No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) by Digital Fiction Page B

and stomach settled themselves. That was when I saw them.
    Through
the empty light, I saw figures moving. At first, I thought it was much the same
as the rest of the House. People screwing, taking drugs, or some combination
thereof; only that wasn’t it.
    Not
exactly.
    Three of
them were closer, two standing around a third.
    Its hands
were behind its back, and I understood it was tied at the wrists. The more my
eyes adjusted, the more I saw what grew out of its shoulder blades. They were
wings.
    “We summon
them,” Cassie said almost in my ear. “The King gives us what we desire.”
    It was an
angel and the two people with it were doing things to it, things I was grateful
I couldn’t exactly see in detail. It was moaning in something that could’ve
been pleasure or pain, or more likely a combination of both.
    Cassie
took my hand again and led me forward.
    Most of
what I saw was happening in the corners of the room where the shadows grew, or
else along the walls that were only half in light. I saw then that there’s an
art to cruelty, though few realize it. As the dominated suffer, so must the
dominant, and giving and taking can be the same thing. Both sides lose
something.
    That was
how it was in the House of Nothing. The angels submitted to men and women with
cruel smiles. Their bodies became canvasses of expressions of a darker kind.
    The more I
saw, the more I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. The angels were beautiful,
but used-up like whores at the end of a tether. One hung in a leather harness
of the kind I’d seen before at a basement party in Soho. With its face hidden
behind a zip-up mask, I didn’t know if it was alive or dead.
    Cassie
stepped in front of me and went to the angel. She ran her hands over its bare
legs and it shuddered, rattling the metal joints of the harness. Her hands
traced a path along its thighs, up along its body and to its head, where she
unzipped the mask.
    Underneath,
the angel’s face was hot with the spiral of addiction. It shone under its skin
like a pale mask.
    “What’s
wrong with it?”
    “Nothing.”
Her eyes smiled behind her own mask. “It simply needs.”
     
    Thoughts
crowded out my head, though their texture and feeling were familiar, yet
uncomfortable. They were thoughts we all have, in the deepest part of our
being. I wanted to do things to the angel, and I wanted Cassie to watch and
help me. The need I saw in its eyes was one of pure hunger, and it looked to me
to satisfy it.
    Then
Cassie zipped the mask back in place, muffling its desperate cry behind the
dark material.
    “I want to
leave,” I said, anger coming behind the desire. If I couldn’t take part in
this, I wanted out.
    She took
my hand again, and for the first time, I felt something slip into the back of
my head. Not physically, but more under the skin and along the inside of my
skull. She’d probably been doing it the whole night — every time she held my
hand.
    “You can’t
leave without me.”
    “Then come
with me, take me out of here.”
    Cassie
shook her head slowly. “The only way out is to continue.”
    It didn’t
matter if she was telling the truth or not, the idea of going it alone wasn’t
something I wanted to contemplate.
     
    We were in
a corridor, dark save for a line of lights overhead. They were held by cables
invisible against their poison glare — a line of sick suns to mark the way.
    “Is this
the way to Carcosa?” I can’t say what made me ask it. The name tasted right,
but the thought to say it didn’t feel like my own. Something what Cassie said
before, about a King who gave them what they desired. I think it provided a way
inside, opened a door for other things to enter.
    “One of
them,” was all she would say.
    The
corridor opened into a circular chamber, illuminated by unnatural lights all
along the walls. The floor was curved slightly, making the chamber into a pit.
A black pit of stars, but the stars — the lights — weren’t really here. They
came from