The Bride Stripped Bare

by Rob Bliss

  Gorman raised his arms to the standing crowd.

  “The family renews its pledge to itself through the bride and groom, through the priest of the Great God Ursa, and through its many generations. The family is strong and unending and shall last from eternity to eternity. None shall break its bonds. Let Ursa receive you—”

  “—and you,” the crowd echoed as one.

  “—and keep you protected with her hide and fang and claw.” Gorman put the bear head that hung over his back onto his bowed head. “Ursa forever.”

  “The family forever,” solemnly spoke the room.

  Gorman lifted the bear head off again and let it hang down his back. Then he stretched his arms out toward Poppy and the three women—the bridesmaids, I finally understood. Poppy and the white woman strode to the stump table. They kissed. Poppy took the cloak off the woman’s shoulders, let it fall, revealing her full youthful nudity. Then he reached down and tore open an oval patch on the front of his fur pants. His erect penis sprang out. The woman lay on the table, smiling, and spread her legs. Poppy fucked her hard and fast—a rape of fury and madness—his grunts joining her moans and cries. Before they each climaxed, Poppy slipped his knife from his sleeve and slit the woman’s throat. Her moans gurgled as her rapist thrust harder, then bellowed his orgasm to echo around the immense hall.

  He got off her, semen dripping, leering his fangs down at her. Slipping the knife back up his sleeve, he tucked his penis back into the fur pants, pasted the flap back over his exposed flesh. Then returned to his place on the stage.

  The woman bled across the wood, the rings stained red, her head sunken sideways to face the audience. But she wasn’t dead. Her hands came up and pulled off her wrinkled face. Revealing the young skin, I remembered from the party. She smiled and sat up on the table, threw the flesh bag of her shed face triumphantly to the audience.

  They scrambled after it as though it was a thrown garter belt.

  The woman picked up her bear cloak and resumed her place beside her sister bridesmaids.

  The two massive men appeared with knives, stood at either side of Gord’s cross, and slit the bonds that tied his wrists and ankles. He fell to the floor, wrists limp and numb, wiping the blood out of his eyes with a sleeve. Blinked in the harsh light, stood slowly and painfully, needing to be helped to his feet by the men. They helped him to walk to the stump, told him to stand like a man not a hunchbacked dog. He wobbled on his feet slightly as the black bridesmaid joined him at the table and let her cloak fall.

  She sneered at him with disgust, then turned her gaze to Venus.

  “Must I fuck the fallen one?”

  Venus kissed the air and winked. “The family will thank you.”

  She turned her sneer back to Gord, ripped open the flap in his pants, pushed him onto his back on the table. The audience laughed and cheered and shouted encouraging obscenities.

  Gord was hard, even though he seemed too dazed to know where he was. The woman got on top of him and rode. Her hips buckled and pounded against him. As she approached orgasm, she pulled a knife from Gord’s sleeve and stuck it into his hand.

  “Cut my throat!” she cried. “Cut my goddamn throat!”

  Gord’s hands reached up blindly. She bent her head low for him to grab her hair with one hand and position the blade at her throat with the other. He couldn’t muster enough strength, and her hammering pelvis made the blade slip off.

  She held his knife hand against her throat.

  “Cut my fucking throat, asshole!” cried the old hag.

  With a flex of his bicep, Gord sliced a quick gash across the wrinkled and loose neck skin. The woman smiled as she bled, a scarf of blood pouring down between her breasts, dripping onto Gord’s vest. She orgasmed and her cries echoed around the hall, across the hushed audience.

  The life went out of her and she dropped onto her dazed lover. The knife fell from his hand and clattered onto the stage. Gord’s chest heaved, pushed against the weight of the dead body on top of him. But only for a few moments, before she sat up, pulled her old face off and threw the scrap of flesh to the crowd. Again, they scrambled and fought for the prize—men, women and children.

  A child of ten gleefully held up her reward. Then she plastered the flesh mask onto her own face and danced for applause. She took it off and gave it to her mother, who then folded it up and put it in her purse for safe-keeping. Then the mother used a napkin to wipe blood off her child’s youthful, smiling face.

