Worlds of BBW Erotic Romance - Box Set (3 page)

As the clock in the Powell mansion’s dining room struck the hour of two o’clock in the morning, Ed Bolt sat down at the table, a plate of cold victuals set before him.

Young Julia Powell took her place in the chair beside him, holding out her skirt as she sat, brushing her long red hair behind her ears before she slid in closer to the table. She was obviously nervous, yet worked very hard to remain lady-like and composed.

Ed concentrated on her because he did not want to look across the table, where Rector Powell was just sitting down. That … thing … called Reverend Mott was already seated beside the Rector, his ragged hood still obscuring his eyes.

“Let us have a brief prayer,” the Rector said, “before we enjoy this repast.” He cleared his throat: “God our heavenly Father, who giveth us this food, we commend ourselves to you. Our bodies, hearts and spirits are yours, and we are grateful for the sustenance thy glory provides. Amen.”

For a preacher, it was an unusually short dinner prayer. Ed’s own father, Reverend Bolt, typically droned on for five minutes or more before the family was permitted to eat. But then, Ed’s family would never have dined in the dead of the night, either, nor had a walking corpse for a guest at their table … 

Rutting hell!
None of this made any sense, and thinking about it made him dizzy.

He wondered if it might help if he ate something. Looking down at his plate, he saw a piece of ham, some cold stewed cabbage, and a slice of some raisin pudding.

But the ham was the pink color of the bared muscle under Mott’s porous flesh. The cabbage was the wrinkled dead texture of the flesh itself, and the way the pudding glistened in the lamplight, it reminded him of the slimy passage where the man’s nose should have been.

Ed didn’t think he would be able to eat any of it.

The Rector nodded towards his old serving woman, who had just entered the room. “Mrs. Starks, might you bring us some of that tea now, please? And mustard for the ham, if you will.”

Then, without missing a beat, he turned to Ed. “So Constable Bolt, how is your father doing?”

“Um … all right, I guess,” Ed said. In truth, he hadn’t heard from his parents in months, not since he’d been given the Constable position here in town.

Not even supposed to rutting wri
te them, bastards.

He didn’t really care much, either. He certainly hadn’t missed his father.

“That is good to hear. You know, it is the local parish leaders like your father who are really responsible for our victory over the degenerate impulses of society.”

Degenerate?
Was the Rector really one to judge on that account?

Right now, Ed was experiencing a bit of concern for himself. Would he get out of this intact? Something was wrong here, that was obvious. Would they let him go after what he’d seen? Or did the Rector himself really think that the situation with Mott and the mound and whatever other insane business was going on here was normal? Was the man insane?

At that moment, Mott raised a forkful of ham to his lipless mouth and took a bite. His teeth closed on the tines of the fork instead; several teeth broke off with a crunch. Bloodless and rotten, they clattered down onto his plate.

Ed looked away.

“Constable, I am sorry about your… accident…earlier in the evening,” the Rector continued. “When you fell down. Surely you don’t remember anything?”

Ed felt his throat constrict. He coughed in an attempt to clear it so that he could speak. “Well … uh … yes. I mean that … Well, it was dark. Umm… perhaps not?”

“Ah. And what did you see? Who committed this murder?”

Ed swallowed hard, took a sip of tea which Mrs. Starks and just poured for him. He told the Rector that he’d heard townspeople mumbling about strange happenings at the faerie mound, and he’d decided he needed to investigate, in case something was amiss and the Rector or his family needed help. It seemed a reasonable version of events, and he really didn’t want to get Mother Henne in trouble, either.

“You decided right off to investigate by yourself?” the Rector asked. “All by yourself--without consulting the office of the magistrate?”

Ed nodded. “I really … Well, the magistrate works so hard, and I, um … didn’t want to bother anyone. I mean, the stories about the mound—I figured it might just be someone’s idea of a joke, right?”

There was a pause as something distracted the Rector. He turned to his left. Ed followed his gaze and saw that Mott was in the process of sipping from his cup of tea. As he sipped, the tea trickled out from a penny-sized hole in his throat, splashing his robes.

