The Old Absinthe House is dead.

The French Quarter is a cemetery.

The bar’s doors are thrown open to the elements and a gentle breeze drifts in with the dancing notes of a street corner clarinetist. I recognize the tune, but it takes a second to place it. I remember a Janjaweed commander who wore out an old vinyl record during an impromptu interview. Sidney Bechet. ‘Blues in Thirds.’ I shiver, the tune dredging up the kind of memories you wished you could forget, but are carved into you.

Outside, the rain falls in softly patterned splashes, turning the street into a slick black mirror, the reflected neon lights beckoning empty streets.

It’s useless though.

The breeze. The rain. The night.

Nothing cuts through the oppressive New Orleans heat.

It’s claustrophobic. Elemental. Insidious. It has a way of slithering inside your skin, changing you.

I remember the first week I was here, on assignment for The Globe. I remember jogging along the river walk on a night not so unlike this one. The heat was just as torturous then. I remember an unfathomable thirst, the taste of cotton in my mouth, and the smell of cigar ash.

I remember the beat up old shanty that popped up out of nowhere. I remember the hunched figure of a weathered Creole woman rocking back and forth in a wicker chair, a crackling hum reverberating from a throat like dried leaves as she sucked on a tobacco pipe.

My first news editor was the romantic sort when it came to life. Liked to believe there were certain moments that defined a journalist. Chance meetings with chance people, unbelievable stories that get stamped into you. Miracles. Heroism from the cranked out drug addict, the compassion of a prison guard. Stories you don’t forget.

The sappy shit we sprinkle in and pat ourselves on the back for, to distract us from the shit and the mud the world crawls through.

I always thought it was idealistic bullshit meant to inspire the interns, make them forget what we subject them to. Because honestly?

Those moments, those stories, are polished turds that hide a diseased underbelly. The places and moments ignored even during daylight because they’re dark, foul, and smell of sulfur. Death. Scorched bone. The sour notes of debased sex. Those are the moments you don’t forget.

I remember the words she whispered while she offered me a jar of liquid darker than the black of space. I’m not sure why I drank it. I suppose it was desperation to quench a thirst I didn’t know needed quenching.

It was thick like molasses and burned my throat, muddied my thoughts and wrung me dry till I was left dry heaving in the dirt.

As I was kneeling there, she read me. Said it was her gift.

She told me to fear a black rooster with jade eyes, to pity the one in chains, to wake the girl in the moon. She told me many things, most of which sounded like the mad ravings of a senile fortuneteller.

I think about that memory as I wallow in writer’s block, my ragged, tired face reflecting back at me in the mirror behind the bar, the light from my phone swallowing my features in shadowed light. My thumb hovers over the send button. I hesitate, but I’ve got a deadline and I have no story ideas.

I hit send.

* * *

The bartender flashes an unimpressed frown as I finish my masterpiece – a glass pyramid of empty bourbon tumblers. I ask for another and she sighs throatily, tucking a stray wisp of red hair behind an ear filled with a row of shiny silver loops.

At a table in the corner sits a jittery blonde, a delicate sandaled foot trying and failing to keep pace with the discordant rhythms of the clarinet. There’s an innocent beauty to her betrayed by the skull tattoo on her right bicep and the black diamond stud in her nose. She’s been alternating between grimaces of tightly coiled nerves and childlike awkwardness each time she fiddles with a ringed finger.

The bartender, Eden, I think it was, sets the newest tumbler down in front of me. An easy smile forms on her lips, the frustrated boredom in her eyes melting away. Violet nails click over the bar as she leans over the counter to ask about the giant question mark scratched into my journal, drawing my attention to pale curves threatening to spill out from a dangerously low cut cowl top.

I shrug, lost in thought, and mumble out an empty response. Her nails drag across the dark wood. I look up, expecting a dirty look, but her red mouth is a wry toothy grin. She winks, catching me off guard.

An obnoxious whistle joins the clarinet and a young local with honey hair saunters in. He reeks of lazy charm and narcissism. The blonde’s eyes light up for the first time since coming in and she pulls her ring off. He sits down next to her, arm curling around her waist, hand resting on the exposed skin of her copper thighs, fingers traveling high until she giggles and squirms in her seat.

Behind me, Eden turns away to clean the line of shot glasses for the fifth time. It’s when she turns that I notice it, a tattoo peeking from under her shirt.

The old hag’s words rattle my skull like tambourines.

“A black rooster with jade eyes.”

A phone shrieks and the memory cut off, replaced with a song that makes my blood boil, fingers inch for the knife I’ve kept hidden in my boot since an assignment in Iraq.

I’m halfway across the room before I know it, blade drawn. Expect I’m not. I’m spinning into the arms of a woman much smaller than me.

“Not worth it,” a voice purrs into my ear.

My body shakes as I look down into frosty blue eyes framed by a mane of black hair.

“Cassandra?” I rasp.

The slim woman pouts.

“How many times have I told you? Call me, Kasper.”

