Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

  “Can you drive me home? I don’t have my car here and it’s really going out there!”

  No doubt this time, he thought incredulously, turning to meet the emerald gaze of the silver dragon resting in a seductive shadow of pressed white flesh. His eyes traveled upwards to meet her own, and he nodded once more. She leaned in to his ear and began singing a Barry Manilow song: “Mandy.”

  But he quickly realized she’d altered the words: “I’m randy, won’t you fuck me and fry me like bacon, cuz I’m in a hot way, I’m randy…”

  She laughed and shook her butt as she strode to the next table. Charles checked his wallet for the condom he had kept there unused for months. He hoped it was still good. He began humming an oldie of his own over the din of the band. “Tonight’s the night…”

  She held his hand as they ran three blocks to his car through the rain. As he fumbled for the keys to unlock his peeling orange Honda, she held her arms wide and shook her head back, embracing the spit of the sky.

  “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” she said, tonguing the rain from her lips. Her mascara had begun to run. She resembled nothing so much as a wet, playful raccoon.

  She held out her hand after they slid into the car. “Ceiran,” she said, “with a C.”

  He took her tiny hand in his own and was abruptly wrenched with surprising strength across the seat. She stopped him two inches from her face, and then pecked his lips with a teasing kiss.

  “Charles,” he stammered, hypnotized by the light dancing in her eyes.

  “With a C?” she asked, and laughed before he could answer.

  “Um, where do you want to go?” he asked.

  “To hell.”

  “Now?”

  “138 Parkside. Then hell.”

  Charles started the car and turned the defrost up to full. The windows were opaque with the film of their breath and the cool humidity of the storm. They got worse before they got better and he was forced to sit inactive behind the wheel and wonder what the hell he was getting himself into. She broke the quiet with a slap on his thigh.

  “Giddyup cowboy. Let’s get moving,” she giggled. Her voice sounded funny as she mouthed the phrase. Too high. Too girlish. So sexy. He stared at her again, trying to drink her in through his eyes, trying to understand who she was – why she had chosen to come with him.

  “I’m not any good with mimes,” she said, and poked a finger on his nose.

  “Beep,” she chirped. “Wanna know who my favorite singer is?”

  “Barry Manilow,” he stabbed. Her eyebrows crossed.

  “Nope,” she tossed her head in denial and pressed her palms to her chest. “Me.”

  She began to sing. Another Manilow song. But softly, her childish voice quivering:

  “I’ve been in heat forever

  And I fucked the very first dong

  I put the cock and the va-gi-na together

  I am Eros and I fucked the dong.”

  Her voice rose louder, surer as she drove into the chorus:

  “He’s got the dong that makes my girl hole sing

  he’s got the dong I need with balls that will sting

  He’s got the dong that makes my girl hole cry

  He’s got the dong, he’s got the dong…”

  Charles ignored the white streaks still receding on the front windshield and pulled out into traffic. This was going to be a night to remember.

  138 Parkside was a large white two-story frame surrounded by giant spruces and wildly overgrown hedges. As Charles stepped past the front gate he felt as though he’d crossed a barrier into another world. The rain barely seemed to make it through the latticework of trees as Ceiran’s spiked steps clicked against the stone walkway. The chilly October wind raised goosebumps on his arms.

  She pushed open the front door without using a key and motioned him inside.

  “Don’t you lock up?” he asked, stepping into the gloom of a foyer. She clicked a switch and a lone bulb on the ceiling glared upon the room. Charles blinked. Both to get used to the sudden painful wash of light, and at the strangeness of the view. There was no furniture in the house! Decaying gray floor planks, dirty white walls, unadorned by anything but yellow shadows revealing where once, something had been hung…

  “No,” she answered his question. “I don’t need to lock up. There’s nothing here to steal, as you can see, and no one could get in that I didn’t want here anyway.”

  He was about to ask what she meant when he got a poke in the ribs and she flounced down the dingy hallway.

