Jeremiah Quick

by SM Johnson

  "Once there was a beautiful boy, the most beautiful boy in all the world, and he lived here, and he asked for a dungeon..."

  Chapter 35

  She.

  She's here.

  But at the same time she's far, far away.

  I have to tell her, she has to understand that this was no ordinary love affair. I hope she's not too far away to hear.

  "… and I… I couldn't say no to this beautiful, depraved boy. I could never say no to him. Everything you see here, is here because he asked for more. I have re-ordered time, turned the world upside down, and I did it all for him. And I was never, not even once, exhausted from living up to his expectations of me."

  In fact, Jamie stopped outlining his dirty little fantasies, because, in the end, my appetite outgrew his imagination.

  The cage she glared at the very first day, spent a few hours in, and hated so much she freaked out at the very idea that I'd put her back into it? I kept him in it for a month.

  Gave him leave to pee on trees morning and night, walked him around the property on a leash and made him shit squatting in the yard. And then made him pick it up with a plastic bag that he carried in his mouth to the trash can. It took only a few days of isolation to have him greeting me in the fashion of an adoring pup, with yips and yelps and happy whining, wagging the tail I plugged into his ass with unabashed joy. My Master's home, my Master's home. He ate and drank from dog dishes on the floor, allowed to use his hands only to scoop up his waste with the plastic baggies.

  How pathetic and sad he was when I locked him in the kennel to leave him. How happy he was at my every return.

  The bottoms of his feet grew soft as his knees grew callused.

  I petted him, brushed him, bathed him like a pet. Treated him as if he had no more intelligence than a Labrador. Mounted him often, as if he were a bitch in heat.

  I fed him treats from my hand when he performed tricks for me, and sometimes the treats were a cruel surprise, pieces of raw pepper and onion, actual dog kibbles. And if he refused to eat them, I smacked him with a length of pipe rolled in newspaper until he did.

  She was right, I was a bastard.

  Sometimes I left him alone so long he had no choice but to soil the kennel, and then I got to punish him, push his face into his mess and smack him with the pipe, and he'd apologize with his whole body and beg forgiveness with his eyes, pleading from head to toes for praise.

  I ended that form of play abruptly, asking him, "What are you doing in there? You're a man, not a ridiculous dog, and we have an important dinner tonight."

  I took his tail away and dressed him in a proper suit with horrible fancy shoes that were not comfortable, and I took him out to a restaurant.

  He was beside himself trying to remember how to be a man, and in public, no less.

  The struggle I could see in his eyes, on his face, with every awkward, hesitant reach for his fork or water glass… delicious.

  I devised a million tests of endurance for him, and he passed every one. I also designed tests of obedience, and these he did not always pass. Sometimes he was doomed to failure by design.

  He was… everything I wanted him to be at any given time.

  He was my perfect, beautiful boy.

  I punished him for every sexual encounter he'd ever had with anyone who wasn't me.

  He'd had a love affair with another man for almost two years. I punished him for that one by putting a cock cage on him, and leaving it on for almost two full months. That was so hot I think I fucked him twice a day, enjoying the fact that if he tried to come erect inside the cage it would only hurt him and make him more miserable.

  I forced him to drink my blood, and he was no different than Pretty, in that regard. He didn't want to drink it at first, but eventually took it into himself as greedily as he took my cock.

  My precious, precious boy.

  There was nothing I asked of him that he wasn't willing to try.

  He looked at me as if he were gazing up on the face of God, the poor dear, even while I know mine is much closer to that of the Devil. Option B. If there's a God, there has to be a Lucifer, the incarnation of Eden's serpent, coaxing Eve to eat the apple – that's who I would be. He who has knowledge shall be free. He who gives knowledge, a teacher of the best kind.

  She.

  She won't ever forget now.

  Not now.

  I've etched it into her skin, secured it with the formula.

  Oh, it's not carved deeply, not like if you wanted serious scarification.

  I don't and won't make that big of a bloody mess of her, won't disfigure her.

  Just these fine reminder lines, that's all.

  I hope it's enough.

  It has to be enough.

  Chapter 36

  Jeremiah cut lines in Pretty's skin and told her story after story about Jamie. The terrible things he did – they did together – in sordid detail. The night he had both blood and shit from fingertips to elbows. The time he strung the boy up on a rope contraption that strangled him if he struggled. The pleased toying that came next, how many times Jamie struggled despite all warning, how he'd cut off his own breath to the point of passing out at least half a dozen times.

  So much.

  They were horror stories. Filled with blood and pain, sweat and tears. And yet the listening part was not horrible because his voice, his eyes, and even his hands were infused with so much love, it was impossible to misunderstand.

  He repositioned her now and then, and always in between, stripped the bed and covered the plastic mattress with a pristine white sheet. He put down towels soaked in the burning solution, then coaxed Pretty onto them with firm voice and firm hands, now on her back, now on her side, until there were few areas left uncut.

  She didn't even flinch from the lime-scented water anymore.

