Story: Heaven's Light

Posted by Thanatos on December 16, 2001 at 15:20:48:

Author's note: after another enormous gap, I finally get my act together and finish a story. Thanks to rathead for helping with some of the dialog at a critical point :)

Sex and death intertwine in:

Light.

Brilliant, scorching light; so intense it was a pain.

Mara blinked as she was thrust forward; the arena's sand a brilliant white that reflected the heat of the Sun back up at her and the other captives.

And the sound.

As they emerged into the arena, it broke around them, it assaulted their ears, a roar, like an immense wave battering the shore, a cacophony of baying voices, eager for their death.

Nobody wanted to move forward; the ten women shrank together into a knot, facing outward, and their terror rose until Mara could hardly breathe. Her chest was constricted, her legs felt like water. She had already voided in the holding pen, so she had nothing more to give, but one or two of the others, who had been holding on, let go, and the smell of liquid feces rose into the hot air.

The guards rushed forward with long staves tipped with bronze, and thrust them at the women, yelling at them in a language she didn't understand, pushing them further into the arena. As Mara's eyes grew used to the light, she saw the sight that she had tried to imagine but had never seen; the Coliseum rising around her. Tier on tier of white marble, decked out in brilliant colored hanging draperies, and huge awnings overhead, and everywhere, the press of people leaning forward in their seats to get a better view.

The noise, the noise. She wanted to stop her ears, to hide her eyes, to curl up into a ball, anything to shut out the world, but she couldn't stop looking around her, looking for her death, trying to see how she would die.

The stories she had heard in the caged cart that had carried them here had made her blood run cold. There were stories of what the Emperor Commodus had ordered done to some of the women prisoners, how they had been strapped into wooden cows and mounted by bulls until they died, that made her feel sick.

And now, as she looked down at the pristine white sand, she saw that it was not white at all. It was splashed with the dark red stains of slaughter, and Mara was in the middle of it. Someone had died here, where she stood, and the great splashes and sprays of blood, darkening in the hot sun, told her it had been brutal and prolonged.

At least it was not the bulls. And they were walking free, so it was not to be the death of being tied to stakes while the animals fed on you.

Then the ground beneath her feet seemed to tremble, and from a dozen points round the arena, trapdoors rumbled open, and the tigers leaped out, snarling from starvation.

Mara backed away, and then spun round, as she realized the tigers were everywhere. The crowd roared, and the ten women broke and began backing away in different directions, trying to keep as far away as they could from the circling, snarling tigers.

She heard someone speaking in her ears, a breathless repetitive prayer, and she realized it was her own voice:

'Please, let it be quick, please, let it be quick...'

Then one of the tigers went still and flat, and leapt forward, and one of the women screamed as it pounced on her, knocking her over. The crowd roared, a seashell noise of thousands of throats yelling in delight, and the woman's screams were drowned out as the tiger ripped into her, its razor-sharp claws slicing her abdomen open, spilling her guts into the sand. Her legs and arms flailed, and then another woman was down, and her piercing, high-pitched cries could clearly be heard, and the unearthly roaring of the tigers as they killed their prey was getting closer.

And Mara ran.

She just ran. She didn't care where she ran, she just had to get away from the terrible claws, and the roaring, out of the blood-soaked arena, out of this place, back to life.

She ran in slow motion, the tiers of marble rising in front of her getting closer and closer with each heartbeat, until she could see the expressions on the faces in front of her. They were cheering, they were happy for her, she thought; they want me to escape, maybe they'll help me to escape, maybe they'll put out their hands and haul me up and out.

Then she realized they were cheering what was behind her, and in the same slow motion, she slowly looked round, each of her footfalls taking an age, and she saw the tiger behind her, sailing through the air in its spring, its ears back, its mouth bared in a terrible snarl, and its feline, killer eyes focused on her, and her alone.

'Urrgmmmph!'

The breath was knocked out of her as the beast's impact threw her to the ground, and the slow-motion speeded up, and the pain was so bad, she couldn't even begin to take it all in.

She knew she was screaming, but her ears seemed to have stopped working, because all she could hear was the roaring of the tiger as its claws raked across he chest and its hind legs came up and scrabbled briefly at her. Then she looked down and saw her flesh and clothing hanging in ribbons, and blood hanging like a fine mist in the air, her blood, and something hot and slithery was hanging out of her, easing out of her like pink rope, and her legs were like jelly.

The tiger raked her again, and now something hot and wet was running over her crotch and thighs. The tiger's head was going for her throat, its mouth gaping wide, the gale of hot stinking breath in her nostrils, and its jaws closed on her throat. Its jaws slammed shut, the incisors puncturing her neck with a horrible sqeak of severed cartilage, and in a terrible, ripping motion, the tiger tore out her windpipe, throat and arteries in one huge sideways wrench.

Mara was still conscious, but could not breathe or scream, as the animal's head came back again, only this time it took her entire skull in its jaws, and its teeth closed round her cranium like pincers, and then her world went searing red as the tiger bit into the top of her head, its incisors crunching into the bone of her skull. She felt her skull give way, felt it cave in with a squeaking crack, and the horror of it all was too much to take, too much to know, as she felt her head crushed in the vice of the tiger's jaws.

An explosion of white-hot light in her mind, and she felt her limbs twitch.

A moment's dislocation, and the world went gray, then new colors and sensations burst over her, flooding her mind.

Mara leaped off the couch, cables popping out behind her as she scrabbled on her knees across the floor, and she screamed in little pants as they caught up with her and battled to get an oxygen mask onto her face.

