From a Tomb in New Orleans Pt. 02

Odette wakes up on cold stone, still wearing her clothes and with a metal collar around her neck. Her dress is torn and rumpled. The collar is firm and unmoving, connected to the wall by a length of steel chain. The area beneath the collar feels odd, there is a pulsing, sliding sensation and the faint scent of cherries wafts to her nose. A door suddenly opens and purple light spills into the room, Odette scrambles to get as far away from the door a possible, but the chain pulls her down on her ass. A tall white man walks into the room, wearing a suit. He crouches down on his haunches, puts a firm hand under her head and raises her lovely brown eyes to meet his cold blue ones. Then he smiles at her and his teeth are glowing in the purple light. 'How are you? Ready for your first day?'

Odette remains silent and looks away from him. He just chuckles, 'The collar must not be fully functional, gotta give that worm a little time to grow'.

Odette looks up into the face. It is uncannily similar of the one she had met. Though scarred and deformed. His words are insane, but he speaks much better English than the other one.

'What worm?'

'The one inside that metal collar. It's an unsightly little critter, but useful.'

The hand under her chin suddenly wraps around her throat, pushing the collar even further into the skin. The sliding sensation turns to full wriggling and Odette shrieks in pain, surprise and disgust.

'That collar serves the dual purpose of keeping you here as well as using your body heat to power an itty bitty incubation chamber. The incubation chamber houses a type of fungus with a central nervous system. When it's happy, it secretes a gel rich in hormones that imitate your body's system for arousal. The gel soaks into your skin, Bada Bing Bada Boom, your decision making capability drops as your brain starts to repress your rational decision making ability. The collar isn't permeant, once the worm gets big enough ...oh"

Odette has passed out. The man quickly releases the pressure on her neck. She is still unresponsive and collapses into a heap. He sighs, 'Goddamnit". He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a small vial and pours its translucent contents into his palms, rubs them together and firmly presses them to either side of her face.

Odette jolts up and begins screaming. Pain is racing through her body, white hot tendrils of it wrapping around her mind like a brand.

"Sorry about that, the long and the short of it is the worm will keep you safe, healthy and with elevated levels of pleasure hormones. The stuff in my hands is a gel rich in nanomachines specifically designed to seek out and activate as many pain receptors as possible within their 15 minute lifespan, lovely thing is that they are working on such a small scale that they don't do any permanent damage to your neurology, so I can apply as much wherever I want."

Odette writhes on the floor like a carp, gasping for air and slapping the concrete with her whole body. Her hands try to grab at his ankles, to tear his flesh and reap revenge, but he steps back mildly. Observing her squalid, silent torture. He begins to speak again

"At this stage there are two possibilities. Possibility the first is that you just try to relax here and let the worm gestate, I'll move you to a more comfortable room with heating and food, comfy clothes the whole nine yards. Possibility the second is that you try to fuck with that collar or harm yourself in any way, gets you a stay for the duration of your time in this place, where I have to sit with you and apply this gel every 15 minutes until your mind breaks from the pain. I'm going to leave you here. When I get back I trust you'll have the right answer"

He leaves the room and shuts the door, that alien purple lights snaps off and is replaced by that eternally horrifying black of a lonesome room.

Odette spends the last of her 15 minute hell thrashing on the ground, every limbs convulsing until they are bloody. An unexpected final violent knock of her head ceases the convulsions with a dull thunk.

She comes to on a pillow of her own blood and a blanket of cold sweat. The sound of steel on steel pierces the air as the door swings open. There is silence for a few moments and Odette rolls over to see if it is the man back to hear her answer. She is weak and her vision blurry, but she can hear faint breathing. Then suddenly there is a rapid sloshing and slapping sound rushing towards her. She barely glimpses the ball of flailing goo as it smashes into her face like the whipped cream pie of some horrific clown. It is warm and writhing, her eyes are stinging with the unholy mixture of secretions enveloping her face. Suddenly she feels a sudden scrabbling around her neck, then intense agonising rhythmic pulsing, like the when she was 10 and had slammed her thumb with a hammer.

The goo on her face begins to solidify, the texture is like rubber and it begins sealing over her mouth and air holes. She claws fruitlessly at her face, trying to wipe or throw the foul liquid off her. She succeeds only in allowing the goo to trap her hands. She is on the edge of blackness, oxygen starved and only feebly twitching when her nose and mouth clear. She coughs and coughs, inhaling the foul stench of the liquid down into her lungs. Her eyes are still blinded and she can feel her hands are entombed in the latex texture, but she can at least breathe. She can survive for the moment.

