The wedding invitation, blood-red script on black, didn’t surprise. However, the time and place did pique my curiosity. Aza and Harri’s wedding was precisely timed, six minutes past eleven on Halloween in the Terminus Chapel at Rookwood cemetery.
Now Rookwood wasn’t just any cemetery, it was Sydney, and indeed Australia’s, largest, having been open for business for one hundred and fifty years, with a million burials under its belt.
As you would expect, I giggled at the Terminus Chapel name, which appealed as a very Annie-like play on words. In fact, the building had originally been part Sydney’s rail network, a dead-end perhaps; with funeral trains from the city running twice daily. Tickets cost one shilling, though corpses travelled free.
The funeral trains stopped many years ago and the building fell into disrepair. But, in one of the periodic bouts of privatisation, the Government sold the Chapel to a private philanthropist. I hadn’t realised, until the invitation arrived, that this was now, like Rookwood’s modern chapel, a wedding venue.
And, if an old mortuary chapel was available, it came as no surprise that my most goth friends had made that their venue of choice. For each of them was considered somewhat weird by our friends, but together they were much more than the sum of the parts, more like weirdness squared.
How I met Aza, in our first year at Sydney University, was lost in the mists of time. But, when I think back to my university days, Aza was always at my side. Kind of like a protective guardian angel, even letting herself be a scapegoat for some of the scrapes I got myself into.
In fact, she was more panicked than me and my boyfriend, Joseph, when I missed my period in my second-to-last year. Fortunately, that was a false alarm, but I was surprised by the intensity of Aza’s concern.
Her name, which was, I discovered from the invitation, short for Azazel, was perhaps the least unusual thing about her. While her skin was pale, everything else was dark. Black hair, dark eyes, black makeup, dark clothes. I have resorted to that old Henry Ford joke, ‘that Aza could have any colour she liked, so long as she only liked black.’
She also adored body art and bracelets, though her taste wasn’t everyone’s. A tattooed web and spider hung from an earlobe, clinging to her neck. And on the other side of her neck, two tattooed daggers pointed towards her heart.
I hadn’t seen all of her body as she hated the sun and never came to the beach with us. But she had told me about other tattoos and piercings, like the goat she had tattooed above her mons the day her clitoral hood was pierced.
Shortly after my pregnancy scare, Aza introduced me to Harri. And the moment I laid eyes on Harri, I knew she and Aza were peas in a pod. Not physically identical, as Harri was, at five-two, a full foot shorter than her girlfriend.
Rather they shared the pale skin and dark sartorial tastes. And an obsession for ancient and modern religious beliefs. Not that they ever went to church, rather they just were so intrigued by why we humans thought as we did.
I had, one evening over a pint of Guinness or three, learnt about Celtic myths from an Irish backpacker I waitressed with in my first year at university. Susie was fascinating, telling me why the Celts started what became Halloween, around 2000 years ago.
They enjoyed, the night before their new year started on the first of November, a festival called Samhain, to celebrate the harvest and the start of winter. Traditionally, Samhain was when ghosts made an appearance, and the Celts, dressed in masks, with bonfires lit, put out food and other offerings for their supernatural visitors.
Susie struggled with Halloween’s timing in Australia, thinking spring better suited Beltane, the Celtic festival honouring life. At the end of October, in the peak of spring, life is bursting with potential fertility which, Susie argued, would be better celebrated than the northern autumn.
I didn’t learn any more about Celtic myths that day as, having mentioned bursting with fertility, Susie remembered she was fair bursting too. So, after getting another Guinness for us, she changed tack and flirted her way into my knickers.
Susie’s knowledge of myths was, however, trivial compared to Aza and Harri's. When telling me about different cultures’ creation myths, it felt as if they had been there. And Harri, whose name, the invitation informed me, was short for Harut, also liked to demonstrate magic tricks that had originated in those older cultures.
The two of them had been wonderful on what was the saddest day of my life. The day before I had told them how excited I was as I expected Joseph to propose on my birthday, the following Saturday. And I was so going to accept.