  The two men dragged Gord’s exhausted body off the table and returned him to his place, in front of the cross, but no longer strapped to it. He used his remaining strength to stand as upright as possible, his body sore, trying to coax blood back into his limbs. Gord leaned heavily against the cross, and looked like a very tired, old man.

  It was my turn.

  The men cut my bonds and needed to help me to the front of the table. That was the first time that I saw the backdrop of the stage. A sky of stars, and the constellation Ursa Major outlined on it, with a depiction of a bear drawn over the linked stars. Was this some form of bear cult? There had been such things all over the world, going back to paleolithic times and Ancient Greece. But in modern times, there were bear cults amongst the indigenous peoples of Northern Japan, Siberia, Finland…and in the American and Canadian Pacific coast! (How old was this family?)

  The Asian hag bridesmaid joined me, her nudity exquisite beneath her cloak, her face hideous.

  Venus leaned into both of us, speaking to me. “Fuck her, my husband, like you’ll fuck me. Your pleasure is my pleasure, mine is yours. We are one. Welcome to the family.”

  The hag smiled ragged and blackened teeth at me and slowly eased down the flap of my pants. Though I hadn’t felt it, I was fully erect, incredibly hard. She touched me, her fingertips lightly tracing lines up and down the shaft, nails circling the head.

  She looked into my eyes. “Should I mount you? Or will you be a man and take what is rightfully yours?”

  I turned to look at Venus, glared at her. “Why are you doing this? I’m not your husband. Who are you fucking people?”

  Venus snapped her fingers, and the woman laid down on the table, legs spread, knees up, framing my thighs. The crone grabbed my wrists and pulled me down on top of her, leaned in close to show me every tooth and missing gap in her blood-stained smile. “We’re your family now. For life.” Eyelashes winked. “Or until death.” She squeezed my jaw and drove her tongue into my mouth. “Now fuck this aged whore and make me happy.”

  I couldn’t look at her face. I couldn’t think of it as sex or love or even lust—it was just a physical act. My penis—which was still as hard as iron—wouldn’t go down, no matter how hard I tried to think it away. I knew it would only deflate when it finished in the woman’s vagina. I looked down between my legs—our legs—and focused on aim and thrust.

  She guided me in, then held onto my shoulders. Too many times I glanced up at her face or over to the audience; shocked by it all, I wanted to leave my body. I was putting on a live sex show for a huge room of people, most of whom were egging me on, throwing their fists in the air as they cheered. Glancing ahead, along the stage, I saw Gord wobbling on his feet, his face cut and beaten and bruised, a picture of dejection—a shell of a man. I couldn’t let myself think about how he got himself to this place—or how he got me here. So much hell had arrived into my life since my plane landed.

  For a second, I glanced down at the woman under me, the sagging mask of age she wore, though the light in her eyes was still young.

  “Fuck me, that’s it, fuck me hard! Fuck me to death!” she grunted; her obscene mantra broken between syllables every time my hips thrust.

  I hated her. Felt rage rise inside me. Looked at the crowd as they yelled profanities, gestured with their hands and arms and mouths—and I hated them all. The woman was one of them—the family—and I wasn’t just fucking her, I was fucking them all. I wanted to rip her in half with my cock—for what she and her family did
to Gord, to me, to who knew how many other victims.

  I thought about Venus’ tongue—the scar that cleft it in two before the dagger blade had drawn blood. It had been cut before, multiple times, so much so that she didn’t flinch with each new slice.

  She had been married before, I realized. But how many times? Did Gord know? There were still too many secrets in this freakshow of a family, and I had only been exposed to a few of them.

  I was getting a chance to kill one of them, as I fucked the bitch, but I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. She only wanted a slit throat, to peel off her decrepit face and to join her youthful sisters. But I wanted more. If the family killed me, fine (what happened to Venus’ other husbands?), but I was taking one with me.

  I hammered into her and her cries of ecstasy rose, as did the cheers and taunts of the mob. She clutched fingernails into my biceps, scratching my vest, as my cock speared her.