I shake my head, forgetting the desperate text I sent. “Casper’s a friendly ghost… And you are…”

“Not at all friendly,” she finishes, smirking. But I’m already looking over her head. She follows my eyes, and pinches my ass. Hard.

“Ouch,” I hiss.

“You’ve really got to work on that temper, Blair. Candy-ass girls like that only come to N’awlins for one thing. Believe me, darling. Desperate little girls like that aren’t worth your anger, no matter who they remind you of.”

I move forward anyway, memories of a different blonde in a different city making my eye twitch. Cassandra’s hand latches painfully around my wrist.

“Let it go. It’s unbecoming.”

I grit my teeth and flow with her as she leads me to a booth in the back, slapping my ass and cupping the left cheek for good measure.

“Besides, I spiked her next drink with a laxative on my way in. Little waif won’t be taking anything up the ass tonight,” she whispers into my ear as we sit down.

Her eyes twinkle and I can’t stop a dark grin forming.

“Now, on to business. That brilliant little writer’s mind of yours is going crazy again, isn’t it?”

I nod over to the bar where Eden is clearing away my masterpiece. As I do, our eyes meet and my heart bangs against my chest like a gong. Green eyes burn like jade fire and the world sticks like a scratched film, faces frozen into half formed expressions. Not Eden though. Her lips peel back from her teeth into a manic grin. The temperature rises.

A lather satchel is dumped onto the table and the world un-sticks. Eden disappears.

“Do you know the difference between Hoodoo and Vodou?”

I look wildly around.

“Blair?”

A finger snaps in front of my face.

“Just… thought I… never mind.” “Hoodoo and Vodou, right? Not much. One is folk magic, the other a syncretic Haitian religion. Why?”

Cassandra pulls something out of her satchel and slides it across the table.

* * *

“You want to steal from ritualistic sex cultists?” I ask, flipping through a slim, leather bound album of polaroids.

“Yes and no,” Cassandra shrugs, propping lean legs on the booth’s table.

Many of the photos are blurred, filled with splotches of grays and whites, then splashes of orange and red.

I raise an eyebrow and Cassandra waves me on.

Gradually, the quality improves. The grays and whites become figures cloaked in shadows; the oranges and reds become flames from stone fire pits. Each new page reveals something new. Wooden bowls stained red and filled with half melted trinkets: jewelry, tubes of lipstick, cut up pieces of credit cards and photo IDs. Another contains braided clumps of burning hair in varying shades mixed with what looks like scorched bone.

Eventually the photos infuse the debouched to the macabre. There’s a raised, black marble dais with a stone altar, unrecognizable symbols etched into the side and piled high with animal furs: bear, wolf, a tiger.

And like a melding of Kubrick and Poe, it’s surrounded by nude bodies painted like specters. The female forms are ethereal, the skeletal outlines glowing in vibrant hues, as if they’d come from a Dia de los Muertos celebration. The men wear black velvet top hats, their half-reaper faces illuminated by smoldering cigars. Their erections are painted stark white with lines of black, reminding me of the segmented nature of figure bones.

I rub my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.

The next several polaroids depict a velvet-lined casket containing several dusty bottles that look eerily like tsantas, shrunken heads. Whatever this cult was, they were stealing inspiration from ritualistic traditions up and down the Americas, all the way to the Jivaroan tribes.

I glance up and raise a questioning eyebrow. Cassandra looks unsettled. Worried. The last photo is grainy, the faint outline of a feminine form illuminated by dancing flames in the background, one of those very same shrunken heads raised high like an offering by a faceless man. There’s a description scrawled sloppily at the bottom.

“Loa’s kiss?” I ask, confused.

She shrugs. “Loas are Haitian spirits. Intermediaries between Bondye; the “Supreme Creator.”

“This is what you want to steal, isn’t it?”

Her smile is joylessly dark.

“Magic cure all without the demonic side-effects such as swiveling head syndrome?”

She ignores my attempt at lightening the mood. “If it were only that.”

Her eyes fade to muted blues for a moment before she snaps back. “They’re combining Hoodoo folk magic practices with Haitian Vodou, and interjecting something more. Something darker. Corrupting both.”

“And?”

“Have you ever been on a psychedelic trip?”

“No, that’s your world. Why?”

“What this does?” she shivers. “Historically, Hoodoo has been regarded with fear. Sometimes derision. Herbal concoctions infused with magic meant to improve lives or ward off evil. Or with respect from those truly versed in its cultural significance.”

“So?”

“So imagine the full release of the mind. Unhindered. Unhinged. Free. Unshackled from moral moorings. To see things we aren’t meant to. With the added benefit of being a potent aphrodisiac that releases pure, animal instinct. Sex sells, darling,” she finishes, gesturing to the album. “But they shouldn’t have this. They can’t have this.”

There’s pained recognition in her eyes. She’s not telling me everything. She knows exactly what it is, and it’s more than just a crazed cult’s infomercial miracle drug that solves sexual impotence and writer’s block.

She’s nervous and her pupils are dilating hard, like she’s tweaked out on something.

But to be honest, I don’t even know enough about Cassandra to be sure of anything except that lies and deception define her given what she does for a living.

