32 - Witchmarked

Leroy had to disentangle himself from his twin to fetch the next candle. He returned to her side, the small black candle in those oddly mismatched hands, and began without preamble:

"I call this story...

WITCHMARKED

The Carnegie Library on Seventh Ave was built around the turn of the century. Some say Carnegie himself stopped off at Dagon's Hollow one day, but I don't think anyone's ever proven that. What is confirmed is that the only town land available was the old potter's field. Some say the graves were moved, others...well, kids say lots of things.

It's an open-plan library, where patrons can peruse the stacks, except for the special collections, which only the librarians can access, though what could require to be under lock-and-key in this town, I cannot imagine. One quirk of the library, however, is the Eternal Donations. The town passed an ordinance that anyone who donated a book could do it under the term that it could not be sold. It would have to remain in the collection forever. Most of those are in the basement. Some of them are falling to pieces. Old recipe books, personal diaries, mouldering paperbacks...just a mass of paper.

Benji liked to spend her afternoons down there. Combing through the unwanted books. Looking for what she did not know. In highschool, she was the sole goth, wearing all black, dying her hair, wearing corpse paint. The teachers and principals tolerated it, thinking it was a phase she would grow out of. She didn't. In her room at home, she built her shrines to the Goddess, curated her personal library of Wiccan classics, paid for by her shifts at the movie theater. During October, the owner let her program horror movies.

It was her favorite time of the year.

Yet she kept digging down there, amid the old books, and finally she thought she found what she was looking for. It was a diary of a woman who had come to Dagon's Hollow from Salem, Massachusetts, in 1892. A descendant of Mary Easty, one of the accused. And, most importantly, there were parts of the book with strange symbols and images. Perhaps the product of a diseased mind, perhaps just idle moments of the imagination. It didn't matter.

It was real. The realest thing Benji had ever run across.

So one afternoon in the lonesome October, she checked the book out and went straight to the tattoo artist to get it inked on her skin.

The same tattoo parlor had been in Dagon's Hollow for almost a hundred years. The old sailor had trained his wife, who had trained a son, who had trained a daughter. Margaret Adamson sat on her grandfather's stool, beefy arms covered with elegant designs of oddly primitive figures of sea life, drawn from the paintings in Dagon's Hollow cave itself. She stared at the design on the faded page. In her mind's eye, Margaret traced the lines and curves. It was like an inverted ankh, but with a spiraling head that was oddly reminiscent of a vulva.

"What's it mean?" she asked.

"It's a sign of the Goddess," Benji said, though she could hardly read the crabbed writing.

"Which goddess?" Margaret hedged.

"THE Goddess," Benji insisted, in a sudden surge of New Age faith. "The real one. The true divinity of which all other goddesses are just aspects."

Margaret considered this, and shrugged.

"Where?"

The blood ran into Benji's eyebrows as Margaret's tattoo gun worked. The vulva-like spiral occupied a space like a third eye in the middle of her forehead, and they shaved the top of her head to make space for the inverted cross-like aspect of the rest of the tattoo. There was pain, certainly. But excitement too.

Benji didn't wear a bandage. Didn't wipe the blood from her face. She grinned, black lipstick on her lips split into a maniac smile as she headed to work. The manager had agreed to let her run THE CRAFT and TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER as a double bill.

The fresh ink throbbed. Benji felt feverish as she sat in her little booth and cut tickets. Everyone stared. Even if they thought the blood was just paint, something for the Halloween season, the wound was too raw, too real. It made Benji's heart leap to instill that little bit of fear in the normies, to shock the sheep, if only for a moment.

The movie had already started and Benji was closing the booth when a tall, dark man approached the window. Benji's heart skipped a beat. There was something about them that caught and held her attention. A spike of pain went through her, as if the tattoo needle was tracing her tattoo all over again.

"S-sorry," she said. "The show's already started."