  “Want a drink?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Sure,” he answered, wondering if perhaps now would be a good time to duck right back out the door and head home. Still, he hadn’t had even a chance at getting any in months, and while she talked and apparently lived a bit odd, she was certainly more attractive than anyone he had ever dated, let alone scored with. So he followed.

  She did own a refrigerator – at least 35 years old with a pull-bar handle like the one his grandmother kept in her garage. The ceiling boasted another bare bulb ringed in cobwebs peppered with trapped gnats. Ceiran had filled two tall juice glasses with ice and was splashing a healthy dose of vodka into each. She filled the rest with orange juice and handed him one.

  “Cheers,” she grinned and downed hers in a gulp.

  “Let’s go upstairs, it’s cozier there.”

  Grabbing him by his non-drink-holding hand, she pulled him up an ancient creaky set of stairs (even the wooden banister looked dry-rotted and ready to crumble). When they reached the top step, she flipped another switch. Another bare bulb. More rotting floorboards. The short hall ended in two rooms, both dark but apparently empty.

  “Close your eyes,” she demanded. When he didn’t comply, she placed her forefingers on his eyebrows and delicately trailed them down, forcing him to shut his eyelids. She held her fingers splat in the middle of his eyeballs for a few seconds and then musically trilled: “now keep them closed.”

  She clomped a few steps down the empty hall. He heard something slide. Then she returned to take his hand once more. “Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed.” she said as they walked.

  “Open.”

  They stood in a pleasure pit.

  The walls were covered in erotic paintings, nude photographs, porno movie posters, Kama Sutra tapestries. If there were windows, they were obscured by the tantalizing array of sex art. The floor was polished oak, and littered with vibrators, cuffs, leather garments, whips. They’d stumbled into the after-effects of an adult book store orgy. In the center of it all was an unmade king-sized bed, looking madly out-of-place with a four-poster canopy of pink and white lace. Restraining straps hung from each post. Satin-sheened rose pillows lay at the head crumpled in a heap.

  She slid a door closed behind them as he stared open-mouthed at the sex palace.

  “Like it?”

  He nodded dumbly. Tonight’s the night, indeed.

  “It’s my very special place.” She whispered like a little girl revealing a deeply private secret.

  Charles gulped a large dose of his drink.

  “It’s very um, kinky.” he said.

  She nipped his earlobe. “Just like me. How about you?”

  “How about me what?” he asked, stalling. He was transfixed by the photographic display of writhing nudes, some bigger than life, fucking their way around the room. A hand caressed the front of his jeans.

  “How kinky are you?”

  He had never really thought about it before. Just getting a woman to go to bed with him had been enough of a challenge.

  “Willing to learn?” he ventured. His pants unzipped.

  She led him to the bed, somehow her own clothes had disappeared. She pushed the t-shirt over his head, coaxed the pants to his ankles. He pried shoes and pants off with his heels.

  She took the glass from his hand and held it to his lips. The tart mix sluiced down his throat as she upended the drink and then threw the glass across the ro
om. It shattered with a wet smack against a wall. Charles jerked his head to see the results of her unexpected violence and was instead yanked onto the bed. She sat astride him, wetting his chest, his neck, his face with licking kisses.

  “Wait,” he mumbled. “Wait. I’ve got… uh… protection.”

  “No need,” she husked in his ear.

  “Not to be rude but,” he began, only to have her tongue lodged in his throat.

  He pushed her back after a moment, and took a deep breath. “But even if you’re on the pill, you know, um disease, and uh, stuff.”

  “Shhhhh.” She slurped in his ear. “I’m clean.”

  She kept up her wet ministrations until Charles could hardly bear it. The walls seemed to pulse with sexual tension, the air filled with the musky stench of her need. And then she was fastening leather thongs about his wrists and scissoring his head with her thighs as she did the same to his ankles.