But that morning Joseph just did not wake up. I was devastated then, and always will be, drawing no comfort from the coroner’s report which termed his death inexplicable. Fortunately, Aza, Harri and a handful of others were there for me and kept me from being totally overwhelmed by grief.
Remembering that they had been there for me when I most needed it, made me so full of anticipation for their nuptials as a taxi drove me into Rookwood, past rows and rows of tombstones, dropping me outside the Terminus Chapel shortly before eleven on Halloween. Dressed in white, as requested; as the brides, as was traditional for them, had told me they would be in black.
Of course, had I googled the names Azazel and Harut and learnt their origin, I would have felt more foreboding. But not googling meant nothing clouded my mind that sunny spring day, apart, that is, from the really odd feeling of fragility and impermanence you have when driving into the resting place of a million souls.
The imposing old Chapel was, of course, built with Sydney’s golden sandstone, though that had naturally darkened over time. The only hint of colour now on the outside was the ivy that ran up the left-hand wall of the chapel alongside the remodelled entrance.
The Chapel was bigger than I had expected, but, having once accommodated the regular mortuary trains, it needed to be wider than the average church.
I was greeted at the door by Lucy, a tall, cadaverous, ascetic looking woman. Her eyes ran over me, hawk-like, as she took my hand in her clammy ones, introducing herself as the celebrant for my friends’ wedding. I was used to being checked out, what girl isn’t, but I couldn’t put my finger on why her gaze was so intense. It was as if she knew of me and was checking that I was as she was expecting. That made me shiver apprehensively.
With a hand on my back, she guided me into the chapel past a large statue of the Archangel Michael, the angel of death. That statue would have been a comforting sight for mourners in the past, who would have known that God had entrusted Michael with carrying the deceased’s soul to heaven. I couldn’t help but notice Lucy avert her eyes, weirdly discomforted by the marble gaze of God’s most powerful angelic force.
Stepping inside the church chilled and surprised me. My taste is usually more Rocky Horror than Edgar Allan Poe, so another shiver ran through me as I seemingly stepped back in time into his gothic world. One even less colourful than outside, and darker too given the small number of windows.
The left-hand side of the church was traditional, a high altar with steps underneath it leading down, presumably, to a crypt. Behind the altar, a stained-glass window portrayed Judgement Day, though Hell did have a prominence I didn’t remember from visiting Europe’s great cathedrals. In front of the altar were pews for a good-sized congregation, certainly more than the forty wedding invitees.
But what surprised me, well stunned to be honest, was that the right-hand side of the chapel was the final resting place of restored hearse carriages from Sydney’s original mortuary trains. Concreted into place, the carriages had chairs and tables, which I hoped weren’t the original tables on which the deceased took their final journey, set for dining.
And bizarrely two women, flitting around like bats, were dressed in colourful Studio Neon t-shirts, one of Sydney’s best catering companies, getting the former hearse carriages ready for luncheon service. Their t-shirts and the stained-glass window were, truth be told, the only colour inside the chapel.
Most of the guests seemed to have arrived before me, and eyes turned to stare. I immediately felt self-conscious, being the only one dressed in white. The few men, older and clearly relatives of the brides, were in grey or black. And the women were in dark colours, no one in black, though navy and grey were popular choices.
I was actually a little irritated with the brides. While okay with agreeing to what they wanted, namely me wearing a white dress, I hated standing out like a sore thumb with that decision.
As Lucy turned back to greet other arrivals, my friend Buer came over and hugged me. Taking me in hand, she led me towards the front and we sat together, chatting easily as we always did.
Like Aza, I couldn’t remember how I met Buer at university, but however our paths crossed, we soon hit it off. I had done philosophy as an elective as part of my nursing course as I adored debating philosophy, logic and ethics; as did she. Buer was the only one at Aza and Harri’s wedding who I knew really well, certainly being counted amongst my closest friends.
You know what it is like at university; after a few drinks and weed, you debate the night away. And Buer and I had more than our share of intoxicated conversations about the meaning of life. She too had been special for me after Joseph died, making sure I wasn’t alone and, as a fellow member of the bisexual club, helping me deal with lust; yet instinctively understanding that I was in no way ready to think about commitment.
