Posted by Sawney Beane on April 22, 2006 at 22:06:49:
The Collected Works of Sawney Beane: Volume #10
THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST AND ALL MARTYRS
by Sawney Beane
12 Oct 1993 - 26 Jan 1994
3,422 words
DISTRIBUTION NOTICE and DISCLAIMER: Sawney Beane requests that any distribution of this work of fiction remain within the realm of social responsibility. This story is suitable neither for minors nor for the seeming majority of adults who have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. It is pure fantasy, which means that, for whatever reason, someone has found it interesting to think about the events depicted herein. It does not in any way mean that the author would like to see this fantasy become reality, so if you are the type of person who might be swayed into doing something irrational by reading a work of fiction, the author respectfully requests that you decline to read further.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sawney Beane, originally a native of Edinburgh, lived for twenty-five years in a cave on the coast of County Galloway, subsisting on the flesh of unfortunate travellers, roughly a thousand of them all told. He and his wife raised a large family of eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters. Eventually, the family was captured, and the whole lot was brutally and unjustifiably tortured and executed without trial. Since his death in the early 17th century, Beane has reformed his ways and now confines his atrocities to his literary endeavours.
WARNING: This story contains scenes of consensual male and female snuff and cannibalism. If you find such things offensive, please steer clear; you have been warned.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This story is momentous in that it is the first story I wrote after discovering that I am not alone. When I wrote the first nine stories, I had no evidence that anyone else in the world had the disturbing ideas I had. I wondered often, but it's not something people like to talk about. Then I came across several drawings by Dolcett that answered my question, and some of them were great pictures. At this point I still didn't know if anyone else was writing stories like mine. That would come later. In any case, I had often thought of writing a story with religious devotion as the motivation for self-sacrifice, and I was fascinated by dreaming up explanations for how some of the situations in the Dolcett pictures had come to be. As a result, I wrote the following story based on the pictures called DOLCET3D and DOLCET3M. These pictures were the most interesting to me since, although the subjects clearly expressed strong emotions, the action seemed at least somewhat consensual. The girl in DOLCET3M and the girl whom I named Elizabeth in DOLCET3D were compelling subjects.
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I
Elizabeth felt her sister's reassuring hand on her shoulder. The gesture was entirely unnecessary as Elizabeth was the calmest of the seven devotees gathered early Sunday morning behind the Kansas City branch of the Church of Jesus Christ and All Martyrs...except for Mary, of course.
Rachel was a good sister, all things considered. However, she had been something of a wayward soul in her younger years. She had been a licensed prostitute for nearly four years before allowing her younger sister to lure her back to the church of their youth. Now, five years later, Rachel was twenty-nine and Elizabeth was twenty-five. Peculiarly, the four years of decadence offset perfectly the age difference between the sisters, leaving the pair at the same stage in the progress through the church's levels of honour. Actually, Elizabeth was exactly one week ahead of her older sister.
Behind Rachel, two of the sisters' close friends chatted amicably. Mark, a truly devout young man and guitarist at many prayer meetings, was engaged in an earnest conversation with Sarah, an eternally happy girl with a smile far too big for her petite face. Mark held in his left hand a seven-foot steel rod to be used in the day's ceremonies.
Two more devotees were to be found behind Elizabeth. Paul, the local minister, who had the infinite benevolence required to assist others in their pursuit of eternal life rather than proceed to claim his own, approached Elizabeth from behind. Ruth, a woman with a history and age similar to Rachel's, stood behind Paul with another long pole.
Elizabeth and Rachel looked down upon the centre of three barbecue pits and saw, roasting on a spit suspended over the pit, the sisters' good friend Mary, a popular girl with an unsurpassed singing voice. Mary was dead now, but she had attained eternal life. Elizabeth calmly watched the barbecue sauce sizzling off of Mary's succulent flesh. One end of the spit protruded from Mary's mouth, the other from her vagina. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the pole with strong rope, and she looked very tasty.
Elizabeth was distracted from contemplation of her roasting friend as Paul gently tied her wrists together behind her back, a strangely unnecessary formality. His penis brushed her hand inadvertently. Everyone behind the church that morning was nude.
Elizabeth did not resist and instead gazed upon her sister's naked body. She noticed the breasts slightly larger than her own, the waist slightly less slim than her own, and, most importantly, the small clump of black hair covering Rachel's genitals. That was the mark of Elizabeth's superiority. Sarah, Mary, and Elizabeth had had their pubic hair shaved off in preparation for their Sunday martyrdom.
