by Jeff Gelb
It was pitiful watching him demean himself like this. Why share something that I could have all to myself? Especially since he failed to mention the most treasured of the rewards for solving the thirteen locks. The eternal services of the Furies. I would be like a god. And share them with this whining, wretched excuse of a man? Was he insane?
“No, Roger,” I said, struggling to keep the pity from my voice, “I don’t have the scrolls. And I am not here in New York to see any professor from Columbia.”
I looked away and drank my scotch. From the corner of my eye, I could see his round face deflate like a punctured tire. He stood up, placed some money on the table for the drinks, then nodded toward me and, with his shoulders slumping, trudged off to an empty table.
Of course, while Hormsley had been right about the scrolls, he had no clue as to why I was in New York. It wasn’t to see Professor Tappani or anyone else. I was quite confident in my own translation of the scrolls. But my reason for being here—as bizarre as it may sound—was that the Hall of Hazaa was right here in Manhattan. As the full moon reached its highest ascendancy, and if I were standing in the prescribed spot, the gate would become visible for a mere few seconds. After that it would be another seven years before entrance to the hall would be possible. According to my calculations, the gate would be able to be seen at exactly two thirty-one this morning, giving me a little over three hours to wait. I had gone over the scrolls a hundred times, and I was sure of this—as sure as I was of anything. After I gained entrance to the hall, I would have twenty-four hours to solve the thirteen locks. If I failed, well, I didn’t want to think about the consequences. All I could do was trust that I wouldn’t. The rewards were too great to do anything else. Anyway, while the scrolls didn’t spell out how to solve the locks, they hinted that if I asked I would be told. Whom I would ask, I didn’t have a clue, but I would cross that bridge when I got to it.
I ordered another drink, and after finishing it looked over and saw that Hormsley had left. He had to have known I wouldn’t share the scrolls with him, but I guess desperation can make men do foolish things. Or maybe he was simply trying to get a read on me, to see whether or nor Lutton hadn’t lost his mind and that I actually had the scrolls in my possession.
I ordered dinner and black coffee. The next twenty-four hours were going to be long ones. After I finished eating, I hung around until twenty past one. The location of the Hall of Hazaa was no more than an hour by foot, and I wanted to get there close to the time that the gate would show itself. I didn’t want to have to loiter in case Lutton or anyone else was spying on me.
It was nippy out. My breath showed in front of my face as I exhaled. I held my overcoat tightly by my throat and pushed forward against the wind, dropping my head as I walked. The cold air was quite a contrast from the blistering heat of Iraq, but after a while I got used to it. Soon the numbness in my ears faded, and I could hear the footsteps keeping pace with my own. I walked a little farther and then turned down the next alleyway and pushed myself against the building. Sure enough, Roger Hormsley followed me into the alley. He seemed surprised to see me standing there waiting for him, then shrugged weakly.
“Jack,” he said, “how could you blame me? We’re talking about the Scrolls of Hazaa, for Chrissakes—”
I stepped forward and punched him hard in the throat. His face purpled as he gasped for air. His eyes searched out mine, begging me, pleading with me. I kicked his legs out from under him, sending him to the pavement.
“That’s right,” I told him. “We’re talking about the Scrolls of Hazaa.”
I kicked him in the mouth, knocking out several of his perfect white teeth. With the force of the kick, his head banged against the brick building, and as he lay still I stomped down on his throat, pushing hard with my foot until I was sure he was dead. I was staring at his dead, half-opened eyes when a beam of light hit me in the face. I looked up and saw a patrol car had stopped by the alley and a police officer was shining his flashlight at me. Then the light lowered to Hormsley’s body. I started running. The shattering high pitch of a police siren followed.