“But?” I ask?

“But.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

She looks away.

One truth I do know. Cassandra is jagged edges and dark humor. Hard like diamonds. Not easily scared. Which plays perfectly with her sharp, severe beauty. But here we are, in a dead bar, her unnaturally white teeth chewing lush lips.

“Kasper.” The name brings her back.

“My contact.” She gestures to the photos. “You remember, Ell, right?”

I nod. A graceful blonde with sad, heterochromatic eyes and a nasty right hook, Noelle was a chameleon of a sort. She liked to change looks almost as often as politicians change values for votes.

She had that easy vulnerable smile that draws men in, the type that gains trust easy, and soaks up secrets like a sponge. She played the vapid princess trope as easily as she played the foul-mouthed trailer park skank. A subtle weapon for Cassandra’s line of business and a resource most journalists would kill to have in their black book of seedy sources.

“Ell was conducting background research like always. Cult followings and rituals these days… usually they’re harmlessly sophomoric. Spoiled fraternity brats trying to spice up drunken sex parties. It should have been simple.”

“Aren’t they all?” I lean back, nursing a cup of bitter black coffee in an effort to sober up.

She shrugs. “I received the album two weeks ago, standard practice for potentials. Not a word since. Ell is many things. Breaking contact has never been one.”

I shift, the old hickory booth now painfully uncomfortable. I’ve had many sources over the years. From the underbelly of LA street gangs to good people that got in too deep with militant organizations. I understood the worry in her eyes. When you lose contact with a source, it usually means they’re dead. Or worse.

I’d done many things for a story in the past. Some I regret. I’ve pushed too many, pushed too far, for information in the hopes of a Pulitzer. And gotten them killed because of it.

Infiltrating a crazed gothic sex cult seems enjoyable at first blush. But I’d done pieces on sex trafficking in Europe and the horrors it spawns. Mixing ritualistic sex, supposedly real magic, and fanatical believers was another sort of monster entirely.

“Why haven’t you gone in yourself? You have both money and muscle.” It’s a noncommittal deflection and she knows it.

Her eyes darken and there’s something just under the surface, a tension in her that seems fragmented, not quite human.

“Even money can’t buy genuine trust and friends, Blair.”

I force down another gulp of terrible bar coffee. “Friends, huh?” I suppose in a twisted sense we were something like that.

“Are you with me or not? If you won’t do it for the story of a lifetime, do it for Noelle.”

She leans forward, pleading in her eyes. And it unsettles me more than any of the polaroids. Women like Cassandra don’t plead.

“I’ve never led you astray before, have I?”

I think back to when we first met, during a corporate merger and wedding event at the Oak Alley Plantation.

I still remember the scent of blackberry shampoo and the tangy flavors of sex.

I still remember the blades of the grass in her tangled mess of raven hair, the gladiator sandals thrown over a sun kissed shoulder, the feral grin splitting full, bruised peach lips. And that crimson line of liquid dripping from the corner of her mouth.

She’d lifted my press credentials from my coat pocket as she palmed my crotch. Her way was saying hello, she’d always say. Which, invariably, was a swift and not so pleasant exit from the event as the groom himself, newly crowned heir to a tech conglomerate, stumbled along shortly after. Flustered. Furious.

Billionaires, apparently, don’t take too kindly when you see them shoving their flaccid cock into their tux, not two hours after exchanging vows. Especially when you’re suddenly without a press pass.

So she’d definitely led me astray before, maybe even still was. But eight months later, and several front page headlines because of her, I couldn’t say no. I owed her. The real truth of it though, was that I didn’t want to.

* * *

It happens in the dead of night, with eyes blurred to exhaustion from glowing screens. When I have more fingers of bourbon in me than even the most dour and fatalistic of journalists should.

It begins with scents: of freshly dug earth and smoke.

The shuffling footsteps come later, pulling me from a dream.

I can’t move. A suffocating heat bores down, so heavy I swear I hear my bones creaking.

Sheets rustle and the bed sinks as a weight is added.

A nude body crawls over me, hardened nipples dragging over my chest, a wet pussy teasing my cock.

My eyes slither open and Eden stares down with jade eyes, cigar in her mouth, face half skeletal. Her hips wiggle and grind against my growing erection and frosty arousal pours out of her icy cunt like demonic vanilla soft-serve. Then she smiles wide. She pulls the cigar from her mouth and holds it like a pen, leaning in close. I scream as she starts to draw across my chest, the smoldering end pushing deep into my skin until I can smell burning flesh. It feels like an eternity before she finishes. She leans back, a satisfied grin on her face. She maintains the grin even as she reverses the cigar, pressing it where her heart would be.

Eden’s form melts away like a shell of candle wax, bubbling, then reforming into the body of the old hag from the river walk, her nut-brown skin leathery. Her heavy breasts sag with gravity and her grin is crooked, mouth filled with jeweled teeth.

