"Mmm," cooed the Khanum, arching her back up to meet my weary form, and I despaired as she wiggled her tight accomadations around my exhausted member; was this woman never satisfied? If all sexual encounters were expected to last for four hours, with an insatiable female partner...then I was glad I had been missing out! I regretted ever wishing to partake in the pleasures of the flesh, and vowed never to think of them again. Certainly, the very thought now sickened me.
"Erik, it is so very lovely when you make that noise; that face...I wish you would do it again," she whispered, in my ear. I could not help myself - I whimpered.
A sudden, frightening laugh rang out into the room. A full set of nails tore affectionately through the skin on my back, from my waist to my shoulderblades, and I could feel the blood begin to blossom, preparing to drip down my emaciated sides.
"It is as well for you that I am beginning to tire. I believe I may have had enough...for tonight."
I was shocked, and a little confused. My weakness, where it had before angered her, now supplicated her. Where I had remained strong and calmly requested an end to our interplay, she had fumed and threatened me with death and worse. Yet now, she would grant me the reprieve I so desperately needed, simply because of a small noise.
Gratefully, my eyes closed, and I would have fallen asleep there and then if the Khanum had not begun to push impatiently on my shoulders. "Get off of me, you corpse."
Trying not to seem too eager, I withdrew myself with immense gratitude. To my vague, delirious shock, my softening member had not shriveled away and disappeared, or retracted back inside my body in terror, but was merely preparing to rest, now, for what was likely to be the rest of my natural life.
"Go to your chambers," the Khanum ordered lazily, as I reached with some stiffness of my arms for my trousers.
"I had not intended to stay - " I began, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand. There was a half-frown on the Khanum's sourly beautiful face. A warning pang shot through my stomach, and I tremulously considered my next sentence. "I trust I...did well."
"Satisfactorily, indeed," came the reply, along with a smile that glowed with an evil warmth. A rush of relief spread through my tired body. Yes, I had satisfied her, though my self-loathing barely allowed me to register the fact. "Very satisfactory, Erik...as your work always is. In your chambers, when you arrive, there will be a small token of my...appreciation."
I smiled wanly. "You must have arranged that beforehand. Yet you would not award me with treasures if I did not perform to your standards. What if I had failed your exacting test?"
"You would not have lived to see your chambers again, of course," the woman before me, still gloriously naked, replied. Of course. I should have known. My smile did not fade or change as the last button slid into its respective hole (God...even that tiny innuendo made me slightly ill to the stomach).
"Good evening, madam," I said, shortly, offering a small bow before turning impertinently and walking straight to the door. I heard a small, jovial laugh come from the khanum as I shut the door, and judged that she was still of good humour, giddy with pleasure.
I judged wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.
-
My apartments were dark, and empty, and smelled still of the various animals I'd only recently dispelled. And, of course, the ever-present smell of death. I lived in it, and most of the time barely noticed it. However, in my sensitive state, the stench of decay grated.The lamp on the table beside me sat neglected as I stumbled forward to my bedroom. I could see well enough in the dark. The door slid shut behind me, and as I went to go collapse, I saw there, on my bed, the package that was left for me.
I upturned the silken bag, and out of it fell a plethora of golden coins and some jewels, and a small, intricately labelled bottle. I glanced at the label.
Arak. Oh, good. I rarely drank alcohol, or at the least, not strong alcohol...but perhaps it would help to dull my mind enough to let sleep come more easily. I uncapped it, downed a small but sufficient dose, and placed it on my bedside table. I then lay down on my mattress, swearing to myself that in just a moment, I would replace the cap on the bottle of arak, and remove the uncomfortable coins from beneath me.
In moments, the bottle's cap was spinning unheeded on the floor as I slept blissfully unaware of the danger that awaited me.
-
I awoke to my own screaming the next morning. Pain was flooding my body, burning off all the nerve endings and ripping screams from my throat like flesh from my bones. My groin was aflame with agony. If I'd thought, last night, that it had known the epitome of pain after my sixth or possibly twelfth orgasm, I was mistaken.Curses in my throat fought for supremacy, pushing and shoving to escape my mouth, form themselves around the pain. My hand moved to inspect the affected area. Or would have.