I raced down the alley, cut across two others, then through a building until I was able to backtrack to the street I needed to get to. All the while I could hear the cops chasing after me. Adrenaline pumped through me, pushing me faster than what I thought humanly possible. I spotted the alley where I would find the gate to the Hall of Hazaa. There was a parked car mostly in the shadows of the streetlights. I dove under it, rolling as far back as I could. My breathing was ragged from the hard run, and I tried desperately to control it and to keep from making any noise. The two cops ran by, both of them panting hard. I heard them yelling at each other, asking if they saw what direction I had run off to. Their voices grew more distant. I waited until I thought it was safe. Then I pulled myself out from under the car. Squinting hard under the streetlight, I saw I had two minutes before the gate would show itself.
As quietly as I could, I made my way down the alley. Earlier in the day I had found the exact spot to stand using a GPS tracker. I now stood there. In front of me was a dumpster. If I had properly translated the scrolls, the Gate to Hazaa would unveil itself to me. All of a sudden I heard yelling, and then the beam from a flashlight hit my chest and then my face. One of the cops yelled at me to get down on my stomach. I heard them running toward me, but I ignored them.
All at once I could see the gate. Massive in size, a tarnished silver exterior with carvings of the Furies decorating it. They were hideous, horrific creatures, and if I solved the thirteen locks they would be in my service.
I moved quickly, placing my hands and fingers in the positions that the scrolls had outlined. It was a complex series of movements, but I had them memorized, and as I completed the last one, the gate swung open. While I never looked in their direction, I could feel one of the cops reaching toward me as I slipped through the open gate. Then it swung shut behind me.
I was in a narrow hallway illuminated by an eerie green light, maybe fifty feet or so from the Hall of Hazaa. My heart pounded in my chest. So close. So damn close.
Immortality. Agelessness. Virility of a god. The service of the Furies.
It would all be mine if I could solve the thirteen locks.
The hallway bent to the right. When I made the turn, I could see it. I could see the Hall of Hazaa. And then I could see them.
I almost stumbled into the hall, dazed, as I stared at them. And they just stared back at me, their eyes shining brightly. I counted them. There were thirteen of them. Thirteen girls, all naked, all heart-stoppingly beautiful, all of them looking no more than eighteen years of age. All of them thin, petite, with just barely perceptible bulges to their bellies, all with pert, champagne-glass–sized breasts and perfect pink nipples. Each of them only showing bare traces of pubic hair—more like peach fuzz than anything else—making the lips of their pussies visible. I remembered a passage from the scrolls, how the key would be an arrow made of flesh and blood. It all started to make sense. I knew how to solve the thirteen locks.
All their eyes were on me. I walked farther into the room. One of them—a girl with long red hair that fell past her shoulders—moved toward me. The others, their eyes were blue or gray, but hers were an emerald green. Absolutely dazzling. She stopped five feet from me and then lay on the ground. One of her hands crept down to her pubic area. She had her legs spread wide as her hand rubbed her pussy, and then using two fingers she pushed through the opening, going deep inside herself. And she moaned with each thrust of her fingers. I heard more moaning, and as I looked around the room, I saw more of them on the ground, moving in ecstasy as they fingered their pussies and pulled at their pink nipples. Several of them had paired off and were rub-bing their breasts against each other as they touched each other. My mouth felt dry as I watched them. I could barely swallow.
The redhead rolled onto her knees so her ass was facing me. It was about as perfect an ass as I’d ever seen. Small, tight, with just
enough to it to make the blood rush through my head. I could hear it pounding in my ears. Her hand snaked between her legs, and I watched transfixed as she rocked rhythmically back and forth, each thrust from her fingers into her pussy bringing a soft moan from her lips. Her head turned back to face me, her eyes rolling upward in orgasmic delight.
I shook myself out of the trance I had fallen into and asked her if I would solve the locks by entering each of them. She gave me a puzzled look, all the while thrusting two of her fingers back and forth into her small, tight pussy, her small hips gyrating and shivering slightly with each thrust. Of course it was stupid asking her in English. I tried again, this time in the extinct language of Akkadian. I had never spoken the language before, and my dialect sounded unnatural to my own ear, but she seemed to understand me. In a throaty purr, she answered me back in the same dead language, telling me that penetrating them wouldn’t be enough—that I needed to ejaculate in each of them to unlock them.
