The Sadist's Bible

by Nicole Cushing

  René uttered a soft, approving moan and patted her on the back, as if to acknowledge

  her progress in adjusting to her new surroundings. Then he led her onward. She followed

  without questioning.

  René did not seem the least bit troubled by the blackness at ground level. Ellie

  trusted this meant all was well. She kept her gaze fixed on the broken sky and slipped

  into a peaceful sleepwalker’s trance.

  When she came to, the trails of starry wax-pus had finished their courses for the

  night and trickled below the horizon. No new stars rose to replace them. While the sky

  had once seemed sick, it now seemed dead.

  Ellie wondered how long she’d been sleepwalking. Obviously, some time had passed

  (how much, she couldn’t say). She had little endurance for hiking. Ordinarily, she wasn’t able to stand more than a half hour of it before turning back. But, despite apparently

  journeying far longer than that, she felt rejuvenated.

  René grabbed her chin once again. This time he tilted it downward, back toward the

  ground. Something cast a flickering yellow glow in the distance. The smell of fading

  flowers yielded to an eruption of pungent smoke that reached down Ellie’s throat,

  grabbed at her stomach, and yanked. It reeked of overcooked pork, rotten eggs, and rotten fruit. She dry heaved.

  “Woreh!” René said, pointing toward the fire.

  Ellie paused, trying to make sure she understood him. Worry? Yes, my old life was

  marinated in worry. But I’m changing, and René seemed to have approved of the change.

  So that couldn’t have been what he’d said. It must’ve been…

  “Lori? She’s there, near that fire?”

  René chuckled and patted Ellie on the shoulder. Was she to take that as a yes or as a

  condescending no?

  As they walked farther along, the glow grew in size and intensity, overcoming the

  blackness. At first it seemed as though it might be a wasteland, a vast array of tall

  bonfires. But as they marched through the strange night, ever closer, Ellie came to see it was a series of burning stone towers.

  Fire flickered sporadically through their windows, at times revealing the silhouettes

  of grotesque figures so deformed they made René seem like an Adonis. Fire thrived in a

  constant, crackling roar at the very top of the structures – bathing each minaret and

  battlement in flames. Along with the sounds of burning, she also heard desperate pleas

  and sadistic laughs; animalistic grunts and orgasmic moans; the cracks of whips and the

  clatter of chains–the sounds of suffering and its mischievous instigation.

  The fire burned the creatures in the tower, but didn’t seem to be killing them so

  much as changing them into more degenerate shapes. Rendering them more holy.

  Purifying them. As René guided her ever closer, Ellie wondered what exactly would become of her once she stepped inside. But this question was overwhelmed by a sudden

  surge of undeniable arousal that pulsed through her veins. I need to hurt her...I need to fuck her...I need to hurt her...I need to fuck her.

  They arrived at a tower entrance – a stone archway. Tall, lit torches stood unsteadily

  at each end, wobbling back and forth in the wind, belching foul black clouds into the air and casting chaotic light on the first half dozen steps of a wide interior stone stairway.

  Ellie found them almost-comically redundant. Torches posted right outside an

  inferno? It made no sense.

  “Tack hew up,” René said.

  The torches crept toward Ellie. Amongst their flames, she glimpsed boiling blue eyes

  peeking out of carbon-black faces. They weren’t torches at all but rather living, burning men. As they approached her, the air started to boil and her brain started to boil and she let out a revolted wail.

  René enjoyed a slobbery belly laugh as he insistently pushed her toward the

  creatures.

  Most of the burning men’s appendages were charred and weak, seeming as though

  they might fall to the ground at any moment. Hence, their hunched-over gait that made

  them look all the more strange.

  Only their flabby bellies and hard cocks were left uncharred. The hairy, blistering

  flesh of these two hungry parts–in flames but never completely consumed–reminded Ellie

  of the burning bush that spoke to Moses.

  The burning men each grabbed Ellie by an arm. Their flames galloped onto her like

  small, rabid animals. Burned her clothes and burned her skin and melted the two together until there was no distinction between them. Then she, too, was a walking torch. She, too, smelled of overcooked pork, rotten eggs, and rotten fruit. They had spread their fire on to her, like a disease. Their cremation was a contagion.

  By all rights, it should have been agonizing. But instead there was only a dull

  stinging sensation, a crackling in her nerves as if they were finally waking up. As if

  they’d been asleep her whole life – artificially sedated by her parents, her school, her church, and her husband.

  By all rights, it should have been horrifying. At the very least, the smell of her own

  burning flesh should have left her disgusted. But she felt increasingly convinced that it wasn’t really her body burning, but rather some obsolete mask that desperately needed and deserved destruction.

  The men-she’d-thought-were-torches led her into the tower and up a flight of stairs.

  She looked back to see if René was coming with them. She could only make him out in

  silhouette. He stood on the other side of the threshold, repeatedly bowing at the waist.

  Making the sign of the cross. Uttering praise: “Haweh. Haweh. Haweh.”