  He made token complaint but she ignored him and he didn’t really care anymore. Whatever it took to get her on top of him, that was fine. Because God did he want her…

  She did sit on him then, her eyes bright with lust, the white skin of her chest flushing with excitement. And she began to grind, slowly, so slowly, and when the rhythm was set, she began to sing:

  “I made it through the rain

  I kept him from protection

  I made it through the rain

  His cock it grew and grew

  I made it through the rain and chained him unsuspected

  like the others who

  got rained on too

  those cocks I blew…”

  Charles didn’t know what she was singing about, or why; he only drove up and in to her, watching the perspiration bead on her forehead, the jet ringlets sticking to her head as the rest of her sultry twists bounced and bobbed on her shoulders. He was yelling out in orgasm as she finished one song and began another.

  “Somewhere in the night

  I’ll screw him deep and sweet as sin…”

  Her voice shrieked and she bucked on top of him as she reached her climax – still singing.

  Charles collapsed limp in his restraints as she groaned and rocked herself slowly, bringing her hips back under control. Then she rolled off of him with a gasp, and licked his chest. Her fingers stroked his face. She poked his nose again.

  “Beep.”

  He smiled.

  “I just want you to know,” she began, averting her eyes and trailing a long red-painted nail down his sternum, “whatever happens, you were good.”

  Her fingers played upon his nearly flaccid member, sliding across its stickiness.

  “Whadaya mean?” he slurred drowsily. The liquor and sex had left him without a spasm of energy. He just wanted to sleep as he watched her hand raise from his crotch, thumb and forefinger rubbing together on a gob of white.

  “Good, good good good,” she repeated, a quirky edge to her voice. She rose from the bed and walked as if dazed to the far corner of the room. There was a circle painted on the floor, and some kind of triangular diagram within. She sat at its center, positioned her legs to cover two of the stripes within the circle, and pressed her soiled thumb and forefinger to the floor. Then she began whispering something. It was a chant of some kind, and while the words seemed like gibberish, the cadence felt familiar. Her voice rose and though he still couldn’t make out the words, he felt the impulse to join in. Words rose from his mouth without conscious thought. He was singing the chorus to “Mandy.”

  Somehow the juxtaposition of Manilow and occult magic shredded the curtain of exhaustion and Charles felt afraid. He tested his bonds, quietly straining against them one by one, trying not to draw her attention. He was locked down tight. Naked and vulnerable. With a woman who didn’t believe in any furniture but a bed. This, he suddenly decided, was not a good thing.

  “Um, Ceiran,” he croaked.

  Her chanting didn’t slow. “Could you, um, let me out of these? My arms are starting to hurt.

  The chanting got louder, more intense. He felt an overpowering urge to sing along. To cry out for the love of some dog named Mandy.

  “What did you mean about ‘whatever happens’?”

  There was a blinding flash, an explosion. Lightning seemed to strike in the room, though how it could get in, he didn’t know. For a second he thought he heard voices, screechy wails answering Ceiran’s incomprehensible syllables. Her chanting was abruptly silent.

  He tensed with fear, straining to see through the smoke to where Ceiran had been a moment before. What if she had been struck by that flash, what if she was dead and couldn’t let him out? Who would hear a man yelling from this house surrounded by muffling growth? In this room apparently hidden away in the middle of the building?

  But then he saw her silhouette rise through the fog. She extended a hand as though offering him a fruit. But she still had to cross the room to give it to him.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, totally confused. The smoke swirled around her in fragrant eddies tainted with pine and sulfur, moving with a life owing nothing to wind. She did cross the floor then, and the look in her eyes made him fear for his life. Worse. It made him fear the manner of his death.

  She held a knife in her other hand, its tip smudged with red. A thin trickle of blood crossed below her bellybutton, dripping to disappear in the dark thicket below. He pulled now without subterfuge at his bindings, but they only constricted further. He was trapped by a naked woman with a knife and something in her hand that instinct told him was even more dangerous than steel.

  She laid the knife on his throat and her teeth suddenly looked carnivorous, not carnal. “Now whatever you feel, don’t move,” she cautioned.