  She was mummified in bandages and periodically he re-wet them with a saturated sponge, but she'd removed those body parts from her psyche and no longer considered them hers. If there was pain in the re-wetting, she didn't feel it. And she didn't mind the idea of being scarred with the fine white lines of his symbols. These scars would be beautiful to her.

  There were places on her back where her nerves jumped into the knife, and the pain was a pervasive sort of pleasure, a leaping toward him rather than a flinching away.

  She no longer flinched away from any of it.

  Who knew her every inch like he did? The pen and its strange gentle knowing, yeah, sure – but there was nothing in the world like being known with a blade. The cold kiss and even, sharp split, the way it entered her flesh and knew the inside of her, and loved her so much it craved a deeper bite than even Jeremiah would allow.

  She thought of the cutting instrument as a 'knife' though it could have been anything, and often was. He switched between hand held craft or Xacto knives, scalpels, box cutters, the large folding knife. For all she knew, he could have been using an ice cube to fool her.

  She fuzzed out sometimes, like when he drew in blood and pain over her spine – she felt that keenly– the drag and arc over bony protrusions – the pain bright and real, then, though still she arched more often into the knife than away. She let the pain consume her, imagining blood patterns down her back, a pool in the center hollow where her spine dipped inward.

  It wasn't at all like the concentrated lines of a tattoo gun, it felt more precise, and without the white-noise distraction of the buzz.

  This was – clearer, somehow, edged in pain, yes, and at times a similar pain, but so much more intimate, so immediate, that sometimes she screamed without realizing she was screaming.

  And when she could hear beyond herself again, Jeremiah would be stroking these shocking wounds with blunt fingertips, stretching them open with mean little tugs and sighing, "Yes, yes, Sunshine, let it out. No clenched teeth, no repressed emotion. Let me hear how much you hate me."

  And when she sobbed, because she should hate him but didn't – she didn't – he would take her hea
d in his hands and lick her tears again.

  She loved that he frightened her beyond measure, though somehow she knew that wasn't why he was doing this. He was doing it because something in her spoke to him, begged him to teach her all of this, and yet it would be to no avail. She'd come to realize that she'd still be the person she was now, when this was all over. Her basic nature would remain. And for some reason she knew this was why his hate was so interdependent on his love.

  He wanted to hate her.

  But he couldn't.

  He was blind to her daily trials. He had no concept of a life without significant interaction with others – check the homework, do the laundry, feed them and transport them. It wasn't glamorous, and had never been. It was a lot of petty this-and-that bullshit, and one can get as lost in that as in a crowd of protestors holding signs.

  This is what he didn't know: sometimes Pretty hated her small-detail life of complacency, and longed for the fire and zest of her youth – the social change, the outrage that fueled her college years. Fuck yeah, nineteen times a week she wanted more. No fucking doubt.

  But… there was a bigger picture, a broader scope, that he might never see, but that Pretty now saw with stunning clarity.

  She would raise open-eyed children who weren't afraid of the Dark, who wouldn't be sheep, who could never grow up to be Them. Because they'd have Pretty, and because Pretty had Jeremiah Quick. They were the lucky ones, all of them, and it mattered.

  He loved her, hated her, hurt her, and made her cry. And if he asked her to die for him, she would gladly agree.

  But that's not what he asked.

  Chapter 37

  She.

  She stops fighting the process and accepts it. Almost like an art form, a living, breathing sculpture, leaning into the knife, begging to be molded by my Dark, and soon enough I'll have her rolling in it, reveling in it.

  She doesn't cry much anymore, and I'm thirsty for her tears. For a while I'd been giving her long breaks, but now they weren't more than half an hour, sometimes less, sometimes only long enough for me to gulp down a beer, feed her some water, or take a piss. There is momentum now, an urgency to finish that's both exhilarating and fear-inducing.

  There is only a little bit left. Her hands and her face.

  I want her in the student desk for her hands, a blood manicure, willing to sit and offer them to me, one by one, front and back. Four. Four directions, four elements.

  It has to be perfect.

  She has to give them to me, on her own. Sit there across from me holding out her hands, giving permission.

  She does.

  As I cut symbols into her palms, and tiny numbers and letters into her fingers, I tell her about this place, the furniture, all the trouble I went through to make it Jamie's version of heaven.

  She watches my face, periodically watches my hands, the careful angle at which I hold the knife, the shallow draws of blood.

  I tell her more about Jamie, how we missed each other twenty times in ten years, and then he inherited this house from his grandfather, and I found him before he'd been here a month.

  Way out here in the wilderness was perfect for us, ten years of looking for each other, ten years of wondering, of wild imagination. It was Jamie who wanted the dungeon. We could play whatever games I could devise.

  This, he tells me, the first time I held him and covered him with my body, my arms wrapped around his slim shoulders, and all kind of perverse thoughts in my head just from that first moment of REAL. He wasn't a fantasy, he was here. I'd pressed my ear to his chest and listened to his heartbeat – thump-athump, thump-athump. My boy under my head and my heart and my hands. Mine.

  And so I gave him everything he asked for, and then anything else I could think of that he might like. I gave him sick and twisted fantasies, and he ate them, every one, and asked for more.

