A short story of horror and lust, a little demonic fairy tale… Inspired by the illustrations of Félicien Rops.
“Can you take me to his house, then?”
“No problem, Sir!”
He stopped before a house in a terrible state, with cracked walls leaning over dangerously, looking as if it could collapse any time now.
“Follow me, Sir!” the coachman said.
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We entered a courtyard. A Belgian blue-stone stairway was leading to a wide hall and reminded me of a monastery. At the end of the hall, there were wooden stairs delving down into the cellars and the crypts of the house and the underground corridors leading to the other side of the canal.
“Who dares to go down into this underworld?” the coachman murmured. “It is said that the Templars have hidden a treasure there, but no-one has dared to explore these subterranean areas. The few that have made an attempt have never returned. But that’s hardly a surprise, because as I already said, the city still has the shape of a maze, something like the inner work of a watch.”
Image via Wikipedia
He turned… and vanished, leaving me alone under a crescent moon with the horror in the hall. A woman was lying on an altar, naked, her legs spread apart. Some creature was bending over her, the arms as thin handles on each side of the body – a skeleton, nothing more, with on top a horse’s head that had two holes for eyes in it, and the one gigantic red and sharp hook of its tongue was flashing down into the lower abdomen of the woman, whose nails were creeping the stone while she was crying in sheer horror and desperate pleasure.
Motionless and without mercy the Demon was camping in the body of his victim, crowned with the Horns of a Moon shining through heavy clouds and thinking – or so it seemed – of the faraway land it had left behind, ugly and grandiose. And now it was bathing in blood, possessing and possessed, a symbol of lust that acute had stranded in death, desperately wanting and making every of its wishes come true.
And then the woman turned her head to me, and it was the Lady of Lust.
And the Demon took of his mask, and I was looking at me.
The Lost Dutchman’s Historical Mysteries
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