Her English is just as thick and foreign as I remember. “You don’t listen,” she says. “White man never does. You see. You see. The ghost has many skins to deceive. ”

She giggles, if hags can giggle, breasts heaving. Then she leans in and presses a tobacco-flavored mouth to mine, grinding her coarsely furred groin against my painfully erect cock. It feels like steel wool. I grimace into the kiss. She presses harder, prying my mouth open with her tongue, probing. Searching.

Liquid fire leaks from her cunt, soaking my stomach as she glides back and forth. My hips roll forward, desperate to sink into her worn body, not for pleasure, but the belief I’d be able to gain something from this dark copulation. Steal from her what she’s not telling me.

She bites my tongue, pushing me into the bed, cackling. “Remember,” she says. The word turns in my mind until I see stars. Her hot folds part as she shifts back, catching at the swollen head of my erection, swallowing it, swallowing me, until I can’t breathe.

I surge forward, screaming into the shadowed face of Cassandra. Her lips glow ruby red and they part, pulling back from pearled teeth, until her jaw unhinges and I swear I’m peering down the maw of a prehistoric monster.

I wait for a death that never comes from a face that’s haunted my dreams since we first met.

It never comes, just a word, floating on the darkness, obscured by the pounding of my heart.

I wake up.

* * *

I yank sweat soaked sheets from my superheated body and a shadowed figure moves. I fumble for the lamp, for the knife under my mattress. Someone beats me for the later.

Dim light floods the darkness.

Cassandra sits at the edge of my bed watching me, more vulture than hawk. She’s looking down. Straight at my erection and the sticky cum bubbling out. I make a quick play for a pillow, wincing at I jostle my dick a bit too hard.

“What are you doing here?” I croak.

She pulls a silver vape pen from her mouth and tucks it behind an ear.

“Waiting for you to wake up.”

I shift as my erection starts to wilt.

“Can’t you do that like a normal person?”

Cassandra leans back, but her eyes never leave the pillow between my legs. She wets her lips and I halfway expect a serpent’s tongue to unfurl.

“What about me has ever been normal, darling?”

Point.

“What are you doing here, Cassandra?”

The clock on the dresser burns 1:11AM in blocky orange script.

She shrugs, as if it’s obvious. “It’s time to go.”

“Go?”

It’s then that I drink in her appearance. Her raven hair is coiled into an intricate braid; cobalt highlights shimmer in the moonlight and her lips are once again the shade of a bruised peach.

She tosses a black bag onto the bed.

“Get dressed.” She doesn’t say anything else. Just uncrosses lean legs and disappears into the shadows and out the front door of my pathetically small apartment.

* * *

“I look ridiculous,” I grumble, trying to pull the silk loincloth further down. But it’s a hopeless endeavor given the size, and only results in needing to fight off the erection threatening to form as the slippery material drags over my groin.

Cassandra leans against a black sedan, puffing away at her vape. “Need a hand?”

“Funny.”

She blows a swirling ring of mint-scented smoke, looks longingly up at a crescent moon. Under the warm glow of the streetlights she cuts a strikingly severe beauty. Her slime frame is encased in a tight corselet, a red gem flashing in her belly button. She’s a living gothic cliché, but damn if she doesn’t pull it off.

“Alright,” she whispers, more to herself than me. “Let’s go.” She opens the door and slides into the backseat, grommet laced leggings teasing smooth skin.

* * *

The town car finally comes to a stop and not soon enough. It’s been mostly awkward silence since we left my apartment. Just clipped conversation and precarious jokes.

I grab the gothic tailcoat and pop the door open, desperate for a respite from the frosty atmosphere and step out into an even colder one.

Metairie Cemetery.

I run a hand through my hair, already slick with sweat.

Figures.

“You forgot something,” Cassandra murmurs at my ear, dropping a velvet top hat onto my head.

* * *

We wind through the cemetery in silence. The tombs get more intricate the deeper in we go. Some flanked by gargoyles, others by weeping angels. An hour drifts by before Cassandra finds the one we’re looking for. It’s a black marble tomb, stylized like an Egyptian pyramid. Cloaked figures flank its entrance, arms crossed, as motionless as the statues we’ve passed.

They look at us with pinched faces and hooked noses, lidless eyes bulging out from drawn hoods. Their skin is mottled as if burned and there isn’t a trace of hair on them. I supposed sex cults preferred grotesquery to blunt hired brawn.

There’s an exchange of words between Cassandra and the shriveled men. It sounds like scratchy hisses and I begin to wonder if this poorly developed plan should be aborted. After a clink of metal and more hisses, Cassandra grabs my arm again and pulls me up the steps as an iron gate shudders open.

Once last chance to bail. The thing with stories is, the ones that try to mirror the brutality of life, the noble hero always dies, usually holding his guts as he pisses himself.

I didn’t particularly want to go about that way, but some things you just have to do, no matter how poorly thought out.

We step into an icy darkness and the gate slams shut behind us.

“I don’t think these are sophomoric fraternity brothers looking to get their dicks wet,” I mutter.

“No, I don’t think so,” Cassandra agrees, arm tightening in mine.

* * *

Torches spring to life, blinding us with dancing flames, illuminating a narrow set of stairs. Just their mere presence throws logic aside given where New Orleans lies. I say as much to Cassandra. She doesn’t respond.