  After seeing Poppy and Gorman both take knives out of their sleeves, I reached into my sleeve as well. Blades must have come with the jackets. A strange accessory for a groom, but what wasn’t strange concerning the wedding ceremony?

  I reared up off my victim and slipped the knife from my sleeve. The hag smiled with ecstatic joy, stretching her neck. I looked back at Venus, whose eyes were those of an animal, as she urged me on to slash the blade across my victim’s throat.

  As I orgasmed, I plunged the dagger into the crone’s heart and leaned on it, driving it deeper, two hands on the handle, twisting. Her claws scratched my head and face as she wailed, but I felt no pain. Only exhilaration. The dagger wiggled in my two-handed grip with all my weight on it, deeper into the wailing hag. Blood poured from her wrinkled gash of a mouth as her wail waned into a gurgle, and her clawing arms slowed to droop off either side of the table.

  I pulled out my cock as I pulled out my dagger. Got off the table, strolled to my victim’s head, slit her throat. Dug my fingers into the open maw across her throat and pulled her face off—her skin crackling as it tore free from muscle, like tape peeled off a roll. I lifted the wrinkled mask to the audience, scrunched it in my hand as I showed it to Venus, then threw it off the stage, onto the floor.

  The hag had not undergone her metamorphosis. She was not beautiful. She wore a mask of bloody exposed muscle, her dead eyes gazing up at me before they were coated in her seeping blood. I held the bloody dagger loose in my hand as I glared defiantly at Venus. She still had a blood-lust craving in her eyes. She liked what I had done, desired me even more. Fucking psycho bitch.

  “I’m not your fucking husband!” I yelled at her and at the mass of family watching me. “This shit is over! You let me go—you let Gord go—you let his family go! Now!”

  Venus stepped up to me, her golden hoofs clattering on the wooden boards of the stage, her bear’s head towering over me by at least three feet.

  “Oh yes, you are my husband,” she cooed. “Better than I could’ve expected!” She stabbed a fingernail in Gord’s direction. “That other…waste of skin…did whatever I asked without question, with merely all the coke he could snort and all the pussy he could fuck. He called it love.” She gripped my face in her hands, stronger than I had assumed, my gaze lifted to aim through the valley of her breasts. I could feel an intense heat emanating from her naked skin. “But you…you’ve shown true blood-lust. Fucking is not as important as killing. To kill is to fuck. A true family member knows this. You are my husband. I feel it. And so do you.”

  I smiled up at her, planted a kiss on each of her golden nipples, to her delight. “Then we must consummate our marriage, my dear.”

  I gripped the dagger in two hands and speared it deep into her stomach, wrenching it up to tear muscle in a ragged, bloody line, slicing sinew and scraping against her rib bones.

  She stepped a hoof away from me, looked down at the jutting blade, and a wave of ecstasy washed over her body. She shivered as she bled, eyes rolling back to their whites. Venus slowly pulled the sticking knife from her belly, releasing a gout of blood down her abdomen to cover her pudendum and to drip onto the floor between her cloven gold hoofs. She moaned and shuddered as the blade slipped free.

  Looking at me through heavily-lidded eyes, a satiated calm on her face, she whispered, “Oh, baby…that felt good.”

  The dagger dropped from her hand to the stage. I watched as the gaping wound I had just tore up from her stomach to the underside of her breasts began stitching itself together. Bubbles of blood rose to the surface of her skin and congealed, hardened to form a row of blood buttons. More blood seeped from her body between the buttons to seal them into a long thick crust.

  She tilted her smile down at me and delicately peeled off the scab. Flung it offstage where it was immediately scrambled after by young men, ripping it into pieces so each could get a bit of it, then they jammed their morsel into their mouths. Venus smoothed a fingertip down the healed pink scar. The only trace left of the mortal wound which I had given her. Which wasn’t mortal at all.

  “I’m always hungry after a good blood-fuck,” she said, stepping to me again, planting a kiss on my lips. Then she turned to her family and raised her arms in celebration. “Let the feast begin!”