'Hold her down, hold her!' came a voice, and she struggled against the hands that grappled at her, her back arching as the pain memory flooded back into her, and her heart thudded in her chest, hammering away at a deadly 200 beats per minute.

'She's coming down' came a voice, and she locked onto it. A voice, someone speaking. Someone speaking.

Normality. Alive.

She was breathing. There were no tigers.

No Coliseum. No death. No pain.

She was alive.

Matt was there now, helping to remove the remaining cables from her body. He picked up her body like it was a feather, and carried her out of the room. She clung tightly to him as the door thumped shut, and his voice was saying reassuring things to her, and he was carrying into the quiet room.

The door clunked shut, and the lock clicked, and the lighting was low. Matt lay her tenderly on the bed and poured her some kind of drink from a plastic jug.

'Thanks,' she managed, and she gulped it down.

'Thirsty?' he asked, sitting on the side of the bed.

'Yes, thirsty.' She drank the fruity liquid down. 'Can I have some more?' She handed him back the cup.

More drink into the cup.

Matt's eyes were locked on hers in the dimness of the room.

He handed it back to her, and their fingers touched, and Mara grabbed Matt's wrist, then his arm, and pulled her to him. The drink sloshed over her, spilling onto her tee shirt and jeans, but she was oblivious to everything except the need to feel his lips against hers.

'Hey,' he managed, and that was all he managed before she had locked her mouth to his, and she pressed her tongue into his mouth, and probed deeply, and felt the warm wetness of his tongue waiting for her.

She wrapped her arms round his neck and pulled him down onto her, and grabbed one of his hands and placed it on one of her breasts. She was panting before he even touched it, and the sensation of his hands, his warm, living hands, on her nipples under her bra and tee shirt, was like nectar to her.

She maneuvered onto the couch, and reached down to unzip his jeans, and pulled them down as he wriggled out of them, and kicked them off, and she grabbed his cock inside his shorts, and it hardened under her grasp, and she felt such a wave of animal desire, a need to be penetrated, a need to be taken, that it took her breath away.

Matt rolled sideways and shrugged his shorts off, and she reached down and tore at her belt and unzipped her own jeans as he did so. The zip broke as she writhed out of them, but she hardly noticed. There was only one thought in her mind, to be penetrated by that hard maleness that jutted out and touched her skin. She tore off her panties and, with a passion that seemed to take over her entire body, she wrapped her legs round Matt's hard male body and devoured his mouth again. She could feel his cock pressing against her stomach, then he shifted, and it grazed her pubic mound, and then it was there, touching the engorged lips of her cunt, pressing against them, pressing, pressing.

'Oh God, Matt, take me, please, just take me,' she moaned, and the words came out as a plaintive cry, almost desperate in their intensity, and she writhed under him, gripping him to her. She knew she was wet inside, and his cock was pressing away at the outer lips, and any minute now would break through -

'Oh, yes, yess,' she breathed in his ear, as it overcame the resistance and the swollen glans found wet, ribbed flesh waiting for it. Like a blind worm, it sank into the muscular grip of her waiting cunt, and the walls pulsed with energy as Matt's cock moved in jerks into her, inch by wonderful inch.

'Oh, you're huge,' she gasped, and an animal passion rose inside her, and ignited like a flame. With a strangled cry, she wrapped her legs round him and hauled him in, pushing against him, rubbing her pubic mound against his in a desperate attempt to feed the wild cravings of her swollen clit.

Matt thrust into her, and she cried with delight as she was filled with his hard cock. She wanted to be filled by him, ravaged by him, torn apart by him, and she raised her knees up, up, until she was caressing his sides, and her ankles crossed behind his back, and Matt thrust into her like there was no tomorrow.

The sensations washing over her were incredible; the sensations of sheer terror, of impending death, of actual death, of the tiger's claws slicing her warm flesh open, the hot spurting of her blood. And the hot, sweet hardness of Matt, filling her up inside, his hot breath panting in her ear.

'Stop, get up,' she gasped, and pushed him off her.

'What's the matter?' he asked in surprise, as she struggled out of his embrace and stood up.

Mara's chest was flushed, her hair in disarray, and her eyes were feral, the pupils shrunk to little pinpricks.

'Lie on the bench,' she demanded, pointing to the padded exercise bench that stood in one corner of the room.

'What - ' began Matt, but she just took his arm and dragged him over, and pushed him down on his back on the slim bench, barely twelve inches wide. His erection, slick with her vaginal juices, jutted vertically upwards, and she moved over to straddle the bench, her feet on the floor on either side of him.

'Better hold onto the bars,' she said, and something in her voice made Matt obey, and he lifted his arms above his head and gripped the smooth metal bars above the bench. Mara's face was shiny with sweat, and hair had fallen into her face, giving her a wild, sultry look.

She leaned forward, and placed the palms of her hands on his chest, and slowly, brutally, letting her own weight force her down, she impaled herself on his cock.

'Ohhhh,' she groaned, as he slid into her, all the way, and it felt like she was riding him, and her feet were on the floor astride him now, and she could thrust up and down on him by standing on the floor, and her hands were on his chest, and he was holding on, and the sensation was driving her blood pressure through the roof.

She lifted herself off him with an animal hiss, then sank back down again, and she flung her head back as the penetration filled her up inside.

'If you come, you're dead meat,' she panted, and she wasn't joking. This was for her, and she needed the sex, she needed it, she NEEDED it, and she broke into a rhythmic thrusting up and down on his cock, and she raked her fingernails over his chest and watched him struggle as she drew blood.