The dark man smiled. He laid a small stack of coins on the counter and pushed it through the little hole in the window. Benji hesitated before she touched them. They were twenty-five-dollar gold coins. Real gold. She could see the eagles on them. She picked one up, amazed at the weight of it. Despite the face value, each coin had to be worth hundreds.

"I have come for something else," the voice was low and deep. "Perhaps we can discuss this somewhere private."

Benji bit her lip. In a town where every young woman seemed to have taken a turn at whore at some point, she had not yet taken money to do anything. Not that she was opposed to the idea. There had been plenty of young women who worked here who had used the empty projection booth for various liaisons. As her tattoo throbbed on her forehead,

"Yeah, okay."

The gold went into the pocket of her uniform, weighing down the black fabric. She let him in, and if the pimple-faced teens behind the counter didn't even look up from their smartphones as Benji ushered the tall, imposing figure with the strange goatish features and long hair down the hall to the old projection booth.

Inside, with the door closed, he seemed to fill up the space. Benji's palms were sweaty, suddenly aware she was alone with a strange dude. If he tried anything, she wasn't sure how she could fight him.

To her relief, he unbuttoned his fly. A perfectly normal-looking dick, brown as a walnut, was exposed. To her surprise, there were black marks tattooed on his prick. Runes, maybe, though in her brain she thought: witchmarks.

"On your knees," he said. Then added, with a wry grin. "Please."

With relief, Benji got on her knees. Hundreds of dollars in gold for a blowjob? Hell, there were guys she had blown for free. She opened her mouth and let her tongue play with the tip of his circumcised prick. His hands went to her head, the hair on either side of the fresh-shaven bit. Not touching the tattoo itself. Benji let her tongue slide on the soft underside of his prick as it slowly swelled. The heat of her mouth, the gentle suction, soon brought him to hardness, and Benji fell into a rhythm, thinking of the porn she had jilled to, whether she should try anything...

The thumbs dug briefly into his skull as he pulled her face off of his dark dick. It was hard now, not particularly big or small, but stiff and slick with her slip. Benji panted, the fever in her head burning now, so that she began to sweat. Her pussy squeezed tight, itching for stimulation. Right now, she would have fucked him for nothing.

Then he pressed the tip of his dick against the vulva-sigil carved onto her head. There was a sense of immense pressure, and for a moment, she was about to tell him to fuck off. Worries about infection raced through her brain.

"Hey," she managed. "Wait a minute, you can't—"

Pain lanced through Benji's skull. Like losing her virginity all over again. Something hot and wet ran over her eyes as the dark man pushed forward. The sensation that Benji experienced was impossible. There are no nerves in the brain to register either pain or pleasure. The hard bone of the skull cannot tear like the wet tissue of a hymen. The soft grey matter cannot wrap around a thrusting cock like a virgin cunt.

Yet Benji felt something fucking with her mind. Flashes of women pressed beneath stones. Of squat-bellied idols, in front of which painted men took turns with a woman whose time it was to bear. Bloody sigils drawn on bloated teats and swollen stomach. A cry of life cut off short as tithe to She Who Must Not Be Named. As balls slapped into her face, Benji drowned in centuries of fertility rites, of the slow degeneration of old religions from sacred mysteries to scattered cults, and at last to bitter old women who initiated the outcast few with the aid of stone phalluses of terribly antiquity, stained black with the maidenheads of thousands, dispensing their potions and powders.

When they found Benji there, the next day, the fever had nearly killed her. The ambulance raced her to the hospital. Bone, already black and necrotic, was removed. Doctors mumbled about attempts at trepanation, of secondary infections, possible brain damage.

Benji just smiled. She stared at horrors that spooled before unseeing eyes. Perhaps if she had read further in that book, learned the true meaning of that symbol, and how it was meant to be drawn in blood at certain times, for purposes of divination—to obtain knowledge—perhaps she would have thought better of getting it inked on her flesh.

"Or perhaps not," Leroy said. "For she did finally discover the reality she had so desperately sought."

With that, he blew out the candle.