I can feel a pressurized heat emanating from it and I feel like Odysseus descending into Tartarus as we mount them.

* * *

With each passing step the heat builds and I find myself thankful for the ridiculous loincloth. I look over at Cassandra and the heat doesn’t seem to faze her at all. Her face is a flat emotionless mask.

* * *

The descent seems to take hours, the heat suffocating before we finally reach the landing and an oak door. Cassandra pulls a key from between her breasts, fits it into a lock, and pushes it open.

* * *

Black quartz glitters in the torchlight above us like a billion stars twinkling in the night. Hushed chants echo from beyond a smoothly carved tunnel, filling the cavernous hell with eerie music.

“Pick up your balls if you have to, Blair.” For the first time tonight, Cassandra sounds like her old self. Her voice steadies my skittering heartbeat.

“It’s just sex, right?” I joke.

“Of a dark sort. Don’t pop too early,” she whispers in my ear, fingers twining with mine.

With her warm hand in mine, I wished we could take a moment. Say things that probably needed saying. But as that Janjaweed commander in the tent once said to me, wishes can’t buy a damn thing.

* * *

The tunnel opens up into an enormous room with a domed ceiling. Noelle’s photography didn’t do it justice. A slant of moonlight drifts through a glass sphere in the center of the dome and I’m not sure how the light makes it down given that it appears we’re several hundred feet below ground. An elaborate system of mirrors I suppose.

I follow the path of the beam to the fur-lined stone slab. The scene before us is almost an exact copy of the polaroids.

Kubrick and Poe.

Sex and the macabre.

Nude bodies dance in elaborate, helter-skelter patterns as a trio of hooded figures purr out sugar sweet chants in foreign tongues. The sound slides into me, under my skin, into my bones.

It’s otherworldly. Sinister. Euphoric.

The heat builds.

Giant coffins form a haphazard perimeter around dais and the stone altar. Some are filled with those shrunken head bottles. Others are overflowing with sex. Bodies piled on satin pillows. Hanging over edges. Rutting away on the dirt floor beside them.

Grasping. Clawing. Sucking. Thrusting.

The scene is unhinged, thought given way to primitive animal instinct. The wet slaps and cries of pleasure form a distinct, debauched symphony arrangement with the chants.

The scrap of cloth between my legs rises.

A skeleton twirls in front us and comes to a stop, hips cocked. It reaches out to grasp my erection.

Cassandra slaps the hand away and the skeleton giggles, the painted outlines of her round breasts jiggling.

“I’ll take care of things here.”

I don't hear her. The debased scenes consume my thoughts. Off to the side, the curvaceous form of a well-endowed female is pressed into the soft dirt, ass wiggling high in the air. Two skeletons spar over the right to take her ass while she giggles, telling them to take turns.

On the coffin above, a man reclines, observing the scene with lust, fist clenched in the short hair of the muscular body working between his legs. His abs clench and he squeezes his eyes shut, pulling the unknown mouth off him, spurting into the sweat soaked face of a younger male with the chiseled jaw of a model.

My erection shudders, no longer caring for propriety or whether I’m straight for not.

Sharp nails drag across my back and a throaty voice spits annoyed venom into my ear.

“Find Noelle.”

Cassandra turns me about.

“Look at me!”

It’s hard to with everything going on around us.

She pulls my face to hers.

“Noelle. Repeat it.”

Her touch settles my mind enough for the words to break through.

“Noelle,” I repeat.

She squeezes my hand, and even under the spell, I notice what that squeeze really means.

I nod.

* * *

I don’t find her.

I weave my way round and round the room. Through the kind of sex that would make porn stars blush -- skeletons dancing naked from partner to partner. Rutting in dirt that softens and slickens to mud from sweat and body fluids. Men and women slurping and fucking in elaborate daisy chains. Goblets filled with the honeyed juices of slippery cunts and spurting streams of engorged cocks. Slurped down like champagne and shared one after another in a superheated, writhing pile of pungent flesh. Spilled over others and rubbed into the skin like massage oil, like ambrosia.

Noelle was nowhere in the tangle of bodies.

“Because she’s yet to make her appearance,” a familiar voice husks.

I spin around.

Eden’s naked form grins back at me, cigar tucked inside her cheek. Her hair shimmers like molten copper. Her pale skin borders on translucence, upturned breasts capped by hardened pink nipples. Bangles of small dyed skulls knotted together adorn her arms.

“You.”

“Me.”

She skips right up to me, pressing her nude body to mine. “That’s not really my name, though,” she says, grinding a lightly furred groin against my leg. The scent of hot peppered rum fills my nostrils.

“Fuck,” she sighs, nibbling and licking at my neck, her hips shifting in circles against me. “These wankers sure know how to cock-up Vodou traditions, but shit if they don’t get the fucking right.” The cockney accent spills off her tongue like syrup.

Her gyrations speed up and I find my hands sliding down her back, fingers questing for her tight anal ring. My mind blurs again and she shudders, impossibly strong arms squeezing me tight as she drenches my leg in a river of hot feminine juice.