And the sight of the blood made her go wild, and she bounced up and down on him with a cold fury that terrified Matt, and her eyes, that gazed down at him, weren't her eyes, but the wild, glistening eyes of the killer, and she grunted with passion as she took him, astride him on the bench.

She took one hand off his chest and pressed two fingers hard against her clit, and rubbed herself brutally, stretching and releasing the hot bud of flesh, and her fingernails dug into Matt's penis with the frenzy of her stimulation.

'Breasts,' she gasped, and Matt's hands came up to cup her breasts in their warm, enveloping dryness, and he held them, and cupped them, and stroked them with the palm of his cupped hand, and now she was climbing towards her orgasm.

The thought made her pant with excitement and delight, and once again the tiger was ripping into her, and she was dying in the arena, but she was alive, and fucking, and she was climbing towards the pinnacle, and she was writhing in the hot sand. The blood spattered around her, and an animal roaring filled her ears; the cry of the crowd, and the screaming of dying girls round her, and the hot brush of animal fur against her, and blood-soaked mouths raised to the sun.

She flung her own head back now, and a sound escaped from her open mouth, a primal scream from the nights when the apes stalked the forests, and her fingers were a blur on her swollen clitoris. Matt was struggling underneath her, trapped between her thighs, and she was invincible, her feet planted firmly astride him on the floor, and her breasts were being held, and around her in the forest night Death stalked, but she was alive, alive, ALIVE, and with an exultant cry she went beyond the point of no return.

She looked down on her victim, and then it was like a maddening itch that she couldn't stop, and she couldn't go fast enough, she couldn't get enough of Matt inside her, her breasts couldn't be held hard enough, there wasn't enough love in the world for her, and she gritted her teeth, and the tigers came again, and the claws were in her, and as they tore across her chest and belly and opened up the arteries in her legs and her blood spilled out, Mara came. It was like a dam bursting, and she felt it go, and a torrent of pain and delight, muscular spasms that rippled out from her vagina and uterus, and shivered out through her body, and she couldn't breathe, she dared not breathe, and the delicious thrusting continued, and her fingers moved in spasms.

And it didn't go away. Her eyes flicked open, and after a few seconds, she realized she was heading towards another one, and the shock and the delight of the multiple orgasm filled her, and she was still rubbing herself, with slower, firmer strokes, but she wanted more, she needed more, she had to have it, she had to had to HAD TO. The sensation rushed up again, of not being able to stop, and this time she screamed in delight. The second one was wilder and more encompassing than the first, and as the waves of contractions burst inside her, she fell forward onto Matt's chest, and cried with the pain and the pleasure and the delight, and the blessed release, the release from her own body's terror, and pleasure, and the primal need to copulate.

'Arghh,' said Matt under her, and his hands left her breasts, and slid out from between their bodies, and he held her to him, lying there on the bench.

They lay there for long minutes, their bodies pressed together, her head on his shoulders, his erection hard and unyielding inside her cunt.

Mara looked up, and he was relieved to see her own eyes back again. She smiled at him.

'Was that good?' he asked.

'Good doesn't even begin to describe it.'

Matt smiled back at her, and teased a wisp of hair out of her face. God, she is beautiful, he thought. What the hell did I do to deserve someone as beautiful as her?

'And now -' she stood up and swung a leg over him as she dismounted, 'it's your turn.'

They had first discovered the Machine at a party.

'So what do you do?'

They had been talking for a while, and his eyes had been on her, and hers on his, and they had got round to asking what each other did for a living.

His name was Matt, and he worked in Network Engineering.

He was pressed close to Mara in the crowded hallway, and as a crush of people came by, for a brief moment they touched. She didn't shrink back at once, just let herself be pressed, and then released as the person behind her pushed past.

'I work in Customer Service,' she said. 'I'm one of the helpdesk agents.'

'Oh.' Their conversation paused, but she didn't move away. He smiled at her again. 'Do you want another drink?'

'Sure.'

He got Mara another drink.

They talked some more.

And then it became really crowded downstairs, so Matt suggested that they go upstairs, where some friends of his had set up a really cool new video game, and would she like to see it?

Mara said that she would like to see it.

So, she thought, it was one of those parties, where the real action went on in the upstairs rooms. Not the rooms on the second floor, where people were laughing hysterically, sitting cross-legged on the floor as they smoked, but higher still in the old house, up the stairs to the attic, behind what looked like a closet door.

She followed Matt uncertainly, but unless she was very mistaken, he wasn't going to do anything stupid, like trying to fling her onto a bed the moment they were alone. So Mara went up the stairs, and he carried her drink for her, which was nice, because she had already had too much to drink, and she wasn't at all sure if she could have made it up the steep stairs without spilling some.

He didn't seem quite sure of which room it was, and they tried one door, but he closed the door quickly with an embarrassed 'Sorry!'. She smiled.

The second door they tried, it opened a crack, and the dark shape that moved in the slit looked out, saw it was Matt, opened it briefly to let them in, and locked the door behind them again.

Inside, there was another couple, who seemed to know Matt. They were sitting together, the girl lying down on a couch, her boyfriend sitting upright next to her, holding her hand. They looked up as Matt and Mara came in.

Mara took in the details of the room. Low lighting, and quiet voices. There seemed to be another couple, through a half-open bedroom door that opened off the room, and from the sounds of it they were busy with each other, but no-one commented. No drugs that she could see, but what looked like two computer transit cases were lying open. A computer monitor glowed a dark blue near the girl on the couch.

There was a whispered conversation between Matt and the guy sitting by the couch, then Matt motioned Mara over and showed her what they were doing.

'Tim, Rhona, say hi to Mara.'

'Hi.'