  During the trio’s ascent, they came upon a dozen pudgy, naked, blistered, half-

  human things. Some trotted up the stairs on all fours. Some giggled. Some screamed

  vulgar threats. Some ignored the procession entirely and used the stairway as an arena for orgies. “Who else wants a piece of this?” a pig-man said after shooting his load into the bleeding ass of a scorched, cackling, masturbating crone. Two of his kin trotted forward and squealed with delight.

  On closer examination, Ellie saw the crone wasn’t masturbating. Rather, her index

  finger had been forcibly attached to her vulva by a nail that had been driven through an arthritic knuckle. And, upon further reflection, that cackling might have been weeping.

  Should Ellie have been shocked that such an obscenity was being committed in plain

  sight? A vague sense that she should be shocked rose to her consciousness, but quickly passed. The fire was purifying her. Melting away her mask, exposing the brokenness

  underneath. Old ways of thinking drifted away from her, like the smoke drifting from her head.

  Ellie and her guides found ample room on the wide stairs to slip past the spectacle,

  but they couldn’t avoid the puddle of blood and shit that had seeped from the old woman.

  She tread carefully, so she wouldn’t slip. But she felt not even a twinge of guilt or

  revulsion when the filth clung to her feet, and she could tell that such emotions never

  even occurred to her guides.

  She was on her way to becoming more like them.

  She felt strange sensations deep inside her head. Maybe they were growing pains, as

  new physical structures developed in her brain that would enable her to better understand how this realm worked. Or maybe, old parts of her brain – the parts devoted to the

  preservation of conventional morality – were simply dying. In any event, she sensed she

  was mutating into something better-than-human. Wiser-than-human. She became more and mor
e convinced the events she’d just witnessed were beautiful.

  How could she think otherwise? The creatures and their mate (victim?) were

  arguably even more broken than she was, and God wanted everyone to be as broken as

  possible. She couldn’t remember how she’d first learned that God wanted everyone to be

  as broken as possible, but the important thing was she knew it. She knew it in the boiling marrow of her bones. Therefore, logically, every single one of these creatures should be envied, not scorned.

  What was this place? She still didn’t know, exactly, but felt certain that it was a holy place. Yes, of that she was sure. Only one thing could make it better.

  “Where’s Lori?” she asked.

  Her guides responded by pointing fiery fingers upward.

  The trio climbed five additional flights of stairs, with similar sacred perversions

  sporadically unfolding around them. On the second flight, a pig man moaned ecstatically

  while a charred figure used a hot spike to pry out his eyes. On the landing between the

  third and fourth flights, a pig-man with tits (or, a pig-woman with a cock?) hung by the neck from a rusty steel chain tethered to a rickety, improvised gallows. Still alive, the creature screamed curses and violently jacked off. Below the gallows, a man-sized worm

  wearing an executioner’s hood wriggled on the ground as globs of thick cum rained down

  on it.

  The last flight of stairs led to a battlement. Here, in the open air, the fire raged as it hadn’t on the stairs. All manner of monsters danced seizure-like jigs on the burning stone floor. “This is truly living!” one of the pig-men said, right before collapsing. When he fell, his back and neck and head caved in, spewing forth cinders and ash. Other creatures leapt from the tower (not so much to escape, Ellie reasoned, as to start the process all over again, to repeat the buffet of gleeful horrors the previous floors offered). Like

  children at a swimming pool, they weren’t yet ready to leave.

  Ellie’s guides pushed her toward the middle of the battlement, then slunk back

  toward the stairs.

  “Wait,” she called. “Where’s Lori?”

  They pointed upward, at the smoke gusting into the black sky. Was this a trick? Had

  Lori been burnt to death? When her guides had pointed skyward, were they implying

  she’d been reduced to cinders and ash, and that Ellie would soon meet the same fate?

  It was as if the tower was a giant stake at which she was being burned, but she made

  no attempt to flee. “Where’s Lori?” she grunted through blistered lips. “Where’s Lori?”

  she asked as her skin flaked away into bits of carbon and her knuckles glowed like hot

  coals.

  A gale swept over the battlement, and she felt wicked stings in her shoulders. She

  was kicked roughly up into the air. I’m no longer a body now, she thought . I’m ashes. I’m fumes.

  But she was mistaken. Her hands were badly burnt, yes, but still whole. She wasn’t

  disintegrating, she was being carried off by a legless, emaciated old man with black,

  feathered wings. His talons pierced her skin as they held her secure. Together they flew through the black smoke and toward a glaring, cruel light.

  Damned with Blessings

  The legless angel deposited her on a massive plateau of smoldering ash. Seven suns

  ringed a blue sky like jewels in a crown. Seven gleaming white towers of various heights rose from the plateau. She felt a steady tremor beneath her. She heard a steady, feral hum above her.

  There was...chanting. Wailing. A multitude of voices – or things like voices –

  coming from the towers. She looked up and saw thousands of naked, deformed angels

  writhing on battlements. They shouted these words with mutilated lips: “Haweh, haweh,

  haweh.”

  Some of them had four wings and some of them had two wings and some of them

  had one wing and some of them only had a half a wing and some of them only had

  stubby, barely-noticeable appendages where wings used to be. Some of them had white

  wings, some had black wings, some had gray wings, some had purple wings, some had

  green wings.

