Chained!

In case you’re wondering: no, I will not go into detail about what happened in that room. Suffice it to say that I eventually became deathly afraid of dogs, and became remarkably kind to cats.

But anyway, the fuss was over and I had been left to clean myself up as best I could, as my mistress Alice and her friends talked of cult business, magical techniques, what good music they’d heard lately… It was a remarkably ordinary conversation for the setting – an opulent bedroom, clearly in the depths of hell. Then again, the room was part of a cookie-cutter prefab building. It was a jarring presentation, all these disparate elements shown together.

And then there was the Angel.

The creatures the witches call “angels” aren’t those harp-pluckers and choir singers with wings and haloes you see in typical cheesy iconography. I’d say, instead, the Angels of Baphomet look like the classic image of demons. Their skin was a dark crimson, rippling with muscles. Their faces had snarling muzzles and wicked, curved horns – often more than one set. Various parts of their bodies had dark brown or black fur, and they had nastily serrated tails tipped with grasping claws, blades or stingers. They also had a number of breasts. The one in front of us had six. She was naked, apart from her fur and her weapon-belt, but she had put aside her sword when she lay down. She was smoking some kind of caterpillars out of a hookah.

She didn’t need any cleaning up, I noticed, though my fur had been matted for a time with… various things. She was perfectly groomed, and smelled… perfect, in a disturbingly visceral way. Brimstone and spices, blood and spun sugar, of hatred, terror and adoration. I don’t think I would have noticed, using my old nose. But I was getting used to being a cat, getting used to my enhanced senses.

The angel took another languid toke on the pipe, then opened her eyes and looked straight at me. I didn’t have time to react to her heart-stopping golden gaze before she had caught me, her ugly paw-like hand catching me under the shoulders and hoisting me up. She spoke to me, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once, malevolent whispers creeping through the darkened recesses of my mind.

“So you are Alice’s new toy. So full of fear, resentment… hatred, child? Do you hate? Yes, you loathe, you burn with it.”

I had involuntarily started hissing at her, and my ears were pinned back all the way. I was scrabbling with my hind legs, but to no avail – she kept me from getting any leverage, and the small nicks I made in her skin merely oozed black ichor. It evaporated in moments, leaving no evidence of harm.

The angel blew the smoke of its last inhalation out through its nostrils, then turned to Alice and company. “Alice, I would speak to you of your thrall.”

Alice averted her eyes. “Speak, Mistress, and I listen.”

The daemon smiled. “You took this one against his will, yes? I can taste his rage, like a phosphor flame in the darkest sky. His mind is incandescent. He shines with an all-consuming flame… if only you could see the race of Man as I do. There is much pleasure to be had with him, much feeding upon his ire.” She tilted me gently, this way and that. I hung limp, saving my energy, just staring at her with naked fury on my face.

“I understand, Mistress,” said Alice. “I began with soul-shackles, that I might take the will of his body from him, but—“

“You misunderstand,” said the daemon. “I instruct you not in your methods, for you have mastered them. I wish to take him for my own.”

“What is mine is yours, Mistress. You need not even ask.”

“I have the right to take from you what I please,” said the daemon. “There is a proper time for using that right. This is not that time. I know of your trials in seeking new thralls. In light of that, I ask your leave to take him for my own.”

Alice was silent only for a moment before she said, “He is yours to do with as you please, Mistress.”

Shit! I’d gotten away from the witch for the moment, but now I was in the clutches of something infinitely more powerful. I didn’t have much time to ponder it, or to flail helplessly against the iron-hard grip around my chest, before I was popped into a sack.

Believe me, when people talk about a sack full of kittens being miserable, they’re not making it up. I was scrunched into a ball, being bumped against something hard (probably the daemon’s leg), and swung back and forth with her stride – I couldn’t even tell which way was up, or how much time was passing, but it certainly felt like a long time. I listened to the clop-clop-clop of her cloven hooves on the stones.

Eventually, I noticed the sound of hooves had stopped, although we kept moving. A door opened, a curtain was drawn, and I was dumped out of the bag to land on another bed. Eyes wild, I dashed for the doorway – and bounced off an invisible wall, nose-first. She had warded me in, just as Alice had done in her apartment.

Even as I fretted and paced, though, the daemon made a shooing gesture, and I found my point of view rising rapidly. I was back in my own body, the shape-change dispelled. But as a human, my fear and anger turned into standing rigidly in place rather than flailing with claws out. I wanted to do too many things at once – fight, run, swear, sink into the ground forever – that I couldn’t do any of them.

“Now,” the daemon said, “Where were we? Yes… furious, are you not? Fearful…?” She seated herself in a throne-like chair with unpleasant grinning faces carved into it. “I am Bo’ara. And you are known as Charlie. You are mine, now, little one. Alice means well, but she is as yet just a girl, untutored in the Pleasures of the Dark.” Her mental voice pronounced the words with audible capitals. I found myself staring at her fangs.

So, slowly, she explained.

The Lord of Hosts, as the Angels referred to their master, Baphomet, had fashioned them and given over to them the corruption of mankind with sensual pleasures. The angels, themselves being ethereal outside of their home plane (Hell, of course), recruited agents among men and women to pursue their agenda, spread their religion. It sounded innocuous, but if I had understood what I had heard earlier, the Lord Baphomet and its angels lived by absorbing the energy of psychic resonances created by human experience. The more people they could get to experience ever more extreme sensations, the more powerful they could become, until they would be able to manifest themselves physically without needing to go through agents. I had a sneaking suspicion that with what allowed them to become so powerful in the first place – the apparent abdication of the Divine by whatever entity held that position before – they would take their efforts to the Divine, and corrupt that too.

And she looked at me, and in an instant she knew that I knew. She knew what I knew. She knew what I was. She knew all my secrets, not just the ordinary ones but the darkest, most poisonous ones we hide in our hearts lest we face our shame and be consumed.

“Look at me, mortal,” she whispered mockingly. “Look into my eyes, and despair.”

Against my suspicions of what awaited me, against my will, I stared straight into her burning gaze. And I knew, with iron certainty, as I had never known anything before, that I was doomed. We were doomed. Humanity, maybe even existence itself, was doomed by the existence of these beings, with their desire to push the limits of human experience. We would become wasted husks, like Dorian Grey without his famous painting. There would be nothing left. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, that I could do to prevent it.

And thus was I subjected to the seventy Pleasures of the Dark, as they are known, for seven is a number sacred unto Baphomet and its creations, and seventy is like seven, only bigger. I must not speak of these, lest their power destroy my mind, or yours; for if they were to be loosed upon the world, the results would be unspeakably terrible. But while some are purely physical in nature, most are matters of the mind, mind over matter. There are among them many ways of converting pain into pleasure, suffering into enjoyment, fury into laughter, hatred into love, trauma into ecstasy. For seven months I was subject to, and a student of, these teachings.

You cannot imagine what I have experienced. I came to enjoy it, with time, with care.

Though as you know, I retain my identity, and my scars… I am devoted to the Sabbat. Though the world is not yet ready for its full power to be manifest – the fabric of reality is as yet too weak, as are the bodies of mankind – I will do what I must to ensure the goals of my Lord Baphomet are realized.

Forgive me.