'Hey, Mara'

'So-o,' said Matt, 'what we've got here is a nerve induction setup, so that whatever the computer tells Rhona here to feel, she will experience. Vision, sound, touch, pleasure... pain... it's all there.'

'Hey, hang on, I thought this stuff was illegal,' said Mara.

'It's not illegal to own it, it's what you play back on it that's illegal,' Tim reminded her gently, and their three faces were looking at her.

There was an awkward pause.

'Say, we've got no problem, if you want to get out of here,' Tim said, 'we've all done this before. But you better say so now.'

Mara stared for a moment, then thought back to a million parties she had been to before, and how unmemorable they had been. This one promised to be different.

They were looking at her.

A million unmemorable parties.

And one here, where she was going to see something really new.

Maybe it was illegal.

But life was too short.

And she only had to watch.

'OK, count me in,' she said, and sat down.

'So, she's all hooked up to the electronarcosis generator,' Tim pointed to the tiny clip electrodes on each of Rhona's earlobes, 'and here we have a disk -' Tim produced a disk that looked like a DVD '- that has a little scene on it that's going to reduce Rhona to, well, a wobbly jelly.'

Rhona laughed at Tim excitedly, winked meaningfully at Mara, and lay back on the couch. Tim punched some keys on the control panel, Matt dimmed the lights untilo the room was in semi-darkness, and after a few preliminary blinks and synchs, the blue screen cleared, and a rhythmic pulsing throb started emanating from the machine.

The throb of electronarcosis.

All of them felt it, even through the narcotic pulses were only flowing through Rhona, and Mara exhaled deeply as she felt her cares evaporate, and a warm, peaceful feeling settle over her.

'Nnnnn...' said Rhona, and her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled slowly upwards. A few moments later, her head wandered from side to side as she lost muscle control, then fell to one side. Tim fiddled with the ENG controls, and the tone of the pulses changed and lessened, and Mara felt her head clearing.

'Is she unconscious?' she asked.

'Not quite; I've taped off the pulses, so that she's being held in a semi-lucid state, kind of on the edge of sleep and waking.' Tim stroked Rhona's hair, and arranged her head better on the couch. 'Talk quietly, she can still hear us.'

Tim reached out and picked up a loom of cables, each of which had a different device on each end.

'Sight first.' Tim prised open one of Rhona's eyes and delicately dropped a tiny cup onto the cornea, attached by a fiber-optic cable to the Machine.

'Now sound,' and he inserted a small earplug into one ear.

'Why don't you need both eyes and ears connected?' asked Mara, fascinated, and Matt answered, whispering into her ear as Tim worked:

'We're not playing pictures into the eyeball, we're sending modulated nerve pulses up one optic nerve into the brain. There's visual stuff coded into it of course, but it's the way the brain is stimulated through different nerve pathways that allows us to create the illusion of being there. We can synthesize anything else from three basic nerve types.'

Tim inserted Rhona's finger into a small thimble-like device.

'Sensation,' Matt said quietly.

Tim kissed Rhona on the lips, and slid the disc into the neuroelectrical player.

'Now, my dear, it's time to dream,' said Tim, stroking Rhona's hair again and smoothing it away from her forehead, 'I'll see you on the other side, my love.'

The disk spun up, and after a few moments the blue screen cleared, then started to show a scene unfolding, as if it were a movie.

Mara watched the scene as it played out on the screen. It was just like watching a movie, as a girl in a tight-fitting police uniform walked up to a gas station and rapped on the cashier's window.

Except that Rhona's body was moving in time with the movie.

Rhona's fingers twitched, her lips moved as the girl shouted Hello round the gas station, and Rhona's hand jerked slightly as the policewoman unholstered her revolver.

'How do they make these disks?' said Mara, astonished.

'Shhh, keep your voice down,' cautioned Matt in a whisper. 'Nobody knows exactly how they make them. They're really difficult to get hold of, epecially the good quality ones. Some are really grainy, and you don't get all the sensation. This one's really good quality, she's really experiencing the - Oh, now watch this next bit.' Matt gripped Mara's arm.

Mara glanced back at the screen, just as four drug dealers materialized out of doorways, and open fire on the luckless girl.

The reaction from Rhona was incredible.

As the girl on the screen folded up under the impact of the bullets, Rhona's body arched, and a thin cry came from her straining throat. Her muscles stood out in ridges, and her eyes squeezed tight shut; her face a grimace of pain.

Mara's hand jerked up to her mouth in shock, and she opened her mouth to cry out, but Matt's hand flew round and clamped shut over her mouth, his finger held in a sign for silence against his own. Mara's eyes widened, then she nodded.

Matt released his hand, and Mara watched, fascinated, as Rhona's body twitched as each bullet opened up little holes in the girl's jacket, and in her legs, and in her throat, and Rhona's body twisted as the girl slumped to the floor on the screen. Rhona thrashed about feebly as the girl died on screen, Rhona's face a mixture of terror and pain, her body shaking as it lived out the girl's death spasms on the screen.

The scene ended, and Rhona slumped on the couch as the on-screen girl collapsed in death. The screen blinked, and went back to a deep blue, and Tim shut down the electronarcosis generator, holding on to Rhona as he did so.

Rhona jumped as she woke up, and her hands flew to her throat, and a thin cry came from her mouth until she realized she was safe, and that Tim was holding her. She clutched Tim close, her body shaking as she panted against him.

And Rhona's first words, as she calmed down and got her breathing under control; her first words to Tim, clearly audible in the dimly-lit quietness of the room:

'Oh, baby, please, take me somewhere, quickly; I need it now.'

