A Temple

In the Metropolis Museum of Art, Lois had walked through a small Egyptian temple that had been disassembled, transported, and reassembled there. The reporter had stood in the shadow of old gods and felt the weight of centuries upon her as she wandered through the little hallway, to gaze at the square stone altar before the statue of the temple's primary deity. She had been alone, but the hairs had gone up on the back of her neck, the shadows had deepened, and Lois had left the exhibit quickly, unsure of what terrible pressure had **** her to flee, like a million ancient eyes upon her...

...and now she felt it again.

Beyond the Black Door, Lois walked with slight hesitation into something that strongly resembled that earlier temple. The whole inside was made of slabs of stone, fitted without mortar. Thick columns, planted at intervals like trees, rose up to the ceiling, forming a natural corridor. It seemed a single room, with no other exit or entrance. Brightly colored hieroglyphs and murals were carved and painted into the columns and walls...but they were scenes that Lois had never seen. Women and lay with animal-headed men and women. A man with the head of a strange beast thrust his penis between the thighs of a falcon-headed youth. Family lines of descent were made obvious, brother laying with sister, father with daughter, the children grown strange...

The altar was a single piece of glassy black stone. The statue behind it was stiff, formal, the high, jutting breasts of a woman, left arm at her side, right arm held out to make a gesture. The face and head were like the famous bust of Nefertiti, but for the pharaoh's beard that graced her chin, and the slight suggestion of curled horns...but that is not what caught Lois' attention.

For all the full breasts and feminine face and form, a long erect stone phallus jutted out from the statue, to hover perhaps a foot above the altar. Whatever hands had carved the stiff posture of the statue, the penis—as long as the goddess' forearm—had been rendered in great, lifelike detail. She could see the ridges of veins, the great swollen head, the almost feminine depression of the slit on the glans. Parts of it was smooth, as though worn by the passage of many hands. That one-eyed snake seemed, by some artist's trick, to follow her every move as she explored the area around the statue, and her eyes always came back to it.

The carvings around the base of the altar itself were different than the murals on wall and columns. They showed figures—men and women—engaged in lewd acts with the statue upon the altar. There, a man held the tip of that black stone cock in her mouth. Here, a woman lay on knees and elbows, the statue penetrating her. Lois noted grooves in the floor—ligature marks, parallel and even. The reporter gave the altar an experimental push, but it wouldn't budge. Intuition told her there was something below it...a secret passage, a secret compartment, something. The sanctum sanctorum of this cult. But it had to have a trigger...and her eyes were drawn back to that hard stone dick.