The fact that all of the week's martyrs were female was quite a triumph for feminists. The previous week had been dominated by three male martyrs, and the four weeks prior to that had seen two male martyrs and one female martyr each. Some claimed discrimination, but the order of martyrdom was strictly determined by which seekers reached the necessary level of preparation.
The group of six chatted reverently as Elizabeth was led to a concrete pedestal in front of the second barbecue pit. Everyone congratulated the aspiring martyr while Rachel braided her sister's shoulder-length blonde hair to prevent singeing.
Paul untied Elizabeth's wrists and handed her a document entitled "Martyr's Oath of Preparedness." Everyone was silent as Elizabeth read aloud:
I, Elizabeth Rebecca Albright, being a believer in the solemn faith of the Church of Jesus Christ and All Martyrs, understand that the only path to the Kingdom of Heaven is through the emulation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the wilful self-sacrifice of my earthly body for the benefit of others. I realize that if I do not undertake to sacrifice myself or if I fail to wholly accept and embrace my own death, I will be fated to be reborn in another earthly body immediately following my natural or unnatural demise.
I, therefore, wish to claim my immortality on this day. I rejoice in the knowledge that my body will nourish the congregation as I have been nourished by the many martyrs before me. Though the rod may cause me pain, I shall not waver in my commitment to the principles of the Church. Though the binding ropes might cause me hurt, I shall not scream out in pain. Though the fire may burn my flesh, I shall not doubt the correctness of my choice.
I do solemnly swear that I meet the following requirements for martyrdom:
1) I have attained the minimum age of 25 years.
2) I have been a member of the Church for at least five years.
3) I have completed the course series for Martyrdom Preparation.
4) I have parented at least one child and have attempted with all my heart to bring him/her into the Faith.
5) I have been approved for martyrdom by the assembled Committee of the Church for Martyr Selection and Evaluation.
6) My decision has been entirely self-directed and I have not been coerced into my decision by any means.
Go now and take my mortal body for your nourishment and help me to gain eternity. I wholeheartedly submit now to the requirements of God's Holy Word.
"If I am being poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all" (Philippians 2:17).
After Elizabeth had read aloud the official statement and concluding Bible verse, Paul handed her a pen. The martyr-to-be signed the document and kissed her sister. She was ready.
Mark washed Elizabeth's feet carefully and guided her as she stepped onto the concrete slab. As she stood submissively, Paul tied Elizabeth's ankles together tightly with a strong rope. Next he bound her wrists in front of her body. Finally, Paul secured Elizabeth's elbows to the sides of her body with a rope around the base of her rib-cage. The ropes were very tight and somewhat painful, but she did not waver in her dedication.
Elizabeth stood rigidly with her eyes closed as Sarah approached with the bucket of barbecue sauce. As Sarah thoroughly covered the new martyr's body with barbecue sauce, Elizabeth remembered slopping great globules of sauce onto Mary's attractive body earlier in the morning. The brush tickled quite a bit, and the sauce was cold, but Elizabeth stood firm.
Rachel, Paul, Mark, and Sarah picked Elizabeth up and placed her on her back on the concrete slab. They inadvertently covered themselves in barbecue sauce in the process. Ruth approached with the rod she had been tending. Everyone cheered as Paul guided the sharpened tip of the pole through the ropes binding Elizabeth's ankles and wrists and into her vagina. Elizabeth spoke a gracious farewell, which met with approval, but she did not notice much of their response. She was preoccupied with two sensations. She tasted the barbecue sauce, which dripped, into her mouth from other parts of her face, and she felt the cold steel entering her genitals. The latter sensation was not at all pleasant. Elizabeth concentrated on the greater benefits she would gain by her intense pain.
The tip of the pole moved further into her until it rested against the upper wall of her uterus. Elizabeth held her breath to avoid screaming as Paul impaled her further. The tip seemed to slide quickly into her, piercing her stomach and sliding backwards up her throat. One of Elizabeth's last distinct sensations was the taste of metal as the pole emerged from her mouth. She could no longer breathe and suffered from severe internal bleeding. She died just as she was being lifted onto the rack above the barbecue pit. Rachel smiled benevolently as she watched her sister begin to roast.
Sunday evening services at the Church of Jesus Christ and All Martyrs began on time. Paul presided with his clothes on. Throughout the sermon and readings, Rachel, Ruth, and Mark sat in front of the altar in thin white robes.
The time eventually came to initiate the three martyrs for the coming week. Rachel stepped forward and dropped her robe. Paul spoke to her and she declared the sincerity of her intentions before the minister carefully shaved off all of her pubic hair with a consecrated razor. Rachel stepped to the other side of the altar, and Ruth and Mark took their similar turns.