Tim helped her up and carried her to the bedroom, and Mara had heard the cries from the dark, and they were Rhona's cries, and they had an animal pitch, an intensity that she had never heard before.

Mara held Matt's hand as she listened to the cries from the bedroom, and she saw the look in Matt's eyes, and the bulge in his pants, at seeing what Rhona had gone through.

And that was when Mara knew that she wanted it, and not once, in all the time that followed, did she ever look back.

Mara's eyes blinked.

She couldn't believe all that was just over a year ago.

How she had changed in that year, since that night at the party.

How many times she had died, how much death she had suffered.

'What are you going to give me?' Matt asked, his eyes still soft and happy from the sex earlier.

'Oh, I chose one of your fave stories,' she smiled, 'I think you're going to like this one, baby.'

Matt settled back with a grin on his face.

We all have our favorites, she thought, as she fastened the ENG clips to Matt's earlobes, and watched him slide into the noman's land between waking and sleep.

What's my favorite? she wondered.

The first time she had experienced the Machine, that night at the party, when the bullets had cut her down, she had wanted to throw up when she came out of it, but the feeling afterwards, the rush back to life, the overpowering urge to have sex, was unbelievable.

She hooked up the electrodes to Matt's sleeping form. Eye, finger, ear. Sight, touch, hearing.

See no evil, hear no evil.

Touch no evil?

And after that first experience, the more she thought about it, the more she liked it, and she had tried it again, and again, with different scenes and settings each time.

We all have our favorites.

Oh yes.

One of the times that had really got through to her unconscious desires had been when she had been tied up to a table and raped by four men in turn, then had her throat cut. It had fueled her waking fantasies for weeks afterwards.

She considered this for a moment, as she slipped the disk into the drive, but she knew the answer; it was just a case of admitting it, owning up the dark side.

Somewhere inside us all, there is the dark side, that clings to the walls of your mind, like a drained leech that thirsts for blood, or like the crawling things that you found under a stone when you were very young.

Only for some of us, that crawling thing never went away, and it lay there in our brain, waiting until we were older, and when the time came, it came out and gripped us, and we were claimed.

When we were very young.

Childhood, and her brother's friends were playing at War, and Mara was always a German, and she had been machine-gunned as she came round the corner, and she had thrown up her arms and gone Arghhhh

and the bullets had slammed into her soft flesh, and blown bloody holes in her back as they exited, and her blood spurted in great jets as arteries were severed, and she fell to the ground, her cry of pain escaping her throat, and she had twitched on the cold ground as the blood drained away, and her life fluttered on the edge.

The line between Death and Sex is very thin, and for some of us, when the thin wall that holds them apart is fractured, they coexist, and you die in your orgasms, and you suffer orgasms as you die.

Mara had watched what happened to Rhona in the scene that Tim played her. She had seen it, in full color and sound, on the screen of the player, all that time ago.

She had lain down on the couch, and she had tried it, the same scene that Rhona had gone through, and she had felt it; the pain of death, the sensation of hot bullets flying through her flesh, the blood pouring into her throat, choking her; the feelings of despair, shutdown, ruin, death.

And then the rushing delight of coming back to life.

The relief, the relief.

And the desire to be fucked, like she'd never known before.

See death. Cheat Death. Make more babies.

It was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

It was better than sex.

Die, so you shall Live.

Suffer your orgasms like you are dying.

Die as if you were having an orgasm.

We all have our favorites.

Die.

When we were very young

Die, die...

DIE.

Mara punched in the download commands and the machine spun up, and began downloading the scene into Matt's mind...

In the grayness, Matt's mind swam up towards the world that opened up around him.

Omigod.

Omigod.

Matt's heart hammered in his chest as he was led along the stone corridor in the depths of the castle.

It was cold, and his bare feet slapped against the freezing cold flagstones of the floor as he walked. Cold, cold, and his breath smoked in the chill air.

They had found him, of course, how could he have been so stupid to think they wouldn't? They had tortured him, of course, even when he had told them everything, and he held his hands in front of him, the places where his fingernails had been just ragged, bleeding scars.

One of them turned to him, and her perfect skin and plucked eyebrows were a counterpoint to the submachine gun strapped across her long leather coat, and the tall boots that thumped on the flagstones as she walked.

'Sie werden sehr bald tot sein, Engländer.' She smiled at him, and her blue eyes were glistening slits in the cold morning air as her gaze shifted to her comrade, and Matt heard her whisper something that he dreaded to hear:

'Machen wir es ihm nicht zu leicht. Zielt auf die Arme und Beine!'

They emerged into brittle sunlight in the courtyard, a crisp blue sky and a perfect day, and Matt's legs turned to water, and he stumbled on the stone flags.

'Mitkommen!' one of them barked, and they grabbed his arms and dragged him to the wooden post in the center of the courtyard.

'No, no,' Matt managed to croak, but they just laughed as they forced him to stand against the wooden post, and they fastened his hands behind the post with handcuffs.

He knew he was going to die; it was so real, so real.

They went and stood, maybe ten meters away from him, and they flicked their coats aside, and under the coats they had their black uniforms on, and they spread their long legs apart as they raised their submachine guns.

'Erschießungskommando - Gewehre anlegen!'

They took aim, and the contrast between their intense beauty, and the power of their guns, and the softness of the glistening leather, was so painful it made Matt want to weep.

Life, he thought, and he looked up, to where a hawk soared, high above the castle, rising in the clear cold air.

'Zielen!' came the command, and he closed his eyes and waited for the end.