The sounds of drums begin to thunder in the domed chamber. The heat increases again and my head starts to sag, falling onto Eden’s shoulder. Her hand moves between our bodies, pumping my throbbing erection in time with the drumbeats before pulling away.

I sway drunkenly.

“Follow,” she says, turning around and leading me slowly behind her, hand clasping around my still growing member.

In the back of my mind, voices bellow out. Find Noelle. Find Cassandra. Others voice dark desires, carnal acts to work on the nubile form that leads me. The voices war with each other, snarling. My mind breaks as I shuffle forward in a fog so deep I don't see it.

Don’t notice it.

There’s a tattoo that spans Eden’s back of a black rooster in flight.

* * *

A photojournalist once told me about an experience on an unnamed river in the Amazon. His boat got caught in a fog so thick it defied imagination. The world just disappeared in front of him. Like he was trapped in a cloud. He couldn’t remember how long it lasted, only the empty fear of nothingness. A sort of limbo where the mind tries to explain what the eyes are seeing but can’t. So it weaves a story, a reasoning for it that’s so real that reality and imitation change places. When the fog dissipated, he nearly threw himself off the boat, unable to comprehend it all.

I thought he was just bullshitting me.

But when you wake up to your own hellish limbo, you become a bit of a believer.

Eden lies between my legs, gazing up at me, puffing lazily at her cigar.

“The boy stirs,” Eden teases, “but not the one I wanted.” She fondles my flaccid dick and it jumps in her hand. “Never mind,” she laughs. Her cockney is gone, replaced by exaggerated Irish.

“You’re not human are you?”

Jade eyes roll. “I am. And I’m not. I’m a woman. And I’m not. I drink. I smoke. I fuck. To outrageous excess. What else matters?”

She taps her cigar over my waist, sprinkling glowing embers of ash over my stomach, my pulsing erection. I try to squirm away, but she holds me down. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it.”

“I doubt it,” I grunt through clenched teeth.

“We’ll see.”

The cigar lowers, lowers, till it hovers over my balls. With a devilish grin, she presses it against my skin and drags it up my shaft. I flinch... and I barely feel anything. A cold, silky wet softness follows as quickly as the smoldering log of tobacco burns my skin. Scorched nerve endings are repaired as quickly as they’re killed, skin melting and reforming in nanoseconds, stronger than before. The dichotomous sensations mingle and the intensity of the pleasure it sparks hits me harder than an avalanche.

Eden flicks the log away, braces her hands on my hips, and swallows me down until I hit the back of her throat. She holds me there with a garbled groan, drooling. The sensation is too much. The debauched sex I’d already witnessed too much.

The first torrent takes her by surprise, a shotgun blast of semen that forces her to pull off. The second blast douses her face, her breasts. Her eyes burn with green energy and she grasps my shuddering cock and wraps ruby lips around the head, sucking down the last few pulses with expert precision.

“Your average bitch can’t do that, can she?” she purrs, picking up her head to fix me with a predatory stare.

* * *

I watch the scene unfold beneath us from where we float above inside the glass sphere I noticed when Cassandra and I first entered. The ritual, if that’s really what it was, had descended into primal madness. I could hear it all. See it all. The debauchery was fed into the sphere, hundreds of images paneled on the curved walls in unimaginable detail.

It has me thrusting into Eden’s sloppy cunt faster, harder. I paw at her breasts, pinch her nipples, sink my teeth into her pale shoulder until cold blood bubbles slowly out, fills my mouth with its metallic tang.

She begs for more, a tighter mingling of pain and pleasure, until she’s a mess, drool spilling from her lips, feminine juice sloshing in my lap as I force her up, down, up, down.

Until she orders me to slow down, hold steady inside her a moment. She lifts off and shudders on shaky legs, liquid cream sliding down her inner thighs.

“It’s time your friends made their appearances,” she rasps.

The screens flicker, focusing on the stone slab and the cresting chant of the three hooded figures.

And there, lying naked on animals furs, is Cassandra. Her face is flushed, black hair damp. Tan skin shimmers under flickering torches.

“And now my favorite part,” Eden whispers in my ear, moving behind me.

The earth in front of the slab quivers. The chanting cuts off. Skeletal bodies spring away from each other and a swirling whirlpool of muddied dirt. A form climbs out of the abyss and the earth quiets, stitches itself back together as it mounts the large black dais the stone altar rests on.

Noelle.

“What did you do to her?” The words fumble out as brief clarity clears my mind.

Eden runs a hand up my chest.

“Not everyone comes back the same after the kiss. There was a pain in her she wanted taken. As loa, we do what we can. Sometimes, they come to us too broken.”

Noelle mounts the dais, climbs onto the stone altar, and hovers over Cassandra’s shocked body. One of the hooded figures hands her one of the dusty bottles. She pops the cork and takes a deep pull, holding the liquid in her mouth.

“She, however, still has a chance. She loves you. In a way. But she’s afraid of what she is. What she became to survive. She wants to change that.”