  Some seemed to be dead and rotting, but still chanting. Some were pristine, intact,

  strong and healthy. As Ellie craned her head farther up, she saw that some of the

  creatures were touching each other. Hunching down, presenting themselves. Offering

  orifices up to other creatures’ appendages.

  Oh yes, that was what was happening: the angels were violently fucking each other.

  Wingless angels shoved their stubby, bare former-wing appendages into waiting mouths,

  shoved their talons into waiting vaginas. The winged angels were, often but not always,

  the passive partners; the ones who were howling, over and over: “Haweh, haweh,

  haweh.”

  Ellie felt her burnt lips sweetly ache as she sang along. “Holy, holy, holy.”

  She focused on a pair of angels standing on a battlement relatively low to the ground.

  The female had skin the color of alabaster, but sparkled with the rainbow reflection of

  diamond piercings all over her face, nipples, wings, and legs. The male was black with

  rot, but this did not prevent him pleasure. He finger-fucked the female from behind, and her breasts jiggled rhythmically in response. Her nipples boasted wide pinkish-brown

  areolas that were fun to watch as they jiggled.

  Then the male whipped her around and raked her face with his talons. Bits of

  diamond-pierced flesh fell from her cheek, kicking up wisps of ash as they landed on the plateau. One of the rotting male’s talons fell off, too.

  A meager bit of meat hung between the male angel’s legs, but it grew longer as he

  tugged at the diamond piercings in the female’s nipple. Even from her low vantage point, Ellie could see the nipple stretch away from the breast. The female closed her eyes and

  bit her lip and whimpered and squirmed. She was gorgeous and helpless and would

  never, ever leave her loving torturer.

  It was a beautiful moment, and Ellie wept joyfully as she watched. She slipped burnt

  fingers through a crusty, scarred layer of burnt clothes-skin and onto her vulva. As she began to stimulate her clit, a giant hand made of flame picked her off the ground and

  brought her up to meet a giant face-of-flame. And the Man of Flame opened His mouth,

  letting out something like words.

  You have questions.

  “Where’s Lori?”

  You will meet her. You will help me discipline her.

  “What is this place? Heaven? Hell?”

  Both. “Heaven” and “Hell” are just two names for the same place. They are one

  and the same.

  “Who are you? God? The Devil?”

  I have been called both names. But names are not my concern. Discipline is my

  concern. Mating is my concern. Degeneracy is my concern. Worship is my concern.

  She didn’t understand everything, but she understood enough. His answers made

  more sense than anything she’d learned in Bible study. She felt both holy and wicked

  there in His palm, but no longer saw these states as contradictory. Waves of sadistic awe and serene darkness crested in her heart. “I worship You,” Ellie said.

  I know. You have worshiped me since you were very young. You worshiped me even

  before you knew about me. That is why you shall have a place of honor here, as one of my angels. One of my demons. I have had you brought here –body and soul intact, not

  dead – to become one of my Ambassadors to Earth.

  And the Omnipotent tossed two wisps of flame from His hand, and they landed on

  E
leanor’s shoulders like hot wax. And they grew into wings the color of bruises. And she fell to her knees and begged the Omnipotent to take her to Lori. And the Omnipotent

  granted this prayer, and Lori was revealed to Eleanor.

  Had Eleanor not been elevated to the rank of angel, she may not have recognized

  Lori. She had lost weight. Her bones had been broken and healed and re-broken several

  times. Patches of flesh were missing from her face, her stomach, and her back. But

  Eleanor recognized the eyes and the breasts – the same eyes and breasts that had

  appeared in her photos.

  Torture her, the Omnipotent commanded.

  And the angel Eleanor strode over toward her immobile love and kicked her in the

  head. “Tell me you love me,” she commanded.

  * * *

  Lori’s mind could no longer afford the luxury of memory; in fact the very concept of

  memory grew more and more alien to her with each passing hour spent with the

  Omnipotent in his Palace of Abominations.

  Not only had her body been reshaped, her mind and her will had as well. The

  Omnipotent had twisted her brain and wrung all rebellion out of it. She existed only to

  suffer and procreate without resistance. Her mind could focus only on the various modes

  of pain: burning, cutting, breaking, ramming, blistering. Flogging, fucking, birth.

  She did not recognize the voice or its owner. The angel was, judging by the two

  swollen mounds on its chest, female. But no other visual cue stood out as unique. She did not, for example, recognize the face. It was burnt, blistered, and snarling – like all the rest of them.

  However, what the angel demanded was odd. More than odd. Downright alarming.

  Did the angel not know that she was the exclusive property of the Omnipotent – to

  be touched only by Him? Did the angel not see that, even if she wanted to utter the unfamiliar sounds demanded of her, she physically couldn’t? Her lips had been fused

  together. The upper lip and lower lip were now one burnt, blistered flap of skin.

  * * *

  Eleanor felt a dull, unfamiliar ache in her fingers. Glancing down, she noticed with

  bemusement that they had just changed into talons – knobby, gnarled, and sharp.

  Beautifully ugly. She pierced one through Lori’s mouth and proceeded to rip a gash from