Then the breath was knocked from his lungs as a giant hammer blow thudded into his shoulder, and another, and another, and his eyes flicked wide open, and he sagged in his bonds, and he saw a spray of his blood sparkle in the sunlight as the low-velocity bullets socked home.

Then the pain came, and it was more then he could ever have imagined, ten times more, a million times more, and he felt pain in his chest, in his arms, in his legs, in his groin, and he smelt the gunsmoke now, and he saw their panting expressions, lusting after his blood, as they machine-gunned him against the post.

But behind it all, behind the pain, was an awfulness, a despair, a darkness that he had never experienced in all the countless disks he had tried.

It turned his knees to water, it laid his soul bare, and beyond the pain and the despair, the sensation of loss, there was something else.

The pain made him see it, and it came closer, and it felt like a brightening light, and a singing in his ears, and it came closer with each bullet that socked into his soft flesh.

The girls were killing him in slow-motion now, the cuffs of their leather gloves quivering with the vibration of each bullet leaving the gun barrels, and he saw each bullet heading towards him, spinning like tops, little spirals of death in smoke, and the flashes of the muzzles were like little jets of flame.

Smoke.

The light grew brighter through the smoke, and Matt felt his soul turn to vapor. There was something within the light, a presence he could feel, and the smoke was getting thin now, and he felt a growing euphoria, a sense of delight.

The girls were moving towards him now, firing from the hip, aiming for his trunk now, cutting his body into bloody ribbons of flesh. They were grinning, and the passion and excitement of their killing was a terrible accompaniment to his rising excitement.

He could feel his hot blood splash out now, running down his cold skin, a gush of warmth in the cold, and it felt like his life was running away.

And still they came, and his eyes drooped until he was looking down at his thighs, and the black holes from which rivers of red ran. There was no physical pain now, only a strange tearing sensation, and somehow, Matt knew it was his soul leaving his body.

The scene in the courtyard faded, and he was in the smoke again, but he was floating, and a great wind was blowing, and the light ahead of him was growing brighter, and the singing in his ears louder, until it was a crescendo of joy, and Matt felt his heart rise within him, and his bloody tatters recoiled and were healed, and he was whole again, and just ahead...

A dislocation, and he fell through the grayness, and the light and sensations of the waking world swam up to meet him

Matt yelled in anguish on the couch, bringing his arms up to cover his face.

'Matt, what is it?' came a voice, but he yelled again, a cry of despair from the soul, as the memory of the light and the joy that he had lost washed over him again. He brought his legs up to his chest and panted, his eyes closed, in the protective fetal position, and he gasped as the experience replayed, again and again, until he thought he would die from the loss of that joy.

He felt a cool hand on his, and he was amazed at the sensation.

A touch.

He opened his eyes, and Mara was looking down at him, her lovely face full of concern, and he felt like his heart would burst.

She kissed him, and held him to her, and for a long minute they stayed there, and Mara's lips were warm and soft on his. Then she slowly pushed her tongue into his mouth, and shifted her position, and slid her hand across the front of his jeans and cupped his balls through the warm denim.

Her breath was hot on his cheek, and her face was flushed from watching the scene on the screen.

'Did you enjoy that?' she murmured, 'did you enjoy being shot up by those Nazi bitches?'

Matt pulled away from her, closing his eyes again.

'Matt, what is it?' Mara was leaning over him, her eyes a mixture of fear and concern, 'are you okay?'

Matt's face was squeezed into a grimace of loss, of pain, and the tears squeezed from his eyes as the breath hissed between his teeth.

'Matt, what's the matter! You're scaring me!'

Matt's shoulders shook, and Mara put her arm round him and hugged him as he wept.

'The light?' he managed to get out, 'did you see the light at the end?'

'What light? I didn't see any light. You were machine-gunned to death, and then the screen went blank.'

'There... was... a light,' Matt breathed out the words, 'I saw it; I felt it.'

'Matt, I don't like this. There's something on that disk that shouldn't be there.'

She leaned away from him and retrieved the disk from the player; multicolored flashes of light sparking off its surface. 'I don't want you using it again.'

'Mara! NO!' Matt tried to sit up, but it was too late, and he was still weak from the scene. Before he could reach out, before he could stop her, she flexed the disk between her hands, and with a squeak of plastic, it shattered into several reflective shards.

'NO!' cried Matt, but it was too late, and his voice was a scream in the room as blind rage took him. 'You stupid cunt! You stupid, stupid cunt! You stupid, fucking, CUNT!'

Matt is standing on one of the Damstraat bridges, and his breath smokes in the icy night air as a tourist barge moves slowly past beneath him, the people inside gazing up and out at the tall houses above the glistening canals.

His eyes are dull in the lights that reflect off the glistening water of the canal. He has died so many times, that his eyes have that far-away, glazed look; the look of the infantryman that has seen too much death. He has been through the pain of dying so often, that nothing does it for him any more. The sensation of death, and the rush of returning life, have lost any meaning for him, as he hungers after the Light, and he endures horrifying deaths in the hope of seeing more of it.

A man walks past him, over the bridge, walking his dog, and nods to Matt as he passes, and the money is passed between them, and the man walks away.

Minutes pass.

It is a year since Mara left him, and Matt rarely thinks about it, but something makes him think about her now, and he can hear her voice:

'Where do those disks come from, Matt? The ones that you keep bringing back late at night? How are they making them?'

He has spent almost his entire time since that moment when he saw the Light, trying to get closer to it.

'There's something on that disk that shouldn't be there.'

Somewhere, at the end of Life, there was a Light, something wonderful, and Matt no longer works, no longer lives; he is obsessed with his quest.

