt-blood pentagram on the ceiling. She carved new printing blocks, cutting up her hands. But she complained she was too thin now to menstruate and they were thrown into a corner, unused.
Why are you doing this to yourself? she asked suddenly, while he was watching her eat.
I love you, I said.
That made her laugh, a genuine laugh, the first one since returning. And then it turned into sobs, shaking her body violently, She smashed her soup bowl away. It flew into a wall. He cleaned it up.
I want to go back, she said. This world hurts.
Back where? I asked.
The next morning, he found she had written on the wall in thick black Sharpie:
When they asked me to repent,
I wondered what they meant.
Her demon libido returned. His erection was soft, her thinness made her seem like something he would shatter. He told her that and she slapped his half-erection. Shatter me. Shatter me and then fuck the pieces.
He pushed rope as he tried to enter her. She clawed at him, but was too weak to break the skin, nails bitten down to the quick left only red lines. It turned him on, old patterns of passivity rushing back. He liked when she hurt him. It wasn’t the first time he understood this but pressed it down into a little dark ball inside himself again.
I need to make a sacrifice, she said, while they were laying in bed. Get me pregnant. I want to have an abortion.
Drop an egg, he said angrily, appalled, finally appalled.
I need to go back, she screamed.
I’m leaving, he told her after a few minutes. She was tracing designs from the pentagram ceiling in the air.
I’ll kill myself, she said barely above whisper.
Just like that?
He felt her grope for something under the mattress. A cold, cold knife was placed between them.
I want to go back, I want to go back, she said over and again. I know the way.
She stuck the knife under her pillow and rubbed him until he was hard again, then guided him into her. She drew him close, an epiphantic smile on her face. Yes, yes, ah, yes, she said, hot breath in his ear, then bit clean through the lobe, the cartilage making a sharp popping sound.
Damn me, she said, plunging the knife into his navel when he pulled away. She pulled it up toward his sternum with sudden strength and his intestines flowed out onto the bed.
No one wants to go to hell, she said as he thrashed weakly, but sometimes the sex is worth it.
She kissed his gaping mouth and closed his blank eyes, kissed them too. Then slit her own throat.
I’m not feeling so stoic today.
She kissed his gaping mouth and closed his blank eyes, kissed them too. Then slit her own throat.
Strangely touching at the end.
Very Shakespearean
Perfect Halloween tale.
I’m waiting for Mexican SS’s column so I know the perfect Halloween Ale.
I am waiting for Q’s post to see the perfect Halloween tail.
Only if it comes in after dark.
It is! Fantastic story!
…
…
It’s difficult to decide which is the more important comment to make, how good it is or how disturbing it is.
Or that I was thinking about the worldbuilding re: Demons and victims and how it worked.
Or that his icons made me think the page was still loading.
I thought it was one of those dialog scenes from JRPGs were the characters stand there and exchange ellipsis for a while.
Video is terrible, music is appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5tI9sbP–E
Wonderful.
This is the best erotica I’ve read since GoT.
Mein Gott!
You fixed it, not fair.
It is what it is.
Sorrey
Name that rag . . . . .
Every fall, Americans are plunged into darkness an hour earlier when the clocks turn back at the end of daylight saving time. Many see the beginning of standard time as a mild annoyance. Sun lovers view it as the unfortunate start to a season of afternoon sunsets. Parents, as I can now attest, experience it as sleep-wrecking proof that the human construct of time is no match for the anarchy of toddlerdom. But I am convinced that our annual “fall back” is something worse than all of these things: not just an inconvenience, but an act of state-sponsored voter suppression.
Salon?
Reason?
Okay. I’m going to call the rag ‘Betty’ and hope it does a better job at cleaning than the last rag.
Yes.
DST forever!!
Dirigible Storage Trailer?
That would be huge.
…the biggest, the bestest trailes ever made. They said you couldn’t do it. But we are. Big beautiful trailers…
Double Stacked Trailer. I don’t have enough land for a double wide.
You spend all your money on these train rides – what have you got to show for it?
free ride certificates from when the train was 30+ minutes late
flyers stuffed under my windshield wipers
a bookmark from the opening of my local station
memories of such things as watching a flaming car get ground between two trains
The greatest cause of voter suppression is the shitty choices on the ballot.
Hope springs eternal.
The story reminds me of “Shattered like a Glass Goblin” by Harlan Ellison.
Good comparison.
“laughed when a crack formed in the chafed skin of his penis.”
Do not have intercourse for more than two hours straight.
1:10 do not recommend.
They make 55 gallon drums of lube for exactly those occasions.
Do not have intercourse for more than two hours straight.
“Sorry babe! We’ve been going at it for an hour and 55 minutes, I’ve got to stop”
“Why”
“Because in 5 more minutes, I have to start having gay sex”
I had a cruel response, but I’ve been mean to Jimbo a lot today.
So I won’t point out that the timer is set to minutes and seconds…
Once I could legitimately blame the Percocet.
They make 55 gallon drums of lube for exactly those occasions.
You need a pump and sprayer like on a a CNC five axis milling machine.
That gives a whole new meaning to tramp oil skimming.
A lot of CNC machines have through-spindle coolant flooding.
Or as I call it, tool ejaculation.
I rate this 4 vomits and a dry heave out of 5
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤢
Thank you for the visual aid.
This isnalmost as disturbing as the Subaru Horror Theater that made me stop reading this site for over a year.
You know most of us don’t put out the same type of content as SugarFree.
That variety is part of the appeal.
I get why people don’t read my work – I’m a terrible person, but there are other contributers too, plus the commentariat.
I meant it as a compliment
Oh, okay.
I am kinda tired. Too little sleep last night.
What?!
Subaru Horror Theatre was
Amazing.
So somewhat smart with plenty of stupidity.
Inside the Low-Tech Heist That Penetrated the Louvre
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/inside-the-low-tech-heist-that-penetrated-the-louvre-2a786266?st=g3exCS&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Have they caught the rest of the thieves?
How soon after they left was the jewelery destroyed for its materials?
Have they dusted off Madame Guillotine?
Will the security chief be included among those who are sent to the Guillotine?
The security chief was, wait for it, a diversity hire.
Well, the second round can include whoever hired her plus the whole diversity office.
True, but apparently the person who replaced the secure display cases that had bulletproof glass and could be dropped into the floor with some shit from Ikea was a commie white guy.
I remember when the True Spirit of Hacking was thus. How refreshing.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/hackers-threaten-to-leak-data-after-breaching-university-of-pennsylvania-to-send-mass-emails/
… and please send 1.5 BTC to the following.
SF. Thank you for a disturbing and horrific Halloween. It takes some effort to get me to say; that was a bit more disturbing than I wanted it to be, but it is Halloween.
That is how it is done.
Today’s weather is perfect for Halloween.
Here are some Swans that this story remined me of.
https://youtu.be/Nl4LWIxT8B4?si=BRWgTLqfG-eTkLb9
Today’s weather is appropriate. And it’s a good night to watch The Crow.
Fire it up….fire it up
I took my wife to see The Crow in the theater when it was released. My wife does not like dark and violent movies. I’m not even sure why agreed to go with me to the movie. Afterwards, I asked what she thought of the movie. She really liked it. Because, at its core, it’s a love story.
Kinda like Dr. Phibes?
It can’t rain all the time.
It can’t rain all the time.
It can rain all the time.