  With the other hand she cupped his balls, which he feared she was about to excise. But the knife didn’t leave his neck. Instead, a warming sensation seemed to wash over his skin from her cool, cupping palm. And then a shaft of needles ripped through his bowels, a mix of pain and pleasure that grew to a white-hot sword before receding again to a dull pressure. She retreated from the bed then, hands at her sides. The knife slipped from her hand to clatter uselessly on the floor.

  “I really am sorry,” she said, the little girl back in her voice. She sounded genuine. “I only need you for a couple days. There’s even a chance you’ll be OK afterward.”

  “After WHAT?!” he shouted. “What have you done to me?”

  “I took the seed of our love, and called in two Direkits from the eighth plane. They need to incubate for a few hours before they’ll be fit to grow outside the body. They’ve taken hold of your balls now, and should grow five or six inches by tomorrow. When they come out they’ll be mine to command. And they can do some pretty cool stuff.”

  “You’re crazy,” Charles shouted, growing increasingly annoyed at her simplistic, silly speech.

  “I’ll come back later when you’re in a better mood,” she said sulkily.

  The door shut behind her, a lock clicked into place. Great, Charles thought. I’m now the prisoner of a bonkers dominatrix. He didn’t believe the Direkit B.S. But what had she done to his balls. They felt swollen, sore. Was he bleeding? He could barely lift his head enough to see them, but he strained against the cords and shook his penis to the side. His testicles looked inflamed, chafed red with pulsing purple veins raised angrily throughout the skin.

  And then one of them moved.

  The motion sent a wave of dizziness through him, but before his head fell back, he saw something that stretched the thin testicular skin. A leech, a snake, something dark squirmed within his sacs. “Holy shit,” he breathed. He leaned back and started to cry.

  Eventually, he drifted into sleep.

  Ceiran woke him with a kiss.

  “Morning stranger,” she giggled. He opened his eyes and felt a momentary confusion. A pale girl with a rebellious tousle of curly black hair rampaging across her head and neck was locked to his lips. It felt so good, so comforting that he began to surrender to her tongue.
Until the ache in his groin reminded him of the events of the night before. He twisted his face away from hers to stare at the pit of her belly button.

  “Oh, you’re angry at me still. Maybe you’ll feel better after breakfast.”

  He stared up past heavy ivory breasts to glare at her. He hoped the anger in that look did something to her. What, he wasn’t sure.

  “I’d feel better if you’d let me out of here.”

  “Not yet,” she smiled.

  It was the smile of a nurse to a terminally ill patient, he thought.

  “What did you put inside of me?”

  She perched a perfectly formed thigh on the edge of the bed, and pulled a TV tray closer.

  “You eat, and I’ll explain it to you,” she said.

  She spooned a mouthful of Cheerios into his mouth from a bowl on the tray.

  “I suppose you would call me a witch. And I don’t mean a nasty woman. I mean honest-to-gosh, call-on-the-forces-of- darkness witch. But,” she paused as she worked another spoonful into his mouth. “I don’t believe that what I do has anything to do with magic. I use some of the trappings, true,” she pointed to the circle on the floor across the room, “but I don’t believe I am invoking demons here. Quite frankly, I don’t believe in spirit stuff like God and devils.”

  Charles’ eyebrows crossed in puzzlement.

  “Then what do you call this speaking in tongues stuff you were doing last night, and flashes of lightning indoors, and whatever it is you jammed into my balls?”

  She ruffled his hair between his fingers. “I said I didn’t believe I was calling up spirits. I think what magic is – what people call magic – has to do with opening the doors to a different universe. Or perhaps a different plane. What I do is borrow some of the power in that place to use it here. It’s not magic, but sort of like a UFO stopping here and abducting someone for a few hours for their own purposes – maybe humans are magical creatures to other races. Anyway, it takes a person with a weird talent for opening the door between, and it’s very dangerous, because the same power that you want to bring through can as easily destroy you. I searched for years for the secrets of the calling, for the right frame of mind, for the right – you would say – spells.”