A hundred deals like this, and Matt wonders if this time will be any different to the others. A group of chattering tourists flock aimlessly over the bridge, only just getting out of the way of a tram that rumbles past, and the man with the dog walks past again.

After he passes, Matt holds a disk in his hand.

He slides it into his coat pocket, and walks away from the bridge, skirting the tourists and their noise, back towards the hotel.

The temperature drops as he walks, and by the time he is walking along the Damrak, it is freezing, and the beggars reach out their hands to him as he passes. Matt pushes past a drug dealer that repeatedly hisses 'Crack cocaine... crack cocaine,' under his breath, and turns into one of the side streets that take him away from the lights and the restaurants and the noise.

A seedy tourist hotel, and Matt rides the elevator up to the fourth floor, and enters his room and locks the door behind him, putting the security chain on.

Inside, by the bed, the equipment hums, unpacked from its case. A tangle of cables covers the carpet, the screen dark blue and silent.

Matt disappears into the bathroom, and there is the sound of urine running into the bowl, and the cistern flushes.

Shadows flicker in the room as Matt turns down the lights.

He pulls out the disk, and as he slides it into the machine, he hopes that this time will be different.

That this time, he will see Heaven's Light.

The machine is booting up, and the dark screen flickers with text as it runs through its selftests and prepares to download the pain and the terror.

Matt lies down on the stained bedcover, and fastens the electrodes to his earlobes, finer, ear, and eye. The last one is difficult, because his eye keeps trying to close and the cable won't let it, but he is experienced at this now, and ignores the discomfort while he sets the electronarcosis pulses going.

The familiar feeling of well being is elusive this time, as the familiar narcotic throb fills Matt's mind, and his head twitches on the thin pillows, a frown on his face, and he can still hear Mara's voice, whispering as he slips into unconsciousness:

'Where do those disks come from, Matt?'

Inside his dreams, Matt is floating, in a gray world without light.

'There's something on that disk that shouldn't be there.'

Then suddenly, he is inside.

He was walking down a corridor again, but it was warm, uncomfortably warm, and there was a smell; a smell of cheap disinfectant and stale food.

Matt felt sick to the pit of his stomach. His bowels churned, and each step down the corridor cost him dear. He looked to one side, and another, and the two prison warders were walking slowly, calmly, looking straight ahead, their keys clinking on their belt loops. Two others followed behind.

'Come on now, son,' said one of them. Matt knew it was the old warder, by his voice. 'There's no point in delaying it.'

Matt tried to walk faster, but his legs wouldn't carry him, and then he was facing a metal door, and they unlocked it and opened it, and he was led into an empty room, where he was patted down.

'Okay, son, this is it,' said the eldest warder, 'We've practiced this together, now let's see if you can do us proud.'

And the inner door opened, and Matt saw it, the wooden chair, made of wood from old gallows, gallows that had taken countless lives before the Chair started taking them. He saw the metal fittings at the ankles, the cables to the hood and the ankles, and the leather straps at ankle and wrist, and he broke down and started to cry.

'Come on son, this isn't the way we practiced it, you know what to do.'

'I c-c-can't do it, said Matt, 'I don't want to do it. G-g-get me out of here.'

The senior warder motioned to the others, and they gathered behind him and started helping him through the door. Matt started to struggle, but there were four of them and one of him, and they overpowered him and half carried, half dragged him to the chair.

He struggled madly as they lifted him onto it, and bucked and struggled as they clamped his ankles in and fastened the wide leather straps that held his wrists down, and the bigger straps that held his ankles against the copper electrodes.

'I didn't do it! I didn't! It wasn't me!' he yelled, his voice sounding shrill in his ears.

'Come on, you know why you're here, son, and making this noise ain't going to help nobody. Try to calm down, take some deep breaths. Remember what we practiced. Deep breaths.'

Matt did as he was told, and took a few panicky breaths, then some deeper ones, and for a moment, things seemed better.

Then they came behind him, and the sponge was placed on the shaved spot on his head, and he felt the trickle of cold water, and the saltiness ran into his open mouth, and then the leather hood was slipped on, and in the confined space of the hood he lost it again, and began to cry out, and he struggled again. He couldn't breathe, there wasn't enough air, and he struggled like a mad thing, and finally began to scream in the helmet.

'Let's get this one over quickly, boys,' came the muffled voice of the senior warder, 'he's losing it. Read the sentence.'

'By the power vested in him, The Governor of the State of New Georgia does solemnly decree...'

Matt couldn't even hear the rest of the sentence, he was speechless and screaming, his ears ringing from his own cries.

'Set voltage.'

'Set at two thousand volts.'

'Set current.'

'Set at ten amps.'

'Gentlemen -' and three of the guards placed their fingers on the execution buttons. Only one of them actually closed the circuit; the other two were dummies, so that the guards would never know who was the actual executioner.

'Close the switch.'

The soft clicks, in swift succession.

Matt's scream stopped. His tongue flew to the roof of his mouth and curled there, and a giant hand rammed a white-hot poker through his skull, down into his body, making his muscles freeze in a curl of agony. A ringing noise filled his head, and increased in volume, and the terrible, unbearable pain shot down his chest, and down, and into his groin, and down his legs.

His back arched in the chair.

But he couldn't cry out, he couldn't even draw a breath, and he was stuck in mid-breath, mid-scream, mid life, and there was a drumming noise, that he could hear from somewhere, and he knew he should know that it was own arms, jerking uncontrollably against the chair. Now the pain in his head was so intense, he wanted it to stop he wanted to cry out he couldn't cry out he wanted to scream he couldn't scream he needed to breathe he couldn't breathe and the pain the Pain the PAIN. It carried on getting worse, mounting, pinnacles of agony, mountain upon mountain, and he felt his eyeballs bulging, it felt like his eyeballs were coming out.