There was only a few seconds of catching her breath when the liquid flies back towards the wall, taking her with it. It smashes into the hard concrete with a sucking squelch and her unprotected lower half smacks the concrete with a sickening crack. The feeling of swelling and heat in her neck is slowly cooling and she can feel dissociation through her body. The goo shifts from her eyes and she opens them to the retina searing horror of her present.

The room is dimly illuminated with a soft green phosphorescent light emanating from her assailant. Little globules of the sickly light are small fish at the bottom of an onyx ocean. She can see eyes form, the white protein moulding up and crystallising to form a strange iris, then a speck of milky substance spread across that iris, blinding it until the surrounding body dissolves it to nothing. This process of creation and destruction in this black roiling sea of horror seems to be pulled from the half-remembered dream of some insane god. A chitinous claw seizes her jaw and squeezes so hard she is sure the bone will snap, but the lobster-like shell cracks and a liquid rich with the stench of rot and decay sprays her face. Grey meat slops down from the crumbling stump, coating her already ruined dress.

The garment is not long for this world, the goo has bleached it and now cephalopod tentacles cleave to it and their suckers latch so firmly the rayon shreds on its own. The tentacles do not seem to shrivel as the other limbs and appendages, the balls of witch light travel their length, like flashes of unholy neon. There is now a twitch in her skin whenever a tentacle brushes against her. She feels parallel slithering corkscrews up her legs and the mass enveloping her hands rises as far above her head as her arms will allow, leaving her head now completely free. She is thoroughly stretched and bound, suspened in the air like a hog for the roast. her now naked and glistening body splayed out and soaked in the juices of this mockery of a being. She cannot help but think what she did to deserve this. She has been sentenced to a rack pulled from nightmare for an incomprehensible crime by a cruel, insane judge. Her contemplation ceases she is painstakingly turned over so that her she faces the floor again, the goo holding her up like a hammock

Her eyes are only slightly stinging. Her body is on fire as if with fever. The sweat and tears run together down her face. A tentacle wraps around her throat and she feels the oxygen slowly leaving her body. There is a flick of oily flesh around her cunt and pleasure roils through her. The tentacle at her neck slackens a fraction and she feels herself suck air like a landed fish. Now, waves of sliding pleasure are emanating from the tentacle forcing themselves into her slit. A ragged moan escapes her. She can feel the tentacles pulling on her arms and legs, so hard that she thinks she might snap. Every tug, pull and push drives the fire in her brighter. Soon she was roaring with the over stimulation. The goo bends her in two and a feeler covered in a viscous fluid plunges into her ass. Any time her husband had drunkenly tried this, it had been pain beyond reckoning. Now, it was just one note in a cacophony of excruciating pleasure. So much so that when tiny cilia begin to drill down into the flesh of her face, right down to the bone, she could only push her tongue out to taste her own ichor.

Suddenly, the goo retracts. She drops roughly onto the ground. All appendages retract into the goo and dissolve. Odette's fire begins to fade and now the coldness of the place leaks back into her. She is coming down and the pain is rising. She curls up into a ball, putting her hands to her face and feeling the tiny holes there. They gently dribble blood, many just starting to scab over. Her eyes flick up to her defiler, the goo's phosphorescent light is dimming, each pulse less than the one before it. While the globe fades, the blackness moves into a sphere. It condenses and twists and squirms towards that most unnatural shape. What had been Odette's entire world for the last few minutes compacts into a perfect three dimensional circle, no bigger than a basketball. There seems to be a crystallisation inside the insidious obsidian orb and there was an audible clunk as the goo turns into a contiguous object.

The door to the small cell opens and the indigo light spills into the room and her eyes yet again. Sandpaper over her optic nerves. "What the fuck are you doing here?" asked the non-chalant voice of the man. He strides into the room and picks up the ball. "What did you do to her face? You just can't control yourself can you?" The voice is non-chalant, but the suddenness and ferocity with which he slams the orb into the stone wall suggest a burning fury and resentment. The stone cracks and there is the sound of shattering glass. Shards of black shower Odette who raises her hand to shield her brutalised face. The man's hands are deeply cut, he simply wipes them on the front of his suit. Two trails of blood soak the cotton instantly. The man turns on his heel without another word. He is not gone for a minute when the shards begin to move. Vibrating and twisting out the door, a tumbling river of shiny black shards. When the last spec is gone Odette sinks to a sitting position and begins sobbing fiercely.