The velvet curtain’s tongue hung. The candle wax dripping down the skull’s bone, each drop a metronome, marking the passage. Pulsing. Chanting ancient litanies, fasting until our bodies ached with hollowness, hollowness meant to be filled with the divine. Where the virgin lay at the altar dressed in sheer gothic as the dark purged her tremors. The gramophone needle whispered, Enrico Caruso. Mingling with the blood and grotesques of virgins, hissing of ecstasy.
The novices encircled the altar, their breathless murmurs with the scent of myrrh. Lips parted, their thighs quivering as the grandmaster’s fingers traced the outline of corsets, unraveling them with the precision of a surgeon. His fingers, talons, black as a raven’s spur, hovered above the virgin’s ribs, like a scalpel of needle and thread down to her cunt, exposing her diddly-bob. Warm and alive. Twitching toward the chalice of sacrifice.
She arched, her body taut as a bowstring, her throat a pale offering to the unseen watchers in the shadows. The gramophone’s voice scratched deeper, the aria breaking into static, into whispers. Caruso’s voice distorting, melting into something guttural, inhuman. The air thickened, pressing against skin like a lover’s tongue, wet and insistent. Someone moaned, or was it the wind threading through the cracked stained glass?