In fact, she was very adventurous and egalitarian in the bedroom, treating every orifice equally. I learnt more about kinks, shall we say, from her than I had from Joseph. Buer had converted me into a lover of anal and indeed had got me deep throating all manner of toys.
Maybe it was the presence of the mortuary carriages, but, as the organist struck up the ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Wagner's opera Lohengrin, it sounded to me like a dirge presaging that darkness was afoot. Which did seem ungracious on the brides’ happy day, especially as they smiled at me as they walked past, and ended up in front of Lucy and the altar.
As Lucy intoned her opening remarks, she mentioned, God knows why, that this was the six hundredth and sixty-sixth minute of Halloween. As the words left her mouth, overhead, thunder clapped super loud, and the dimly lit chapel darkened further.
We Sydneysiders are used to spring storms rising up in the Blue Mountains and scurrying, with a tight trail across the city, towards the sea. But that was usually in the afternoon and you could feel the storm in the air as it built. This one seemed to have emerged out of a cloudless spring morning and was, oddly, hanging around Rookwood rather than scampering for the sea.
And when a lightning bolt hit the steeple, I was all very thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightened. My fear was then accentuated by a loud noise from the crypt, which caused my heart to race and my palms to become sweaty.
Fortunately, Buer’s soft hand reached out to mine, and, when I looked at her, alarmed, she smirked and whispered, “Does this mean the Gods don’t like gay marriage?”
I couldn’t help but laugh, as I knew we both understood that love was love and opposing marriage because of the happy couple’s gender was just weird.
As only she could now that I had lost Joseph, Buer’s words and touch quietened my racing heart, enabling me to focus on the service. Especially enjoying, in the gloaming of the storm, when Lucy pronounced Aza and Harri wife and wife. And, after the organist had, in a remarkable piece of musicianship, played Mendelssohn's ‘Wedding March’ as a dirge, we settled into the mortuary train carriages for a spot of lunch.
The carriages were decorated with Halloween clichés; spiders, cobwebs, the odd broomstick and fake ghost. Hollowed out pumpkins glowed with candlelight; all, as Susie had told me, drawn from the traditional Celtic way of marking the passage into the darker half of the year.
While the decorations were cute and not at all frightening, I did remember something darker from our conversation. Susie had mentioned that this was a liminal time when the boundary between us and the otherworld thinned, meaning spirits found entry to our world easier and liked to be more active.
Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but joke to Buer that as spirits and ghosts had a liking for Halloween, perhaps it was a busload of them turning up in the crypt that caused the loud noise down there during the service.
Talk about awkward; those who heard my words, turned and stared as if I had been totally inappropriate.
“The Aos Sí are to be both respected and feared,” Lucy said, from a few seats away, her intensity not matched by her understandability.
“Do you mean the devil?” I asked, “But fire at Halloween keeps the devil away.”
Following many sharp intakes of breath, the conversation halted, redefining the meaning of pregnant pause.
“No, not just the devil,” Lucy finally replied, “While some think fire is the devil's natural home, fire is allegedly said to protect humans from a broader range of beings.”
“Allegedly?”
“It is a myth, Annie. The Devil and the Devil’s Henchmen will enter the world at the time of their choosing. Be aware that Halloween is a liminal time, so today makes sense, but nothing, and certainly not fire, will stop them when they choose to call.”
For some reason, Lucy’s remarks gave me goosebumps, and not the pleasant kind. Her words seemed to suck the warmth from the room.
Buer, noticing me shiver, quickly changed the subject. And, credit to the caterers, we ate a particularly good meal while listening to fine congratulatory speeches; after which the guests started slipping away.
I was in no hurry to leave as I was enjoying chatting to Buer and sipping my champagne; happily gossiping, in my own little world, until I realised that only the brides, Buer and Lucy remained in the mortuary carriage with me.
The brides would have none of my suggestion about leaving, saying they had a treat planned. And from somewhere a bottle of green liqueur was produced and five glasses lined up.
“Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,” Lucy intoned, as she placed sugar cubes on flat perforated spoons, which rested on the rim of the glasses containing the absinthe. She dripped iced water onto the sugar cubes, which gradually dissolved and dripped, along with the water, into the absinthe.
