100 - The Summoning

No one moved. Asenath gave a smile as she held the stub of a candle in both hands. The sole light in the darkness. The air was still, like the night itself was holding its breath. Waiting to hear the last story...and whatever came after.

"Like the others, my last story is a personal one. It took place exactly one year ago, right here where we're sitting now," Asenath said. "I call it

THE SUMMONING

They had come, the Fright Society, to scare and titillate each other. There was James and Edith, Alexa and Nikki, Jules and Julia—and Asenath, who had gathered them all together. She had chosen carefully, reaching out through the internet and in person. Not just any lover of the strange and weird would do. She needed people who didn't just enjoy a good horror story, but yearned for something more than just a tale.

So they had played the candle game, knowing the stakes. Or at least they thought they had.

Until Asenath, the one who had gathered them all together, told the final tale, holding the last candle. When it was done, she raised it to her lips and blew it out.

Nothing should have happened. Rationally, the night was no different. Yet they all felt it. The feeling of someone watching them. The hairs stood up on their necks, the gooseflesh rose on their arms and legs. The tension grew and grew, none of them dared to break that silence.

Out of the night She came. Perhaps She had been there since the beginning, waiting patiently. Perhaps their stories really had called Her. She stepped lightly, on bare feet, but Her chains dragged upon the ground, and Her horns rose up toward the moonless sky. Draped in starlight, which gave shape to Her darkess. The curve of a hip. The hole in space that was the insatiable gash. Breasts like congeries of bubbles, phallic feelers that could have been serpents or tentacles drifting in an unfelt breeze.

Edith was the first to scream. The noise seemed to draw Her. The darkness swallowed Her. The other saw by starlight as Edith writhed, consumed, Her clothes torn from her naked body. A delicious shiver went through Her as something penetrated Edith, the pale thighs spread apart. Her naked body rose into the air, and she slowly slid down, impaled.

"Oh fuck," James said, frozen in place. "Oh shit, it's real. What do we do? How do we send it back?"

Asenath shook her head. "There is no sending Her back. We invited her here."

"No, there has to be something. An exorcism, a spell..." Nikki said. She fumbled with a book. Then screamed, as a spear of darkness lifted her up into the night.

One by one, the others tried to run, to fight, to beg or plead. One by one, She dealt with each in her own way. James was flayed alive, cock first, his bloody shaft spurting cum that stung his raw flesh. Jules and Julia were drawn into that hole in space, their bodies squeezed and contorted as those who had come from the same womb, now returned to the same womb.

Alexa had brought a .38 special; five shots hit nothing. The last she saved for herself. Blood and brains splattered Asenath's dress. It was not enough to save her. Shadowed hands clamped on Alexa's head. Tears ran down her face as the wound healed, shifted. A tight, puckered hole in Alexa's forehead. Something dark and phallic pressed into the new orifice. Brave Alexa, who had faced the darkness, felt her brains fucked and scrambled, and the worst part was she did not die.

Asenath stood. She bowed.

She bargained.

"One year from now," she promised. "I will gather six more. We will perform the summoning again, call you here, and you may feast."

The darkness radiated amusement. She liked to be called by the old ways, and those dark imaginations that called her had been amusing. So she had left, taking her bounty...and Asenath was left to gather together her another harvest.

"I have kept my promise," Asenath said, and before anyone could reach for her, she blew out the final candle.

For a moment, the darkness was almost absolute. Then, out among the grave markers, something moved.

A young woman, her homespun dress clinging to her frame. Blood smeared her crotch and dripped down her legs to her bare feet. Her arm ended in a nub, to which a scythe-blade was tied to her arm. She scraped it along the stones.

Skkrtch. Skkrtch. Skkrtch.

Something loomed from the darkness behind her. An impossibly tall woman stood to her full height, her face hidden by a mask, an enormous pair of iron scissors in her hand. The scissors opened and closed with a sharp snap. Between the two of them, a kind of music was made. The tread of feet. The rasp of the scythe. The snap of the scissors.

All around them, shapes moved. Some were dim and difficult to make out, for there was only starlight. A dark, amorphous thing that might have been an enormous pair of buttocks, quivering and sloshing forward, dragging behind it an obscene chain of bodies. White, apelike things, their faces nearly human, saggy dugs hanging from their breasts like the milk-sacs of pregnant dogs. A knuckle-walking hulk, its squirming face hidden by a sheet, dragging its massively engorged scrotum and prick across the gravel paths, as small green orbs squeezed out and slithered away.

They were shapes both familiar and terrible to behold. A pale Japanese man without pants, his cock a massive, writhing maggot with tiny legs and black eyes stepped forward, a smile on his waxy face. Next to him walked an equally pale naked woman with long dark hair and a hole in her breast, carrying a chittering centipede with a face just like hers as a woman might carry a child.

A woman dressed as a priestess with the head of a catfish, long barbels undulating gently, slowly shed her robe, and the perfection of her bare body was in ugly contrast to the small, inhuman head that watched them with such obvious intelligence. Beside her a stone devil flexed her wings, the strange genitalia flaunted, the odd androgyny of her body stirring something within the soul. In her hands she carried a tiny pair of homunculi, male and female, black bodies crisscrossed with patches of white, bearing spears carved from pencils.

There were more. So many more...and behind them, waiting, watching, was Her. They couldn't see Her, but they could feel Her. Like some lodestone in their souls could feel the tug of that great concentration of fear and lust.

"Thank you all," Asenath said. "None of this would have been possible without you. Your need, your lust, the darkness within you that called to the darkness without. Look at the horrors that wait for those who, unknowing, have invited them into their hearts and minds. These are the shapes that shall haunt their dreams."

There was no peal of mad laughter. No curtain call. The horrors closed in on the tellers of tales, and the Fright Society, who had whispered of obscenities, now found themselves drawn to that which they had called up. It was a part of them, as they were a part of it, as all must be who partake in such a rite, however safe they might think they are.

The screams began. They lasted a long time.