  And when I worried that I'd crossed some line or another, he'd laugh at me – laugh! – and say something flip like, Oh, my love, my heart, not even close.

  He was the perfect boy for me.

  How it was possible I could have and hold him was beyond me, never mind the more-than-that activities of horror that I wanted to (and did) perpetrate upon his willing body.

  The more-than-that was bliss. Sometimes I made him my little boy doll, dressing him in boots and ripped tights, miniskirts, makeup, and lace. He looked even more boy then. And it made me want to eat him immediately.

  Who gets this kind of boy, ever, even once in his life?

  I did.

  Chapter 38

  Later he positioned her on her back, hands restrained to the topmost edge of the bedframe, with restraints just above each of her bent knees, and these he attached to the bed near her shoulders, pulling her legs up, keeping her obscenely exposed.

  Pretty cried when he cut the curve of her jaw with one hand and slid fingers into her with the other; the sheer terror of having the blade to her face competing with the lewd openness he was requiring from the rest of her – left her gasping and rigid, shocked and dreadful. Words could hardly describe the utter vulnerability of it – that he asked for positively everything, and she gave him positively everything – and in that moment their souls were joined in a way she'd never experienced before.

  He was in her and on her, surrounding her, hurting her, loving her. He licked blood and tears from her face, and looked so fragile, so hopeful while he did it that she couldn't look away from him and didn't try to, just stared right into his eyes until his thumb brushed across her clit, and the spark-shock of it made the world go away.

  If he'd killed her right then she'd have had no complaint. If he'd asked her permission to snuff out her life, she'd have given it. She'd have kissed his lips goodbye.

  She was… embarrassed, afterward. More horror-stricken than she'd been for any of his stories, perhaps because now she'd become one of them.

  Her simple existence had ended.

  Now she was a monster, a mass of scars and hurt and change.

  He kept his left fingers inside of her as his right hand carefully drew shapes and symbols – glyphs, he called them – on her forehead and along each line of her lower jaw with the fine point of the craft knife. Tears streamed form her eyes in a continuous flow, and he consumed them, of course. Something about facial nerves were immediately connected to tear ducts, and she cried more tears than he could capture on his tongue, and he tsk-ed her and made soothing noises.

  Sometimes his fingers twitched or curled, shocking her back into that reality, the one in which he violated her in so many ways she almost couldn't keep track.

  The little brush inside changed her focus for short seconds of time, made her aware of her position – open to him in every possible way.

  When he was done cutting her face, he took his fingers away, and Pretty marveled at the loss.

  He put her on hands and knees, then, and rutted into her as if he were furious.

  The worst part was that she was wet for him, and his cock slid easily in to mark her as his own. The entry alone made her come, and his subsequent hip-snapping motion built her up to climax all over again – and the inside of her head formed the rhythm of a chant – Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick – and he was imprinting himself on her psyche in a way that she couldn't fight.

  He fucked her twice that way, the first time sliding his cock into her pussy and it was so perfect it made her whimper at first and shout by the end. The second time was slower, and lasted longer, and his cock stretched the muscles that protected her anus, demanding entry, demanding submission. That time left her aching and raw and begging for him to come, to end this, although he was still wringing orgasms from her over-stimulated clitoris, and she peaked and tensed, relaxed, then peaked again, tight as a stretched wire.

  He chanted, too, in her ear, "Mine, mine, mine," and she surrendered to him, trying to stay open for him, be open for this.

  She felt him come, not just the grunt that rolled through his chest, but the heavy
urgent squirt from his cock.

  He let her shower after that, while he put the bloody sheets in the wash and wiped down the mattress.

  The shower.

  How much she took such a simple pleasure for granted – the unwinding of bandages, the normalcy of standing beneath a fine, warm, stinging spray. It was the first shower she'd taken alone since arriving here, and it was lovely, despite the fact that her body was so terribly wounded that every droplet hurt, and the very thought of soap was terrifying. She grit her teeth and braved shampoo and conditioner, though, because she could feel there was blood clumped in her hair. Whatever was in his liquid fire seemed to do something to the cuts to stop them bleeding. The edge of the wounds were white, the wounds themselves dry. She patted herself dry and was so languorous and content that she practically floated back out to him.

  He was waiting for her, with a leather belt and a pair of cuffs.

  Her eyes took in this information, but her head refused to process. Surely he wasn't going to beat her?

  But no. The belt was for wearing not beating, and snugged uncomfortably against the raw skin of her waist. The cuffs clicked closed around her wrists, and Jeremiah used simple double-ended snap clips to attach loops on the cuffs to loops on the belt. "No hands," he said. "Just for a while."

  Pretty stood still and quiet while he twisted her hair into a braid, and she wondered about that, for the Nth time – under what circumstance his fingers had learned to weave these patterns in hair.

  He patted the mattress, which was covered with wet towels that smelled like his citrus solution. "Lie down, Sunshine."

  He draped a citrus-soaked sheet over her

  The sting and burn was familiar now, no longer a shock, not even that first instant, and she didn't react. She saved her energy for scarier things, for when he changed this game.