So there it was. Thirteen girls in twenty-four hours. I would have to fuck each and every one of them. If I failed, I would be eaten alive by the Furies, fully aware and conscious as they sucked the marrow from my very bones. Thirteen girls in twenty-four hours ...
If I was a teenager, I could’ve done these thirteen in an hour. At forty-two and after those four scotches I’d had only hours earlier, I wasn’t so sure. But what choice did I have? According to the scrolls, I was safe from the Furies until I tried to unlock the first lock, but how could I walk away from the treasures that the Hazaa offered, especially now that the police would be looking for me for Hormsley’s murder? But if I did it ... If I fucked all thirteen of them, I’d be like a god. With the services of the Furies, I’d have no need to worry about the police or any of man’s laws.
I looked from the redhead to the others. All of them writhing on the ground, either thrusting their fingers into their own pussies or into the pussy of a girl next to them. This was like some sort of pornographer’s wildest fantasy. Thirteen absolutely gorgeous girls, all moaning in ecstasy as they pleasured themselves, all waiting for me to enter them. I didn’t know if I could fuck each of them in the twenty-four hours I’d be given, but I didn’t care. As I stood watching them, as I felt the hotness of my blood pounding through my head, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. All I wanted was to fuck them.
My hands shook as I took off my overcoat, then my boots and my clothes. As the girls saw my erect cock, they started moaning even louder than before, which made my cock even harder. I looked down at it. It hadn’t been this hard in years, if ever. It was far more than any arrow: it was a fucking battering ram.
I looked at all of the girls once more and felt dizzy, felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest. The pounding in my head was like island drums. The redhead was still on her knees. I joined her, taking hold of her small hips, and as she removed her fingers from that perfect tight pink opening, I slid myself into her.
Things changed instantly then. Instead of the warm, tight pussy I was expecting, it was more like I was fucking a swamp. Something primevally foul. And it unleashed the most rotten stench imaginable. Like decomposing corpses and sickness and vomit. And her skin that just moments before had been so smooth and firm to the touch was now more like some squishy, gelatinous substance. She changed too, no longer a beautiful girl but becoming a hideous creature, her flesh bloated and an awful gray, her form misshapen and bulbous. She still had the same red hair and green eyes from before, but that was all that remained of what she had been. Her hips were now wide and grotesque, and as I held them my hands sunk into her flesh as if it were mud. Then I looked down and what had been so perfect before was now more like a cow’s udder. I stared in horror as it moved as if a living thing, the lips of that udderlike genitalia sucking on my cock, making the most godawful unearthly slurping noises.
I wanted to scream. I looked around and saw they all had changed, all of them becoming these hideous mockeries of the female form. What had once been small but perfect breasts were now large drooping, oozing sacks of flesh, and those beautiful pink nipples had transformed into massive purplish wartlike things. But it was their bodies that were the biggest horror, no longer slender and lithe but bloated as if they were waterlogged corpses and now the shapes and colors of nightmares. They were still all pleasuring themselves, shoving their clawlike fists up their holes, but they were no longer moaning in ecstasy. Now it was more of a caterwaul of screeches and cackles and other ungodly sounds.
These thirteen creatures were the Furies. The same that were carved on the outer gate. The same that were illustrated within the Scrolls of Hazaa. While there was no mention in the scrolls as to how many Furies there were, there was no doubt that these were them. And I had to fuck each and every one.
I wanted to scream. I tried to pull out, but those slurping lips held tight to my cock, and then I remembered the scrolls. If I failed to open any lock that I started on I would be instantly feasted on by the Furies. My resolve hardened. I’d be damned if I’d let these foul creatures slobber on my flesh and lap up my blood.