  — | — | —

  Chapter 12

  I had been strapped back onto my cross, Gord onto his, and both of us were kept in a wooden prison somewhere backstage, no windows, no furniture in the room, a heavy wooden door banded by iron strips, locked.

  Gord’s face looked like shit, one eye swollen shut, lips fat and deformed, and, of course, the fresh slash across his forehead. But he was alive. And, sometimes, awake.

  “Gordy,” I called to him, his head lolling from side to side as he slipped in and out of consciousness. “Can you hear me? Are you awake? You gotta tell me everything you know about these fucking psychopaths.”

  He chuckled and coughed, blood-pink saliva slipping threads down his chin. “Congrats, buddy,” he said weakly. “You got the best girl in the world. And fuck—you killed that old bitch real nice! I think Venus really liked that. You’re golden, my friend, golden.”

  “Gord—snap out of it!”

  He stopped talking, mumbling nonsense under his breath until he began sobbing. I pulled once again against my restraints, but they were too tight. All I could think of was escape, for myself and Gord and his family. But where were they? And even if we could get out of here, how could we get out of this town? The whole area was controlled by them. Even Canada wasn’t freedom.

  “Gord, talk to me. Tell me something I can use to get us out of here. I stabbed Venus—and she liked it! I saw the wound heal in seconds! Who is she? What is she?”

  He sniffled and coughed, spun his head to look at me with his one open eye. “She’s like no one I’ve ever met. You see what I mean now? I wanted her so bad…but I fucked up.”

  I latched onto something, an old secret he wouldn’t divulge. He had to tell me now—what did he have to lose?

  “What did you fuck up? You said something about the Swamp Hotel back at the tailors.”

  He nodded. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry,” he mumbled, not to me but to himself, to the family.

  “What is this hotel?”

  “Here. This is. The Royal Order of Ursa.”

  “Ursa? The bear? You mean all of those bear skins people are wearing, the fucking bear heads hanging from the ceiling—is this a bear cult? Gord! Wake up and talk to me!”

  His head lolled from side to side, his words moving in and out of volume, but I pieced together what he was saying as best I could. “I didn’t know if we were getting fitted for the pants here or at the tailors.” He laughed and bloody saliva spilled from his swollen lips. “You see how small it was? That’s nothing. But it was something to them. Something big. I wasn’t supposed to say anything about it—couldn’t even make the tiniest reference to it while you were within earshot. That’s part of their code of secrecy. It’s very strict. ‘Swamp Hotel’ is also kind of a password, fo
r family only. But they think that if I spill a small secret, then I’m apt to spill big ones. And secrecy is what’s kept them going for centuries. You would only find out about the Royal Order of Ursa at the wedding. But then, you wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Same with my folks and kid sister and big brother.”

  The more pieces he gave me, the more questions I had. Something didn’t sound right. But I finally understood that Gorman wasn’t just Venus’ father, but also some kind of high priest for the whole family. Slipping up in front of him would’ve been the worst.

  “Are they a cult of some kind?”

  Gord’s fists clenched, pulling against the bindings, but he only made them tighter. His hands were turning purple, like mine.

  “Cults are small, the family is huge. They’ll kill me for saying all this, Chris. Maybe you too. But you’re married to her now, so maybe not. But I’m definitely dead. I don’t care anymore.”

  “No you’re not and neither am I. And I sure as hell aren’t married to that freak!”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. They’ve probably already got a legit marriage license for you and her. This was just the Baer wedding, the family ceremony. It means more to them than getting married in a church or at City Hall or wherever. And the family is everywhere. If they know you’re married to Venus, hell buddy, the world’s your oyster.” He laughed through his tears. “You’re set. You won’t have to go back to that shitty college anymore. Name an Ivy League school and they’ll put you there. Or you could quit your job and just be Venus’ husband, live in the lap of luxury. Set for life. Don’t we all work in order to hopefully retire rich and live lazy? Do you think I wanted to be a blue-collar slob my whole life?”