“You know what they say,” Buer said, as the five glasses touched, “After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were.”
Sipping the intoxicating drink, I looked around the table and smiled as I saw, lit by flickering candlelight, the three friends who had supported me. You wouldn’t wish a loved one’s death on anyone, but having endued that, they gave me all I could have wished for.
When it came time to have a second round, I realised it must have been around eight o’clock as the sun had set and the church outside the carriages was pitch black.
With our first sip of the second glass of absinthe, Buer toasted, “And they also say, after the second glass you see them as they are not.”
We sipped our drinks in a maudlin silence. When I looked around the table the colour drained from my face. My friends had not changed. Was how I wished they were, not what they were?
Then when I looked at Lucy, she said, “There is a third part to the toast Annie. After the third glass of absinthe, it is said that you see things as they really are. Some say that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
As those words sunk in, me sitting in a mortuary carriage, in the dark, on Halloween, surrounded by a million dead Sydneysiders, I felt a dread, like I was alone on a pitch-black precipice. Palms sweaty, heart racing, the only thing that boosted my flagging spirits was the green spirits I had consumed.
“Not alone,” Buer whispered, “I promised the One to always support you.”
“As have I,” Aza and Harri simultaneously added.
“You are scaring me,” I nervously said, “Who is the one and why do I feel like today will end horribly?”
“How today ends will be your choice, yours alone Annie,” Lucy intoned, as if she was reading from a sacred text.
There was a loud crash, so loud that I momentarily though the gates of hell itself had opened. But fortunately, it was only the doors guarding the steps leading down to the crypt that had prized themselves ajar.
Those opened doors released a glow, the crypt’s ray of sunshine lighting up the church. And that light lifted my spirits, pushing my nervousness down a notch.
“Do you know how Halloween originated Annie?” Lucy asked.
“It is a Celtic tradition,” I answered, “I once met a backpacker who struggled with October being Halloween in Australia, thinking Spring better suited Beltane, the Celtic festival honouring life.”
“Susie’s right,” Lucy continued, “Unlike the north, on Australia’s Halloween the earth energies are bursting with potent fertility; the Maiden Goddess, the manifestation of growth and renewal, has reached full ripeness. That is Beltane; Flora, the Goddess of Spring, the queen, the bride. The Oak King, the Green Man, wins her hand, the Greenwood Marriage, the union of earth and sky, the consummation, pregnancy. In this great southern land, tonight should celebrate sexuality, passion, vitality, joy; and conception.”
“What has this to do with me?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Why do you think we asked you to wear white on our wedding day, Annie?” Aza said, “We knew you would think it was so us to have a Halloween wedding wearing black. But today is about you, in white as you are the Maiden Goddess and your Green Man awaits.”
Looking back, I do wonder why I didn’t run screaming in horror even if it would have been into a cemetery. But somehow, be it the Absinthe or Buer continually holding my hand or my curiosity, I just needed to know. And so, following Lucy the five of us crept down to the crypt.
The floor was covered with spring flowers, azalea and camellia petals to be precise. But what was also there was neither green nor a man. The size of a grizzly bear, the insect-like creature had a large head and a slimy exoskeleton. What grabbed my attention, however, were the tentacles, each eel-like with the end somewhat like an elephant’s trunk.
It just seemed obvious there were eighteen tentacles; six in the front, six in the middle and six at the back.
“Six, six, six; the number of the beast,” I whispered.
“Indeed, Annie,” the insect said in the sweetest voice I would ever hear, “The beast, devil, even Satan. Though Beelzebub is more melodic don’t you think?”
With those words my four companions bowed, respectfully took a knee, and were transfigured, their bodies becoming radiant with gossamer angel wings visible.
“Lucifer, Azazel, Harut and Buer; tonight, you fallen angels are appointed guardians. You have waited, down under, hidden from the sun for a million years. Tomorrow you ride, the revelation to John is at hand. On this Beltane, the end-game begins.”