Mott’s arm creaked as he lowered his cup, and the Rector turned back to Ed as if nothing had happened. “Yes,” he said, and he was smiling again, though Ed had no idea if the cheerful
sentiment on his face was genuine. “Didn’t want to bother the magistrate. That is understandable. So, what else happened? Please do continue.”

He admitted that Mott had chased him into the mound, but for some reason he didn’t feel comfortable revealing that he had been attacked by another
thing
down in that shaft—that leathery animal creature with glowing red eyes, which he now believed was the very same demon that Mother Henne had seen.

Instead, he told them that he’d tripped in the darkness, had felt himself falling, and could remember nothing more.

Julia watched him intently as he spoke, her big blue eyes wide, like a child absorbed in a fireside ghost story.

For the first time, Ed realized that she had quite a pretty face. Childish in a way, with those freckles and plump cheeks… but highly expressive and full of passion. And the way she stared at him…

He’d never had a girl look at him like that before. Somehow, it made him feel a little more confident about the situation.

“I commend the precise detail of your report,” the Rector said when Ed had finished speaking. “You are highly observant.”

With this, the Rector placed his napkin on his plate and rose from his chair. “Thank you so much for the information, Constable. You do not know what a great help you have been.”

Ed nodded, and also rose from his seat, following the Rector’s example. “Thanks. I’m … um … really glad.” He still had no idea himself of what was going on here. It was like an unpleasant dream that he’d been stuck in.

But now he’d be able to leave? His mind was already racing ahead, thinking about how he’d explain it all to Mother Henne.

The Rector seemed to have read his mind. “You must keep all of this secret, Constable. I have your agreement? I will speak to the Magistrate myself, but I must be assured that you will not discuss anything which has occurred tonight.”

He stared at Ed, and those red eyes probed him, compelling him to agree. He couldn’t think straight when that gaze was upon him, and he felt his heart beating fast.

“Of course not,” Ed said. “You can trust me.”

“Good.” The Rector smiled.

Ed looked down to his feet and blinked and found that he could think clearly again so long as he wasn’t looking into those red eyes.

Rutting hell, can he mesmerize people?

Ed knew that he would have to be careful. But he could not keep all of this to himself.

He would let Mother Henne know it was all part of some dire conspiracy before he told her the details, that she had to keep it quiet … But he would tell her.

“We will lead you out the way we came in. Best for secrecy, yes? Reverend Mott, come.”

The thing called Mott rose from his seat to stand behind Ed.

“Father, shouldn’t he rest here a bit longer?” Julia pleaded. “He’s been hurt.” Her big eyes trembled as she looked at her father. Her hands were fisted in her skirt, kneading the fabric.

She didn’t want him to go. This pretty, curvy, delicate girl had some interest in
him,
the cripple--and she didn’t want him to go! That was something new. Suddenly, despite all the strange goings-on, Ed found himself with conflicting feelings. He half-wished he could stay with her.

You’re a rutting idiot,
he told himself, trying to quell such thoughts.

Powell paused for a moment, staring into his daughter’s eyes. He bit his lip, thinking, and Ed saw that the Rector was not entirely immune to the girl’s pleas.

In the end, though, he just shook his head. “No, child. I think the Constable would be more comfortable at home in his own bed, yes? And it is very late for you to be up, young lady. Mrs. Starks, can you please escort Julia to her chambers?”

The old lady came forward and took Julia by the arm. The young girl was watching him intently. Those big pale blue eyes of hers were locked on Ed’s face, as if pleading to him not to go—
warning
him not to?

“Let thine eyessh run with tearsssh night and day,” Mott suddenly rasped, “and let them not ceassse: for thy virgin daughter has s-s-suffered an inshult, and the wrrrath of your Lord is thus insssigh-ted.”

Ed looked at the hideous Mott-thing, then turned to the Rector, who smiled apologetically back at him.

“Oh, he’s not speaking to
us,”
the Rector said. “His mind often wanders on a different plane.”