Somehow I kept going, pounding into that swamplike hole, all the while her gelatinous haunches pushing into me and seeming to melt around my body like slime. I tried to think of the way she had been before the transformation, but I couldn’t hold on to that image. All I could think of was the hideous creature she now was. I forced my thoughts to the last girl I’d been with, a Chinese girl I had paid for in Iraq, and with a soul-deadening horror I ejaculated into the creature before me.
Those lips still held firm to my cock, and I had to pry them open as if prying open a clam. Exhausted and sick to my very core, I fell to the ground. Then the others came crawling toward me, their clawlike hands grabbing for my limp cock, their bluish purple tongues—as rough as sandpaper—running over my body, darting into my ears, pushing into my ass. I tried to ignore it; I tried to ignore them. Otherwise I knew I’d go insane.
One down, twelve to go.
I lay there with my eyes closed and tried to conjure up other girls I’d been with, all the while trying to ignore the feel of their claws and their tongues on my body. Somehow I was able to bring Emily to mind. She was this dark brunette I had slept with for nine months in Florence, Italy. I tried to picture myself taking off her panties and then studying that wonderful black bush of hers, all the while playing lightly inside her with my finger. After that I reversed positions so I could lick my tongue around the lips of her pussy and then her clitoris while she sucked on me. As I thought of that, I pushed those foul claws and tongues away and stroked myself until I became hard again. Then I grabbed the nearest of those foul creatures. I couldn’t get her on her knees and instead had to go at it missionary. God knows how I did it. My body sank into that gelatinous mass, and with horror I realized that her pubic area was more alive than I could’ve imagined. While they had only had a small amount of peach fuzz when they were girls, now it was more like steel wool, except each strand was living. They were like little thin worms that slithered and pricked at me. Somehow, although it seemed to be an eternity, I came once again and, like before, had to pry open those lips to free myself.
I checked my watch. Over two hours had elapsed. With each one it was going to get harder and harder. As it was, I knew it was going to take years to forget this nightmare I was now living. How many flesh-and-blood women would I have to be with to rid myself of this foul memory? How many years would I close my eyes at night and have to relive this horror? I knew the answers to both of these questions would be in the hundreds, but I would have all of eternity to cleanse myself. Eventually I would. Then I remembered the passages from the scrolls recounting how the Furies would feast on me if I failed. I couldn’t allow that to happen. The thought of that was beyond horror.
I fucked four more of those creatures, each time first bringing to mind a woman from my past and then making myself hard enough so I could penetrate that vile, ungodly hole. Each one was more horrific than the last. Instead o
f fucking a swamp, it was like I was fucking a pool of congealed blood, and their bodies were even more grotesque, with lumps that moved and crawled under their skin. The last one, God, the last one—it was like fucking a vat of mucous, and all the while those hideous lumps under her skin sucked on my body as I pounded inside her.
When I finished with those four, I collapsed on the ground, and then I must’ve passed out. A cold chill shook me awake, and I became aware again of their claws and tongues slithering over my body. With a start I looked at my watch and saw that I only had five hours left. Five hours to fuck the remaining seven monstrosities. I almost gave up then, but as I lay there with my eyes closed, listening to their cackles and screeches, I imagined them flaying the flesh from my body and then the greedy and obscene looks that would form over their faces as they sucked my flesh down their throats. That thought forced me to keep going. Somehow, I forced myself to become hard again.
Fucking them had gone beyond horror. Their screeches as I thrust myself into them, the way those monstrous udders sucked and slurped at my cock, it was enough to drive any man insane. But I kept going. I had to. I had to survive this nightmare so I could be with a real woman again. I had to feel human flesh instead of this gelatinous obscenity. I had to feel the warmth from a female mouth and tongue again. I had to touch the delicate curve of a woman’s belly and trace my fingertips down her thigh and feel the moistness between her legs. My last experience couldn’t be this. It couldn’t be this horrible stench or the slimy feel of their bloated, gelatinous bodies or the fetid sourness from those hideous mouths. And worst of all, the touch of those eel-like tongues along my skin. Somehow I had to get through this. Fucking these living nightmares couldn’t be the last experience I had.