Paul announced what everyone present knew. The future martyrs would wear their shaved genitals as a symbol of their upcoming glory and would not be permitted to wear any clothing other than shoes for the remainder of their lives.
Finally, the time came for the Eucharist. The three roasted martyrs were carried in and mounted in the front of the sanctuary. Paul read the verse from Philippians included in the Martyr's Oath and blessed the bodies of the honoured ones. He praised them highly before directing their consumption.
Assistant ministers with large knives entered and began to cut the meat into small cubes. The congregation lined up and received a piece of each martyr on their tongues one at a time. The three dead women were just enough to provide each member of the congregation with three bites of fresh meat. When everyone had returned to their seats, the martyrs were little more than skeletons. Each of the future martyrs had received one of the current martyrs' hearts. Rachel had chewed placidly on her sister's cardiac muscle throughout the Eucharist ceremony.
Everyone went home happy. Many looked forward to their day of glory. The coming week's martyrs retired to their homes in eager anticipation of their last week on Earth. The poles were cleaned and stored to be reused the following week. Rachel fully expected to die on the rod that had killed her younger sister.
The bones of the martyrs were prepared for burial in the expanding Church cemetery, and the names of the deceased were engraved on the long list of the honourably departed. Elizabeth, Sarah, and Mary were born again into the eternal life of Heaven.
II
Eve did not remember the Sunday nearly nine years earlier when she had been fed a small cube of Elizabeth's right thigh, a small cube of Sarah's left forearm, and a small cube of Mary's left shoulder. She could hardly have been expected to. She had ceremoniously eaten three to five bites of martyr on every Sunday she could remember. She'd been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and All Martyrs since early childhood.
Now she was quite annoyed. The fact that this annoyance was tainting the glorious day of her martyrdom caused her even more annoyance. It seemed to her that the martyr of honour should receive a bit more respect. She felt like a steer rapidly approaching beef. Martyrdom was not supposed to be like that.
She was nude except for sandals and a pair of sunglasses resting on her forehead. It was a Monday morning, a thoroughly untraditional time for a martyrdom. Hers was to be a special sort of martyrdom. She was to be roasted and eaten by pagans.
It was an experimental martyrdom. Eve had been selected for this special duty as a result of her intense devotion and fortitude. She was believed to be capable of withstanding the emotional stress. She accepted the commission with no small amount of reluctance and uncertainty.
Logistical and economic problems had caused the Church to turn to desperate measures. The Church had become extremely popular in the preceding decade. The consequent glut of potential martyrs forced the Church to decide between martyring more and more of the devoted each week and allowing the waiting lists for martyrdom to grow indefinitely. The latter policy was unthinkable. The weekly quota of martyrs had been raised to four seven years earlier and to five three years earlier. Further increases would lead to a very messy church service.
In addition, church funding was running low. While most martyrs left their savings to the Church, this did not amount to very much since people who know they will die at age twenty-five or thereabouts are not likely to worry too much about investments. Eve was the first to test a possible solution to these problems.
The Church knew that many bloodthirsty pagans would gladly pay large sums of money for the honour of eating martyrs' bodies. Thus, the sale of martyrs to interested pagans seemed promising. Eve was to be consumed at the Jones family reunion.
Her soul was not in jeopardy as long as she went through with it. She had been blessed and consecrated on the previous morning along with five of her best friends. After she had smeared barbecue sauce all over the body of her boyfriend James and watched his martyrdom, she had read the Martyr's Oath and gone through the ceremony stopping just short of being impaled. She'd been on her back with wrists, ankles, and elbows tightly bound and her whole body covered in barbecue sauce.
As the week's five intra-church martyrs roasted peacefully, the sixth martyr of the week had been untied and had accompanied the next week's five martyrs and John, the minister, to the showers.
Eve had attended the evening church service and had even eaten five tiny chunks of meat with the other devotees. The minister explained her position to the congregation and accorded her special honours. It was wonderful.
The following morning, however, bitter reality set in. She was on her way to be eaten by savage unbelievers. It was not right to nourish the pagans in this way. Of course, she was indirectly nourishing her congregation financially. The Jones family had paid a hundred thousand dollars for her.
She was walking in the woods of a local park and passing a sign which read:
ELM PARK
Cooking Facilities
Ahead
1 Mile
She had walked nearly two miles and would have to walk another mile to her ultimate destination, a small barbecue pit far back in the woods of Elm Park designed mainly for roasting pigs. Eve shivered at the thought.
As she walked, she was irritated by the price tag attached to her shaved genitals via a piercing in her labia. It seemed unnecessary. The real source of her annoyance was the fact that she was forced to carry most of the equipment herself. She carried in her right hand a large bucket of barbecue sauce. A paper bag of cooking implements, including forks, knives, tongs, and brushes, hung from her left elbow. The pointed end of the long steel pole rested on her left shoulder and left hand.