Ropes bound me hand, foot, wrist, arm, ankle, leg, hips, stomach, waist, chest, neck, and head, to a stiff table. Someone definitely did not want me to escape. And little wonder! There was a man standing near my feet, looking terrified, and holding a long pair of scissors in one hand. In the other, a neat length of suture thread, in a highly curved needle.
The poison that I now knew must have been stirred into my gift last night was still affecting my dim brain, and it was a moment before the data reconciled itself in my mind. Like a kaliedescope, my mind was seeing many things at once...thoughts that had no bearing kept racing through my mind as a desperate attempt to distract me from my torture.
But slowly, like the destructive force of a glacier, it occured to me what must have happened. My stomach turned, and I remember being vaguely annoyed at that horrendous shrieking noise...until I realised it was my own. Horror claimed my eyes, which widened like the gibbous moon until I must have looked quite frightful.
That bitch!
That unbelievable, horrendous torturess of a demon! Words that were barely half-formed, in a semenous mixture of unmitigated hate, ejaculated from my raging form, as my limbs snapped the ropes like so much spider gossamer. My mind went red, and I barely saw the human shapes pounding on the doors, begging in rapid Persian to be let out. Soon I was freed, standing in full nudity atop the table, bleeding still from the new wound on my pubis, a wound which I did not dare inspect. A fleeting glance indicated dark black stitches, as ugly and large and unprofessional as the stitches in my mother's first mask for me.
A primal scream flew out of me like a phoenix of dark fire, bringing with it the claim and the promise of vengeful retribution. Unbidden, my hands reached forward to grasp, to twist, to mangle and kill...
-
The next thing I remembered was drowning in a sea of blood. A reccuring dream for me, but now with an added horror. Nearly seventeen bodies in varying states of dismemberment, lay strewn about me like cadaverous confetti at a dead child's birthday party. I am not prone to nausea, but my stomach turned over its contents pensively as I stared at the carnage around me.
My shoulders slumped in exhaustion as a despairing sigh escaped my lungs. It would be ironic, dryly sarcastic and perhaps amusing to some, to say that I was half the man I used to be. But not entirely accurate, for I was now lacking what made me a man, at all.
But...no. Alas, as I attempted to clean the flowing crimson hate from my skin, I realised what my body must have known all along - she had not removed everything. The phallus, yes, but not the accompaniment. Those she left in perfect condition, carelessly clinging to the underside of my groin, looking alien and frightening without their counterpart.
Could she have made my punishment more complete? I doubt, after the initial shock and anger, that I would have minded too terribly a eunuch's life. It would have freed me from one of humanity's burdens, something I would never have denied that I desired. But this...not only to incapacitate me in achieving sexual pleasure (not to mention the suddenly daunting issue of...voiding while standing), but to leave the means of wanting to do so...
By God, I would have cut them off myself, that instant, if I did not all ready ache like Hades. Well, I hoped she was satisfied. That hellspawn in the shell of a beautiful woman...she must have been watching. She would not let such a show go to waste. And what a show it had been. How I wished I could have missed it.
My eyes scanned the room, glacing up at the ceiling. And there she was, standing imperiously in a high window, looking down at me with a friendly smile that gave away all too easily her pleasure at my agony. A willowy hand lifted to gesture to something at her side, and I saw, in a jar of brine that must have been the length of the Khanum's forearm, what was unmistakeably my phallus.
Unnerving is far too tame a word to describe the feeling of looking at a jar thirty feet away and seeing your disembodied genitals. There are, to my knowledge, no words to describe the fear, the hurt, the anger and the screaming, burning hatred that coursed through my body. I'm sure I heard another cry from my sore throat before my stomach decided, finally, to release the bile it had been slowly mulling over. I vomitted vigourously, adding to the sick detritus of the room.
My mind reeled still with the drugs in my body. This couldn't be happening. Certainly I knew that the Khanum wished to have me killed...perhaps even kill me herself, but I admit that in my arrogant, youthful folly, I did not foresee this. I did not credit her intelligence enough to think that she might be capable of such immense and irrevocable atrocity. My eyes rolled back into my skull, and I saw a bright red cloud of macabre, amorphous dreams floating toward my troubled mind as I passed out again, wishing for the death I knew the weak poison would not bring me.
And in my ears, the khanum's pleasantly delighted laughter, so innocent-seeming, echoed endlessly off of my newly increased misery.