The Earth Moves

Lois could feel the vibration as the statue moved, the rumble passing through her knees and even in the cock wrapped around her mouth. Carefully, she removed her lips from the stone phallus. String eye-to-eye with the now-wet rod, the imp of the perverse struck Lois and she gave the jewel-like drop on the tip a quick kiss before she clambered off.

The altar had moved backwards, revealing a square hole cut deep in the floor, lined with metal. The reporter peeked in—and whistled. Her eyes roamed over fat stacks of greenbacks, scattered jewelry boxes, a handful of plain manila envelopes...what looked like a cup made from an inverted human skull with a stem made from gold, a double-pointed dagger like the fangs of a serpent with highlights in gold and silver, and a large, leatherbound book.

Lois hesitated a moment, then reached for the tome. If this was an altar, then these would be the offerings and implements of the cult...and the book might give her an idea of what she was actually dealing with. The leather felt strangely soft to her hands...pigskin, maybe...although otherwise the book was plain and unadorned.

She turned to the title page, and was gratified to see that the book was in English, albeit an old-fashioned dialect, and printed. The first words:

THE GRIMOIRE OF THE MAGDALENE,
OR,
THE WHORE OF CHRIST.
Written by the Moor El Hazzred
Done into Engliſh by Iohn Dee, Doctor.
Imprinted in ANTVVERPIAE
1571.

Lois frowned and flipped through the book, hoping for a quick scan through the work before focusing on any one section—along with the printed sections there were diagrams, woodcut illustrations, notes and marginalia in crabbed handwriting, odd stains, passages in Latin and Greek... Sections were headed "On the Incarnation of Spirits," "The Creation of Homunculi," "Rite of the Moonchild," "Incubi & Succubi"—several passages there seemed to be underlined extensively—"The Worship of Shub-Niggurath," "Charm Against Barrenness," "To Get With Child," and the like.

The reporter released a breath that she had been holding without aware of it, a blush running across her cheeks as she read select passages. It was a kind of manual—mostly involving sex magic in some form. Your genuine occult workbook, full of the kind of detail you didn't get in the paperback grimoires in the New Age section of the local bookstore. The statue made a lot more sense now...if there was a cult reading or performing some of the "rites" in this book, they'd be complete sex addicts.

The woodcuts were what got Lois, though. Something about the crudeness of the line and the details the artists had chosen to include struck her as being more than the work of a fevered imagination...some of these scenes were undoubtedly drawn from life.