They were driven in a limousine to an enormous,
eighteenth-century church illuminated in floodlights against the night
sky. They were blindfolded, walked a short distance, and then helped
down a staircase and through a door that sounded heavy and equipped with
many locks.
A bare wooden floor beneath Jennifer’s feet creaked. A
lighter door squealed open, and a hand on her arm led her down wide
stone stairs. The air here felt cold and damp. “Stop here,” the
accountant said. She heard a shuffle of feet. The blindfold came off.
Jennifer found herself alone within a labyrinth of narrow
tunnels of rough-hewn stone. She sighed in dismay, knowing she was being
shown a secret that would not be lightly freed to the world above.
Impenetrable doors closed behind her.
Most of the passage ways around her were cloaked in
darkness. A dim light pointed out the only direction open for
investigation. Brushing away annoying cobwebs, she had only an instant
to discover the filaments to be fine wire rather than spider’s silk.
Given another moments to think about it, she would have realized how
effective a trap the wires would be charged with the five hundred
thousand volts typical of a stun gun.
Jennifer had no memory of collapsing to the cold stone.
The pain of jangled nerves disoriented her. Consciousness did not elude
her entirely, however. Strong arms hoisted her over a broad shoulder and
carried her away, dumping her onto a hard bed in a cramped cell. When
she recovered her wits, she looked into the benevolent smile of a man
dressed in a black hooded robe. A priest, Jennifer thought, and then
though better of the notion.
“Welcome back, my dear. You’re such lovely catch. It’s
not often we have such succulent young morsels wandering into our lair.”
Jennifer tried to sit up. Her muscles refused to
cooperate. “Where’s John?”
“John is meeting with the high priestess.”
“Rosie?”
The man wrinkled his nose. “You should have no knowledge
of her, none whatsoever.”
She tried to rise a second time. A hand on her shoulder
pushed her back to the hard mattress. “Relax, my dear. Use our time
together to ask your questions. They’ll answer a few of my own. There
will certainly be no time later for idle conversation. And I do enjoy
talking with outsiders. There is so little said among most of our
congregation.”
“If you hurt me,” Jennifer said with utmost confidence,
“John will kill you.”
“Indeed, he has the power to do so,” the man said
solemnly. “Even your Rosie knows the futility of defying a
representative of the Dark Lord Himself, but your John may not realize
his true mission in life, nor the sad futility of trying to hold to a
bauble as elusive as yourself.”
“You sound like some kind of complete idiot,” Jennifer
said.
The man nodded profoundly. Jennifer thought for an
instant he had agreed with her assessment. “Ah, the power and wisdom of
the unbeliever,” he said instead. “I had forgotten the vehemence with
which men deny their own heritage. It seems these days that all the
forces of the world have conspired against us, even as the darkness of
human nature makes itself more and more apparent.”
“Blow it out your ass,” Jennifer murmured and redoubled
her effort to sit up.
She failed.
She gave up and tried another tact. “What are you going
to do with me?”
He smiled this time. “Those who fall prey to the web are
sacrificed to bloodlust.”
“Why don’t you just quietly wack off in a dark corner
before I consider some bloodlust of my own?”
“I am but a servant of Armageddon,” the man said. “I
wasn’t the one who determined your fate.”
“Just following orders, I take it.”
“Just following orders.”
He withdrew an object from beneath his robe. Holding the
hypodermic to the light, he removed the plastic cover from the needle.
“Wait a minute! What is that stuff! What are you going to
do?”
“Shush, you pitiful little creature. You will find out
soon enough for yourself.”
She couldn’t move fast enough to stop him. The needle
went in through a bare patch of skin on her upper hip. She slowly went
numb, but she remained conscious. The man leaned over her and, rolling
her from side to side to gain access to buttons and clasps, he undressed
her.
Shock and outrage coursed through her without any means
of expressing itself. When he had shucked off her last item of clothing,
he lifted her in his arms with a grunt and a chuckle at his own
clumsiness, and he carried her from the cell and down the stone
corridors to a chamber of darkness.
The echoes of the man’s footsteps and strained breathing
gave her some indication of the size of the chamber. As she was spun
about and deposited upon cold stone, she saw hints of vast archways
overhead. They were beneath the cathedral topside. She could hear the
dim strains of a church organ penetrating from far above.
The man began to hum along with the majestic tune. He
reached out of Jennifer’s view for a glass jar and unscrewed a metal
lid. She would have gasped in shock when he slapped a handful of cold
lotion upon her bare skin. Under the influence of the drug that had been
injected into her, she twitched not an iota.
Using both hands, he began applying the lotion to her
stomach, unceremoniously dipping between her legs and kneading both
breasts to apply a thorough, even coating across her entire torso,
although he seemed entirely unaroused by the chore.
Jennifer had absolutely no idea of what kind of perverse
preparations were being made. He made no effort to apply the lotion to
her lower legs, or her arms and face. But those, she soon discovered,
were to be wrapped with a foot wide roll of crimson lace. He bound her
legs together just above the knees with the fabric, and then lifted her
arms above her head and bound her from just above her breasts all the
way up to her hands.
When he finished, she could see through the fabric. She
could breath through it. She heard him wiping his hands on his robe,
and, for whatever the observation was worth, she saw that they had been
stained a dark reddish tan color by the lotion.
He left her alone for a time. Jennifer tried to take deep
breaths of air in an effort to clear her head. She exercised her fingers
and lower jaw. The numbness slowly subsided. Within another few moments,
she would be able to move and, hopefully, to flee and hide in the
darkness.
He came back before that happened, and she managed a moan
of protest as he gave her another injection in the hip. With a helpless
inner storm of despair, her outer body again slowly turned to lead.
This time, though, the paralysis was of another species
and had no effect upon the sensitivity of her skin. She felt the gentle
breeze of his passage and the touch of his finger as he adjusted corners
of the crimson gauze. If they meant to cause her physical injury, she
was going to feel it, and be helpless to prevent it.
The drug did nothing to cut off her flow of tears. John,
too, would have been overpowered and disarmed by now. Blundering into
the lair of these people had been foolhardy. She had not thought of John
as the type to fall prey to his own kind so easily.
She had time alone with her thoughts. In the end, she
heard an approaching murmur of voices. They brought with them the
echoing of shuffling feet and the breeze of their passage as they filled
the hall and drew close about her.
“A particularly fine specimen,” a man commented from so
close by that he could have reached out and touched her.
Another chuckled. “What would we do without our arrogant
little infidel to entertain us? Rosie has such exquisite taste in prey.”
Novels by
William G. Tedford