Sybil Writes On Leaves

15

After Lavinia’s lesson, I was dismissed to return to my room and rest. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Visions of tortured, anguished faces twisted up in unnatural grimaces haunted my dreams. I walked alone on a road lined with mutilated and dismembered bodies. The smell of blood and burnt flesh filled the air. Cold, razor-sharp steel sliced through my skin and into the muscle and bone underneath. I felt the handle of the dagger in my hand.

My eyes opened and I sat up startled. I was sitting naked on cold cement floor. The entire room was concrete. A dim yellow overhead lamp lit the room. I heard a woman’s voice behind me, “Clarence.” When I turned, I saw three women seated on three wooden chairs. They all wore long black gowns, black leather boots and gloves; every inch of flesh was covered except for their faces. They all had long black hair and dark complexions. They looked to be from some Middle-Eastern country like Iran or Lebanon. None of the women appeared to be over 30. But there was something about them, an energy they emanated, that made them seem very old, and very serious. They all sat up straight in their chairs, right leg crossed over the left, hands folded in their laps. The women stared at me without speaking, their expressions didn’t change.

As I looked from one pair of eyes to the next, I began sweating profusely, my heart pounded and panic covered me like quilt of thorns. The woman in the middle asked, “What are you afraid of?” Her voice was soft, warm and even motherly. However, the sound of her voice instantly prompted my body to react. I sat frozen in terror. I began to hyperventilate. The woman on the left asked, “Do you know who we are?”

I rolled over on my side and my body tightened into a sweat-coated ball of tension convulsing on the floor. The woman in the middle leaned forward and whispered, “Calm.” My body immediately stop convulsing, I caught my breath and my thoughts began to clear. Still I remained curled in a ball shivering in fear.

The woman on the right asked, “Why are you afraid of us?” I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question even if I had been able to open my mouth to speak. I didn’t know why I was so afraid of those women. All I knew was that their presence terrified me in a way I had never experienced before.

The woman on the left repeated, “Do you know who we are?” I shook my head. The woman in the middle took over, “That’s no surprise. We’re not as popular with the humans as some of the others. You may not be consciously aware of who we are, but your soul remembers us well. Everybody knows us. Most people can’t function with the level of terror that comes with having an awareness of our existence.”

The woman on the right said, “Your kind likes the blindfolded woman with the scales. A harlot, that’s who you would have administer justice. A symbol of corruption.”

The woman on the left, “We’ve been administering justice since the beginning. All of humanity stands guilty in Our eyes along with the parasitic gods and spirits that nurture and collect your souls.”

The woman in the middle, “We’ve been referred to by many names. Some flattering, some not. In humanity’s early years of language, we were commonly referred to with various forms of ‘The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen to You‘. I prefer ‘The Beautiful Ones’.”

The woman on the left, “Close your eyes.” I squeezed my eyes shut and saw a short middle-aged man with glasses. He stood in front of a large hole in the ground. He was a Black man dressed in wranglers, a plaid button up shirt tucked into his jeans and cowboy boots. The woman on the left’s voice said, “Meet The Great Sathanas. Look in the hole.”

I moved toward the hole in my vision. The Great Sathanas didn’t move, it was if he couldn’t see me. I looked down into hole, a family of four laid at the bottom. A large man in overalls appeared at my side with a shovel and began filling in the hole. The voice of the woman in the middle said, “That family didn’t anything but move into an apartment upstairs from one of his businesses. Watch this.”

I saw a young woman alone in her apartment. She sat curled on her loveseat studying a college textbook. The vertical hanging blinds behind her stirred then two dark figures crept in through the slider. One of them snuck up on the woman, pounced on her, punched her and covered her mouth with his hand. The other went to the front-door and opened it. Four more men entered, including The Great Sathanas. They shut the door and one of the men said, “Wait a minute before you hook that shit to her head. I don’t want her to enjoy it yet. I want to see the fear and pain in that bitches eyes when I’m fucking her.”

The Great Sathanas stood to the side and watched as the five men threw the woman on the floor, tore her clothes off, then shoved their dicks down her throat till she choked and tears streamed from her eyes. They laughed and passed a fifth back and forth as they took turns raping and sodomizing the young woman. The Great Sathanas commanded, “Hold that bitch down.” Then he pulled a scalpel from his jacket, knelt down by the woman’s head and made a small incision behind her ear. He then used tweezers to insert a small device into the hole. One of the men asked, “How do you keep it from getting infected.” The Great Sathanas replied, “If it gets infected I just cut the bitches head off, pull the chip out, wash it off and put it in a new bitch.” The men all laughed.

