1 - The Whore's Grimoire

Anya lifted the nearest candle. It was black, small, and when she held it in the palm of her hand the others could see the strange sigils inked into her skin. She stared into the flame as if she could see something in it the others could not.

"Many people do not believe in the occult. They have never experienced it for themselves. Yet sometimes even the staunchest unbeliever experiences something that makes them—question. This is one such story. I call it..."

THE WHORE'S GRIMOIRE

There's always been a whorehouse in Dagon's Hollow. It was one of the first permanent structures to go up, before even the post office. A three-story Victorian pile not far from the train tracks. Generations of girls and women had gone to work there. It stood as an option open to almost every young woman—and even a few young men—who came of age in the town. A sure enough way to earn money, when jobs were hard to get.

If nothing else, it offered a room. When I went to work there, the makeup didn't quite hide the black eye my mother had given me during our final spat. The old woman—Madame N.—seemed to understand. She set up me up with an empty room. There was a webcam, which I was supposed to work regularly when I wasn't entertaining a guest, and a trunk for my few things. A shelf nailed to the wall carried sex toys. Clothes came from a massive cedar wood chiffarobe.

There were ball gowns from the Civil War. Lingerie from the 1930s. A pair of chaps, which I would wear without any underwear. A robe of silky black, shot through with threads of silver. Wooden Native American masks. Costume jewelry. Whatever the clients wanted, in person or online.

It was a few weeks into my new job when I realized the bottom of the chiffarobe was hollow. That a loose nail served as a handle, to lift up the floor and reveal a small space. That's where I found the book.

I have no idea how many whores had lived in that room. The book was old, that much was certain. Small enough to fit in a hand, but almost two inches thick. The boards were hard, covered by skin—and that was what struck me first. The skin was soft, brown as caramel, and in the very center of the cover was what was unmistakably a nipple.

I almost didn't open it. My heart hammered in my chest, and I felt more than ever the loss of the crucifix I had left at home. That was one benefit of the whorehouse. Jesus did not stare down at the walls when I spread my pussy for the cam. The dead painted eyes of wooden saints didn't judge me when the local sheriff squeezed his cock into my ass. It was just me here, with my own guilt and shame. So I took the small book

The pages didn't feel like paper, but like something thin, almost slick and porous. I thought maybe it was a diary. Maybe a journal passed down, from one working girl to the next. In a way I was right. In others, I was wrong.

The first few pages, in English, involved potions for inducing abortion. Some later hand had offered contemporary measurements; another offered suggestions for replacements if some herbs weren't available. Further in were love-charms. Rhymes in Greek, Latin, with English translations, phonetic renderings. Teas to promote fertility. A chill ran over me when I realized that I was looking at the accumulated occult lore of generations of whores.

I didn't read the whole thing that night. Just flipped through it. Caught sight of images that might have been painstakingly copied from the Kama Sutra. Sexual positions and acts I didn't have names for, then. Things to do with an aborted fetus. Uses of menstrual blood. A virgin's sperm. The piss of pregnant horses. Some of it seemed obvious superstition, other bits reminded me of things I had read in articles online.

Over the days that followed, when I wasn't pushing a dildo in and out of my pussy for the punters online, or on my knees sucking off a customer to earn my keep, I read more of the book. I didn't believe in it. Not really. Yet there was enough there that seemed to be reasonable that I started to entertain the fantasy that maybe there was something to at least some of it. When my period didn't come one month, I brewed a bitter tea that caused me terrible cramps, but the bloody flow returned with a vengeance the next night.

Maybe that was why I decided to try something from the back of the book. Where the pages were black, and written with some kind of white pencil that glowed in the dark, and it was easier to read that way. It told of a blessing that could be a curse.

I still had a lock of my mother's hair. The other ingredients weren't so hard to source. And for three months, I peeled the condoms off the men who pumped between my legs. Looked them in the eye as they spattered their seed into me. In between my faking moans, came the words the book said I should sy. My mind and will bent to one purpose.

When my period came that month, I drank the tea. But this time, I caught the bloody discharge, and caught it in a bottle. I hid it in that space beside the book, in the darkness. Then I did the same the next month, and the next. When I had three bottles, I set up a special cam session. Dressed in that midnight robe shot through with silver. The candles and pentagram were just props, but the bottles and the prayer were real. The punts stroking their cocks watched in fascination as I thrust the bloody filth into my pussy...and for a moment, maybe in a fit of madness, I could feel the energy of the performance take me over. All that attention fixed on my cunt. All that desire, that hope, even that disgust at what I had become and what I was using.

I poured that into the prayer from the book. Not to God, whom I had long ago stopped believing in. But to something I didn't have a name for. The kind of goddess that would fulfill a whore's vengeance. For a moment, all that hate and pain I had been saving up for years broke through like a dam, and when I collapsed into a puddle of my own juices with three bottles stretching my cunny, it seemed to me that for the first time I had touched something beyond myself.

When I left the house, eight months later, I took the book with me. I walked to my old house. Through the window, I saw my mother, looking frailer than I had ever seen her. The plain dress she wore was hugely tented, and she moved with an awkward shuffling gait through the house. Too big for a single bastard.

From inside her robe, Anya produced a small book. The leather cover was dark, but rising up from the very center could be clearly seen a nipple. Without a smile, Anya lifted up the hand that carried the first candle, and blew it out.