Then it stopped, and he flopped in the chair, and was about to draw breath, but then he smelt burning flesh, and there was searing pain on his head and in his ankles, where the skin was being burned off the bone. His entire body felt like it was on fire, as the flesh was literally being cooked off his bones, and he opened his mouth to scream, but then the poker was rammed into his skull again for the second jolt, and this time, there was a popping noise in his ears and suddenly the world went very fuzzy and indistinct, and he knew he was dying; arched and twitching in the electric chair as twenty kilowatts of energy surged through him.

He hovered there, and now the pain was a soft cocoon round him, and it grew warm and dark, and the twitching and the stench of cooking flesh grew indistinct, and in the distance, there was a light, and a Voice, and it seemed like the sweetest sight and sound he had ever heard.

He saw, rather than felt, his head loll forward; it seemed to belong to somebody else very far away, and there was a whispering now, hundreds of voices around him, and he was filled with a sense of wonder and anticipation, and a great calm descended on him, and it felt like he was about to cry, with tears of joy. This was what he had been looking for, in that long year since he first experienced it. This was it!

Smoke rolled about him, and the light grew brighter through the smoke, and there was that strange tearing sensation again that Matt knew was his soul leaving his body behind, and he felt no fear, just a growing expectation of something wonderful.

He was floating, and the wind was blowing again, and his hair was waving in the breeze, and the light ahead of him was growing brighter, and the voices were growing louder.

But they were changing, shifting out of harmony, becoming a shrieking, tearing sound that he hadn't heard before.

Something was different to that last time; something was wrong.

Horribly wrong.

The smoke was swirling around him, but it had become thick and acrid, and it stung his eyes. He was moving through it, and he was heading down a corridor, but it wasn't the same corridor; it was ancient, and made of roughly-hewn stone, blackened and scorched, and in the crudely chiseled alcoves horrors lurked, leering at him as he passed, and the sounds grew louder and more discordant, a hideous cacophony of shrieking and wailing, many voices crying out.

And at the end of the corridor, which loomed close now, there was a door, and as he drew closer, he saw that it was made of blackened brass, with a giant ring set in it. The figures carved on its surface seemed to move and intertwine, and their skeletal faces were looking at him, they were craning to see him as he approached, and he tried to pull away, to hold himself back, but he was suspended in mid-air, and was moving inexorably towards the door.

Something was on the other side of the door, and it was speaking, in a voice that rose about the terrible shrieks and cries, in a language that Matt couldn't understand, and Matt strained frantically to get away. But the door kept on coming closer, he felt a ghastly sense of foreboding at what lay beyond.

Then the door started to open.

A vivid blaze of red light seared from the widening crack, and a great heat rolled out, as if a furnace door had opened up in the world. Matt's body started to smoke; it smoked like a dry branch in a fire, and his flesh blistered and crackled and broke. Something was inside the door, and it was waiting for him, and there was a roaring, seashell noise, and a great wind, and as it grew louder Matt could hear it was a multitude of voices crying out, crying for something, and the voices were mingled until it was a roar.

The door opened wider still, and the heat skyrocketed, and he went up in flames. He screamed as his flesh was consumed, his fat liquefying and burning in greasy black smoke like a candle, and he wriggled, suspended in mid-air, and the great wind blew on his burning body, feeding the flames. His burning flesh fell off him in flaming tatters, and the pain went on and on and on, and then his voice cracked and was gone, but there was still more of him to burn.

Blood vessels and organs deep inside him broke open as the heat reached them, and blood and viscera spurted and uncoiled and fell from him, smoking in the furnace-light, until all his body was gone. He saw his skeletal form, hanging there, the blackened bones twisting and moving, then even the bones started to crumble and fell away in broken lumps and trails of ash.

But his soul was still there, and it was naked, and the pain of his death and his burning wouldn't go away, and he screamed in pinnacles of agony as he entered the portal, all the pain of his life surrounding him.

For an instant, he had a vision.

He was alone, on the edge of a precipice, and all around him a blood-red sky smoked and burned, and sheer cliffs and twisted pillars of scorched rock loomed against the red sky. Below, the precipice fell away, down, down, through depths of dark and fire-flecked air to a distant worm of red-hot molten rock that snaked through the landscape.

Then he realized he was not alone, and it seemed as if he was in a vast crowd; a great press of souls at his back, screaming in their own endless agony. And there were too many of them, and although he tried to press back, there was nothing he could do against the gigantic tide, and he was pushed over the edge. He flailed his arms uselessly, but he had no body; he was just one naked soul falling in a waterfall of millions, and he cried out in fear as he plunged into the abyss, accelerating in a headlong fall into nothingness.

And the sunken fires licked up the sides of the gorge to greet him as he fell like a bullet into their midst, and his naked soul plunged into the white-hot rock with a great splash of fire. And in that fire, the very life that animated him was sucked from him, and all the pain that had gone before was nothing, nothing to this, and he cried in soundless agony as his soul was consumed, his useless spirit flaring off in a great jet of flame in the dark gorge. And it didn't stop; it went on and on and on, and in a screaming agony he realized it would go on forever, an endless burning that would never, ever stop...

In the dimly-lit room, Matt lay, quite dead, his eyes blankly gazing at the ceiling, his face a mixture of terror and despair, the Machine gently replaying the last scene, again and again, as Matt's sightless eyes waited to see the light that never came.

(c) Thanatos 2001