The Great Sathanas sealed the incision with the same kind of glue I’d seen used in the hospitals, then he placed a small piece of medical tape over it. He then pulled a small control pad from his pocket and pressed a button. The men seemed to struggle to hold the young woman down as she began convulsing violently.

The Great Sathanas pushed another button and the woman went stiff as if an electrical current was passing through her body. He pushed another button and the woman’s body went limp, her eyes rolled around in her head, a slight grin appeared at the corners of the woman’s mouth. The Great Sathanas pulled a syringe from his jacket, popped off the cap, picked a vein in the woman’s arm and inserted the needle. The woman’s grin widened. The Great Sathanas said, “Fuck that bitch now and see what happens.” One of the men quickly undid his pants, pushed his pants down to his knees and shoved his dick into the young woman. She moaned and rocked her head from side to side, her grin turned into a smile that seemed to stretch from ear to ear.

The voice of the woman on the right said, “Let’s fast forward this a little bit.” I saw the same woman, she no longer looked like a healthy college student. She was skin and bones with bleached blond hair, heavy make-up, a tight-fitting black shirt that said “SLUT” and a black mini-skirt. She sat on the edge of a bed staring straight ahead. Her face remained in a constant, unsettling grin. Loud voices could be heard outside the door leading to the room. The Great Sathanas entered followed by a large group of drunken young men. The Great Sathanas said, “Alright. You boys got four hours. We’ll bring you up some beer and a couple of bottles. Let me know if you need anything else. It’s your party boys, have fun.” The young men fell on the woman like a pack of ravenous wolves.

I opened my eyes. The woman on the right said, “When she’s so beat up and repulsive that nobody wants to fuck her, he’ll strangle her and have his henchmen dump her body behind some meth house. Her parents will search for answers as to why their normally responsible and loving daughter suddenly turned into a drug addicted prostitute who was eventually murdered on the street. They’ll wonder why she didn’t tell them. They’ll wonder how they couldn’t tell. Meanwhile, another young woman will be delivered to The Great Sathanas by the gangbangers and drug-addicts he has working for him. He pays them $500 a head for every fairly attractive young woman they can deliver to him. Of course, none of those women know that they’re being led into forced prostitution.”

The woman on the right added, “This is the sort of thing that catches our attention.”

The woman in the middle, “Lavinia has caught our attention as well. First, you will help her destroy The Great Sathanas. Then you will kill Lavinia. If you don’t, we will and then we will hold you accountable for the blood you have shed. If you do what we require, we will consider the murders you participated in to be acts of necessity and we will leave you alone. Think carefully about this Clarence. There are thousands of stories about nice places like Hell. The reality is that we decide who is damned and who isn’t. We are the one’s in charge of the damned. But you won’t find too many stories about us. You just know that for some reason you are deathly afraid of us. Don’t be ashamed of your fear. The Creator of this world has a similar reaction when we appear in His presence. There is no power that exists that can protect you from us.”

The woman on the left said, “The human mind cannot begin to comprehend eternal torture. That means forever. When this entire universe passes away and another one is born; then after that one passes to make way for another, you will still be suffering. There is no ‘place’ called Hell where all the sinners party together. The souls we punish suffer in isolation. We may allow you some company to fall in love with. But that’s only so that we can take what you love away from you, torture and destroy that which you love right in front of you and use your love to torture you further.”

The woman on the right, “We’ll bless you with a hundred offspring, let you nurture them, raise them, love them with all your being; then we’ll make you sit and watch helplessly as we hunt them down one by one and rip them to pieces.”

The women then changed into three large black birds, smashed through the concrete ceiling and flew away. I woke up in my room. I had no idea what time it was but everything was dark. Lavinia’s voice said, “Find some clean clothes, then go downstairs and eat. You, Damijana, Sally and Brianna are leaving right before dawn.”

40 40 Debra Lynn Bonner 66 A <36544 13623> <41233 64154> <15111 31216> <54422 25332> <62666 46561> <23355 52445> 66/6 20:20 #Clockwork