“Who?” I ask, but I already know.

Eden’s hand drifts to my rapidly inflating cock as Noelle leans in and captures Cassandra’s mouth. The resistance is minimal. Her arms encircle the taller woman, crushing her to her. Thick black liquid leaks from their joined mouths, spills down Cassandra’s cheeks. The kiss turns hungry, desperate as Cassandra swallows the ‘Loa’s Kiss.’

Then it becomes violent. She pushes Noelle away with unnatural strength, sends her spinning off the altar. A terrible shriek echoes through the domed chamber.

“All facades of falsehood must drop,” Eden says, voice hot at my ear.

Silence fills the room as a figure in a tailcoat and a velvet top hat pushes through the crowd of dirty, sweat slick bodies. When he reaches the stone altar, he shrugs the coat off.

Ebony skin glows like polished obsidian. Unlike the others, it isn’t paint that decorates his body. They’re tattoos, intricate lines of white and red detailing every bone in his muscular body.

“My husband, Samedi,” Eden purrs, her hand lazily pumping my cock. “Isn’t he magnificent.”

He climbs onto the altar as Cassandra suddenly goes limp mid snarl. She looks around, confused. Then something strange happens. The roots of her black hair change color. Her tan skin pales. Green creeps into her eyes.

Samedi’s hands grasp her slim hips and he pulls her towards him, pushing her lean legs back and up over his shoulders.

“Fuck,” Eden grunts, hand pumping faster.

He pulls a loincloth from his groin, revealing a purpled headed cock that looks more like a battering ram than a penis.

“Let me go,” I whisper.

She doesn’t hear me. Her hand is a blur on my erection.

I grab her wrist, squeezing.

“Let me go down there,” I growl.

Her grip loosens and not because she’s listening.

She’s laughing.

A full laugh, that starts in the belly and erupts out in a crazy torrent of sound.

“What do you mean?” she cackles. “You never really left. I’m the only one yet to join.”

She points a long finger at the sleek dark form of her husband as he presses the fat head of his cock against Cassandra, spearing into her flared pink lips.

I don’t see it at first. I’m too absorbed by Cassandra’s nude body as it changes, morphs in increments. When Samedi flexes his ass, pushing through her small tunnel, I finally do, if only barely in the flickering torchlight.

A mottled, pocked scar on the side of his hip. A scar that was all too familiar from a piece of flying shrapnel.

Everything shatters.

* * *

I look down as Cassandra’s blue eyes fade completely to green.

“Now you’ll see,” Eden grunts as Samedi’s cock, my cock, surges forward into the clasping confines of her slippery cunt.

I could feel what he felt. Or was it what I felt? I wasn’t sure anymore. I was only aware of a deep longing not entirely my own as the ebony cock hanging between my legs drills into the pale redhead folded nearly in half in front of me.

There’s nothing romantic to the coupling, just raw, powerful need. Filthy obscenities. And wet squelching.

I start to feel my conscious slipping away and I claw desperately at nothing to remain where I am, trapped in the burning heat of Eden.

Wasted effort.

I’m buried.

* * *

“I’m sorry I drug you into this. I’m sorry for the lines. But it was the only way. It has to end.”

The familiar voice startles me and I look wildly around. I’m in a dimly lit room with a vaulted ceiling and stonewalls covered with plant life.

A dark-skinned girl with stark white hair sits chained to an iron chair. I don’t think she could have been more than eighteen.

She looks up with tired eyes. “Hi, Blair.”

“Cassandra?”

“After a fashion.”

She nods over to a tree behind her. I reel back. Cassandra, her body anyway, is tied to the tree by thick, half-decayed vines.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “What the fuck is going on?”

“All you need to know is that I need to rectify the awful things I’ve done.”

“I don’t…” She cuts me off.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

I flounder for a response. I was more lost than I’d ever been in life, trapped in a story with entire chapters blotted out.

“You grow up with family always dying round you, you take to it real easy, no matter what your mama taught you. I never expected to be one, wearing skin after skin.”

The girl’s words are static in my ears. I’m fixated on Cassandra’s form hanging in the tree. She notices.

“I don’t know why her consciousness stuck around. She was the most damaged shell, inside and out. But here she’s been, from the very beginning. I don’t quite understand it. Mama would say it’s God’s will. She has a purpose. I don’t think God much cares, but I think she does have a purpose.”

“Her personality has been spilling out, mingling with mine. I never really noticed before. It’s never happened. I’d always hated peaches, especially after… But there I was one day. Cans of them stacked neatly in the fridge. Stacked in the shelves. Peaches everywhere. I spent a whole day getting rid of them.”

She laughs. It’s a brittle thing, like splintering glass.

“I remember things, fleeting blurs of happiness. A spinning tire-swing. A dog with floppy ears. Memories that aren’t mine. They’re hers. Because everything I remember is crystal clear horror. Twisted faces. Men in hoods. Peaches on their breath as mouths… “

She looks up with large brown eyes, leaves the tangent unfinished.

My skin is hot and prickly and my body shakes. For a man who makes his living with words, none came. How could they?