Fuck, was all I could think. Christian teaching implied the fallen angels would one day be unleashed to wreak havoc. Those accepting God, it was claimed, would be saved from the eternal punishment with which God smited Satan, his fallen angels and the unrepentant.
Totally spooked I wondered, 'What about me?'
As if answering that question, Lucifer said, “Humans cannot reason why, yours is but to do and die.”
Azazel and Buer, more generously, took my hands in theirs. Comforting, which was just as well, as Beelzebub’s face transformed, and I stared into my beloved Joseph’s eyes.
And I sobbed, deep wracking sobs, on hearing Joseph’s voice, “Let go my darling. Do not be afraid, you have found favour.”
Two tentacles reached out and caressed my face. On one side it was Joseph’s tender loving touch, not a likeness, his actual touch. And on the other side something altogether more intense, my skin felt an otherworldly glow that left me aching for more.
“Remember backpacking around Europe and visiting Mount Olympus?” Joseph’s voice asked out of Beelzebub’s mouth.
I nodded, as Buer’s hands, experienced in the task, slid my dress and underwear off. That left me naked before a divine power capable of being my deceased boyfriend.
Eight other tentacles reached behind me and held my shoulders hips and legs, their touch just as exquisite as the one touching my face. And from each touch shockwaves started rippling through my body and lapping against my clit.
“We learnt,” Joseph continued, “Everything’s a game played by the Gods. We humans are kind of irrelevant, at best a means to an end.”
“Ah-ha,” was all I could say, as two tentacles attached themselves to my breasts, the first suck of my nipples more intense than Joseph or Buer ever were.
“Annie that isn’t a myth,” Joseph’s most serious voice said, “Trust me. Our world is actually like a chess game played by two divinities. And not the only one they are playing.”
“Male, female. Thesis, antithesis. Positive, negative. Ying, yang. God, Satan. Each depends on the other,” the honeyed voice of Beelzebub added.
“Good versus bad,” I moaned, as my nipples hardened and throbbed with the tentacles’ delicious sucking.
“God’s best move was to have humanity believe in so-called good and so-called bad,”.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“How are you feeling now?”
“Heavenly.”
“Exactly, can anything this good really be bad. And I have only begun.”
There is obviously a cynic in me and, to gasps of horror from the fallen angels, I automatically said, “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Beelzebub laughed, a rich sonorous laugh, replying, “Only one other woman has experienced these tentacles and not the eighteenth.”
“Who?” I whimpered, as eight tentacles lifted me so I lay prone supported by them, and Beelzebub’s body hovered over mine. Whimpering again as another tentacle softly caressed my bottom.
“Eve. You are the second person to bite my Golden Delicious.”
The tentacle slide, without burn, past my anal ring and moulded itself into my arse. Nothing I had done with Buer had prepared me for the exquisite feeling of a perfect fit and the nerves in my arse throbbed with the intensity of the contact.
While that felt perfect, when the end of a tentacle took my clit in a velvet vice-like kiss, I entered a new realm of pleasure. Instantly engorged by the first suck of the tentacle, the throbbing of my clit matched the intensity of my heartbeat.
All was then held still and quiet, redefining, for me, the meaning of edging. I was on the brink of having my life changed forever.
The tentacles moved, just an infinitesimal amount, and I was consumed. Literally flooded, by a tidal wave of ecstasy, a multi-orgasmic supernova. Waves of intense pleasure, each one, like the incoming tide, bigger than the one before, racked my body.
On and on I spasmed, held like a ragdoll in Beelzebub’s tentacles, as the devil drew from me, by suckling on nipples, clit and arse, orgasmic ecstasy richer, so much richer, than anything gone before.
And, after how long I do not know, Beelzebub paused and let me draw breath, before observing, “Annie, in this game, God and I have agreed that there is always free will. You must make a choice.”
A tentacle slid under the one suckling my clit and touched feather-lite the still spasming opening of my dripping pussy. My soul yearned for completion, I needed that tentacle inside the place I naively saw as the only unfilled part of my body.
“I will not force you against your will. Mine is the bargain Faust did not grasp, your womb for nine months in return for the keys to absolute pleasure.”
“I’ve had that,” I gasped.