She was followed several paces back by the three people who would be responsible for preparing her to feed the multitudinous family which would arrive in the evening when she was golden brown. Mr. Jones, about sixty and very bald, was the patriarch of the family. He carried a large bag of charcoal and a length of rope. His son-in-law, Steve Schmidt, held the other end of Eve's spit. He was in his late twenties and also carried a satchel of photographic equipment with which he planned to immortalize the first secular martyrdom in America.
Between the two men was Steve's wife, Traci Schmidt. She was very close to Eve's age and did not carry a damn thing. The snotty little rich bitch acted as if feeding her was Eve's duty rather than an act of supreme sacrifice. Traci tended to order Eve around and tried her best to act as if she ate martyrs every day. Eve unpiously hoped that Traci would choke to death on her collarbone.
An especially unusual thing about Eve's martyrdom was that she was destined to become steak rather than small cubes of flesh. The Joneses would carve her like a roasted duck, and her limbs would be sliced into steaks. This did not help to alleviate her feelings of objectification.
As the party neared the cooking area, Eve began to have unpleasant thoughts about the members of the Jones family she would never meet. She saw images of the family reunion in her mind and saw her flesh abused by young and old.
Eve saw middle-aged ladies complaining to each other about the taste of her shoulders. She saw young men fighting for the honour of devouring her breasts and genitals and thinking most unholy thoughts about the martyr as they did so. She saw children with runny noses being threatened with deprivation of dessert unless they finished consuming the small bits of her calf granted them. She saw a bratty three-year-old girl drop a thumb in the dirt and leave it for the field mice. She saw her intestines in the mouths of inattentive middle-aged men chatting about football. She saw toothless old women futilely chewing on her ribs. She saw large pieces of herself left to rot in a dumpster. She saw evil in all of it.
Eve placed her burdens on the picnic table next to the cooking pit and contemplated the place of her earthly end. Unlike the normal weekly martyrs, Eve had the added responsibility of directing her own martyrdom. A weary sigh ran through her slim, attractive body. She brushed her blonde hair from her pretty face and got down to business.
Eve asked Traci to braid her hair because she did not feel like doing it herself and enjoyed the opportunity to give Traci an order. Traci complied sulkily. Eve set all of the cooking utensils out on the table and explained how each was to be used with special emphasis on the long probe, which would allow them to see when her centre was finished cooking.
Eve helped Mr. Jones and Steve to build a roaring fire in the barbecue pit and enjoyed its warmth for a moment before proceeding. She pulled herself away with the thought that there would be plenty of time for that later.
Eve spread a large plastic sheet from her bag on the ground and asked Traci to wash her feet as she stepped onto it. Traci flat out refused with a rude comment about washing cattle. Eve responded by telling her that she did not care, as she was not the one who had to eat her dirty feet. Traci eventually complied moodily.
Eve stepped onto the sheet and directed Steve in the tying of her bonds. When she was securely bound with three ropes, she asked Mr. Jones to cover her body in the barbecue sauce. Then she reclined on the sheet and gave detailed instructions for cooking her and removing her from the spit. She emphasized the necessity that she be turned continuously. She remained relatively detached throughout the process. The crucial moment approached.
Steve and Mr. Jones carried the spit over to Eve and guided it through her ankle and wrist ropes and into her vagina as she instructed them. Her last words were a series of instructions for insertion of the spike.
Traci remained off to one side with a hostile glare on her face. She snarled, "Goodbye, meat," just as the two men began to push the spit deeper into Eve's body. Amid a flash of pain, Eve envisioned Traci choking on a clavicle and took comfort. Eve opened her mouth wide just in time to avoid loosing a few teeth as the pole exited her body a bit too quickly. The tastes of metal and blood filled her mouth.
The two men lifted the spit and martyr onto the fire. Sight had left Eve almost immediately. Hearing faded out soon thereafter. The other senses remained for a few moments. She continued to taste the metal and barbecue sauce mixture. She smelled the charcoal burning but could not breathe at all. Eve sensed the warm feeling of flames licking her buttocks.
She was fading fast but distinctly saw an image in her mind. A particularly snotty child was pushing the small pre-cut pieces of a disproportionately large portion of steak around in a plate of barbecue sauce and potato salad. He was trying to pretend that he had eaten more than he had. A mother's voice reminded the child of starving children in Asia and had promised dessert if he would eat just one more bite. The child deliberated for a while and then fed the bite to a passing pet spaniel. The image ended as Eve expired a few moments after being placed over the fire pit.