“I woke up with blood on my hands. In a body that wasn’t mine. I remember feeling satisfied. Free of a dark pain. You know, I even licked my fingers clean that first time. I savored his blood, even if it also made me queasy. Even felt aroused. I guess that’s what vampires must feel when they feed. I can’t remember how many bodies I’ve used as shells since that day, how many lives I’ve stolen. You stop counting after awhile.”

“I thought I was trying to give them a way out, to let go of their pain. I told myself I was only stealing from ones who didn’t have the will to live anymore. That they were serving a greater purpose. They’d agree.” She shrugs. “Narcissism. Revenge ain’t so a great purpose.”

She turns back around.

“But it breeds a blackness in your soul. And I’m sorry, but I’ve birthed something horrible. And she won’t stop taking. Not unless you wake her up and let a ghost die.” She nods over to girl, the real Kasper.

I struggle for several moments, trying to take it all in, to understand.

Fail.

Realize that some things a man just isn’t meant to fully comprehend.

“Underneath it all, it was you though, wasn’t it?” I say, finally finding my voice. I walk over and kneel down on one knee. “It wasn’t all her. The jokes. The jobs. Noelle. I.”

The chains around her frail wrists drag through the soft earth as she struggles to reach up a hand, but the shackles weigh her down. She doesn’t have the strength.

“No you don’t. It’s sweet of you to think and it eases my heart for what’s to come, but the woman you fell for isn’t me. Those traits: her charm, her wit, and her humor. Those are Cassandra’s. I can’t, I won’t take credit for them. Somewhere, somehow, it was her that was growing fond of you. So I did as well.”

“That’s fatalistic bullshit. You’re better than that!” The words come out in a rattled whisper as I try to inject confidence in them.

“Am I? You don’t even really know me, Blair. You...”

Her body suddenly starts to spasm, fists clenching, black blood dripping into the dirt. “Go,” she spits out. “Take her and go. She wants to tear you apart, squeeze the life from you because of an ancestor you don't even know.”

I hesitate.

She strains at her chains, fighting something back.

“She doesn’t really want to wake up. You’ll have to convince her. Give her a reason why. Now go. Go!” she screams.

I lunge forward, sprinting to Kasper’s hanging body, pulling at thick vines, muscles straining with the effort. An eternity seems to tick by before the last one gives and her light body falls into my arms.

* * *

I run through the crumbling corridor of Cassandra’s mind, her limp body dangling in my arms, small feet dragging on the floor. Behind us, a dark shadow sweeps through the labyrinth eating the light as it passes, shattering the bulbs of light that I was told hold Kasper’s memories, her lifeblood of a sort.

I stumble along, her weight wearing me down until my lungs threaten to vomit up out of my body. The distance to the doorway out seems to span the vast nothingness of space. My arms burn and I have to stop. I sit down against a wall that’s slowly crumbling to dust.

The stories have it all wrong. Shining gallantry doesn’t exist. Good, noble deaths are horrible lies meant to distract from the true, wretched ugliness of it.

I consider leaving her behind. Free myself from this sick nightmare. It’d be easy. I’d done it before. Made promises to sources to get them out of warzones. Failed to do so. So many promises given, so many tossed out like dirty pennies.

I look down at her small body curled in my lap. Her consciousness barely seems alive. A blip of a weak heartbeat or the illusion of one given where we are. I pull tangled black curls from her face. She has the same severe beauty, the same lush lips. For some reason, I expected changes. Or maybe I wanted them. Needed them. To prepare myself for the likelihood of a girl different than the one I’d come to know, the one who told me to let a ghost die.

More bulbs shatter and the corridor grows darker. Only a precious few are left.

Kasper’s eyes dart under her lids as more pieces of her are broken, the mad beast inside desperate to exert control, finally flush her out, with me along for the ride.

I struggle to get up, mount one last effort, but my legs are cramped up and I fall back down into a pile of dust. I don’t have the energy left to get us both out. I lean down, bury my face in hair, and plead for her to wake up.

A blood-curdling howl echoes down the length of the hall. I slam my head back against the wall, and echo that howl with my own.

Fuck it all.

My head droops, the last of my energy extinguished with that howl. And I notice something. On the inside of her left bicep is a tattoo of white ink, barely perceptible unless you were looking right at it. It’s of a girl reclining in a crescent moon. The old Creole woman’s words ring loud in my ears. The same words a ghost told me. But how? How do you convince a tortured soul to want to wake up again, especially to a horror such as this?

A memory comes to me of a nightmare, or so I had thought. My chest burns. I rip my shirt open and there’s my answer. A brand of burnt flesh made by a cigar, formed into the shape of a sun.

I concentrate on a feeling. And because I don’t know what else to do, I start humming along to “Blues in Thirds.”

* * *

Times passes. More bulbs shatter. There’s only one left. A chaotic shadow comes to a rest in front of us. I look up and hum louder, pull Kasper in closer to me. Concentrate harder. The shadow rears back.

And Kasper’s body shudders in my arms. I look down and her eyes start to open.