“No, that was the appetiser. Absolute pleasure still awaits.”
To experience more than any woman ever? I ached with desire. Yearning, I had to know.
“Take me, I am yours,” I whimpered.
The tentacles holding me against Beelzebub's body tensed their grip on me and somehow surrounded my sensitive organs.
“For you shall have a daughter and her name will be Susej,” Beelzebub intoned.
“Yes,” I said before a tentacle slid into my mouth and down my throat, delightfully caressing nerves I didn’t know I had.
Shockingly, tentacles attached themselves to my eyes and entered my ears, nose and stomach button. It wasn’t like the tentacles switched off my sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Rather they harnessed those senses to my sense of touch, intensifying how my brain perceived every touch every tentacle made, wherever it caressed me.
All the tentacles began to vibrate and my body again was rocked by continuous waves of pleasure, each wave setting a high-water mark, stronger than anything that had come before.
Then achingly slowly the last tentacle, the potent one, spread into my pussy. Like plastic, it moulded and yet stretched me, just the perfect fit. Deeper, sliding over my g-spot and caressing my cervix.
Those who say the clitoris is the centre of a woman’s pleasure, have never had orgasms like these. I was rippling in ecstasy as clusters of nerves I never realised I had were sensually stimulated.
The divine caresses built and then burst in intense clitoral, vaginal, and, even that Loch Ness monster of orgasms, the cervical, and rippled through me. Yet I knew I hadn't reached the pinnacle.
I felt the potent tentacle tense against my velvet slippery vaginal walls. Anticipating the squirt of Beelzebub’s seed, an orgasmic harmonic hum rippled through me as all my cells seemingly turned, like flowers, to face the sun, opening themselves to the energy that was about to soak my pussy and flow against the selected egg that ached with its need for fertilisation.
As Beelzebub came, the pulse of supernatural energy that soaked my pussy, had my body squirming and shaking as I was consumed in the mystical fires of rapture. Orgasming repeatedly. From every part of my body.
Nothing had prepared me for the intensity of infinite pleasure, and only the Beelzebub’s nursing caresses stopped my body disintegrating in ecstacy.
I was beyond ten on an orgasmic Richter Scale, in uncountable territory, as the tsunami of pleasure hit and continually ebbed and flowed. In suspended animation, I hovered between life and death experiencing the divine rapture of full-body orgasms; on and on and on and on ...
I woke, how many hours later I didn’t know. I felt as if I had slept deeper than I had ever slept before. It was as if I had emerged from a dream, it’s vividness perhaps a by-product of my first taste of Absinthe.
But, as if to counter my dream-time idea, my hand stroked my belly. I felt the force, the glow. My egg had been fertilized; the devil’s spawn was on her way.
I remembered that being a mother had been no bed of roses for Mary. The anti-Christ as a social media savvy teenage girl didn’t bear thinking about. But the guardians were there to help me. And from upstairs I heard their angelic Gregorian chant, repeating words that began, “Hail Annie, Full of Grace, Our Lord is in thee.”
The four women smiled at me as I emerged from my Beltane in the crypt and into All Saints Day. I felt, despite my nervousness as an expectant mother, like I stepped into a normal Sydney November day.
“The taxi is on the way,’ Buer said, as she kissed my cheek. As we walked through the door, I couldn’t help but notice the crack in the pedestal on which the statue of the archangel Michael stood. The first sign that the tide had turned and the forces of darkness were about to play their trump card.
That crack made it clear to me why the devil had made a passing reference to John’s last book of the bible. My four companions, the fallen angels, were now the guardians looking over Susej, the black queen in the divine chess game that was my life.
But not just my life, everyone else’s too.
In John’s revelation of the end, he had, I now realised, foreseen the four women sitting beside me as the taxi edged out of Rookwood cemetery. Slowly, given the typical Sydney traffic, the taxi made its way to my apartment, and the citizens of Sydney, and indeed the whole world, went about their lives with some hope and expectation about the future.
But that wouldn’t last. For these fallen angels were John’s four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Scholars had told us what those riders would bring with them. One bought conquest, one bought war, one bought famine, and one bought death.
What the fuck had I done?