“All right,” Ed said, nodding. To him, it sounded like Mott’s mind was simply as decayed as the rest of him, but he didn’t want to offend the Rector by saying so.

“Let us go,” the Rector commanded, and then he led them out of the dining room, with Mott bringing up the rear.

Ed tried to get one last glimpse of Julia, to wave to her or something, but it appeared that old Mrs. Starks had already pulled her away.

He would probably never see her again … Ah well, she was the Rector’s daughter, what did he expect?

Not to be this heavy-hearted about it…
Don’t be a rutting idiot, pining away, you barely just met the girl!

But he was concerned, as well. Would she be safe here, with whatever strange goings-on were happening?

He’d have to make sure someone found out. The magistrate, the churchmen in town… He’d do what he must to expose these queer doings and make sure the Rector’s daughter was safe. They might not want to listen to “a mere cripple,” but he’d MAKE them listen, somehow.

Now, the Rector led them down a long hall hung with religious paintings, towards an open door, beyond which were worn wooden steps leading down.

“We can access the cavern through the cellar,” the Rector explained, heading down into the near darkness. Ed followed, Reverend Mott stomping behind him, walking stiffly yet with enough speed to keep up with them.

The faint lamplight half-revealed many shapes in the long basement room.
There were gridded iron racks arranged along the walls, with little glass balls set every few feet into the grid of the ironwork. The glass balls were inlaid with gleaming silver, and some kind of silver-coated ropes or cords were wound throughout the racks.

One device
near the stairs was something like a half-scale church organ, with a wooden cabinet and rows of iron pedals and keys. The “pipes” of the organ were iron and topped with two-pronged silver wands that looked like giant roasting forks. The device had silver ropes running out of it which snaked out across the floor and were attached somehow to the iron racks on the walls.

Is that what they made with all of those materials they ordered?
, Ed wondered.
What the hell is really going on here?

At the bottom of the steps, the Rector motioned them forward. Ed had gone a dozen paces, walking cautiously along the uneven cellar floor and being mindful of his bad foot, when the Rector stopped and suddenly waved to someone in the shadows.

A bearded man in servant’s clothes emerged from the dark beyond the lamplight. He held a device in his hand, a strange crystal rod with a two-pronged silvery tip.

“Ah, Mister Starks. Thank you.” The Rector turned to Ed, smiling—and grabbed his arms.

He was impossibly strong. His hands were like iron clamps, and he raised Ed off the floor without so much as a grunt of effort.

“What the—?“ Ed gasped. He tried to think, but the Rector’s red-eyed glare made his mind sluggish. Somewhere deep down, though, he knew that he was in serious trouble.

“Sir, upon your honor…” Ed said, appealing to the Rector’s station, “I surely won’t tell anyone about anything. I told you I wouldn’t … You might let me go home, as you’d promised before?”

The Rector shook his head, smiling. “A despised cripple with nothing much to lose? I think you
would
tell. You’d have to let someone know the terrible secrets of the Rector’s estate. I didn’t want to alarm my dear daughter, but this has to be done. We need another test subject anyways, and it can’t wait.”

The bearded servant-man, Mister Starks, moved forward and touched the cold tips of the two-pronged rod to Ed’s forehead.

Before he could scream out or even squirm, Ed’s mind was swallowed by an abyss of blackness.

Alone alone alone alone.

They put me here!

Hate hate hate. Ten thousand thousand years of hate.

I,
Croatoan, remember them—dying then—

Ed Bolt was watching—forced to watch, submerged in the thing’s memory—and he saw them too.

Countless multitudes of long-limbed creatures with elongated heads and lambent red eyes.

Like the thing in the pit?

They are my kind, yes--but I hate them now!,
screamed an awful hissing voice in Ed’s head.

He was seeing all this through the memories of the demon-thing in the pit.

Now, the scene unfolded, hideous beings were teeming in an impossible city where blue-black crystalline towers rose to the clouds, and floating terraces hovered over avenues filled with—

Death.

Over time, they had engineered themselves--to make themselves smarter, immortal, and psychically powerful, able to control machines with thoughts.

BUT…

They changed themselves too much, remade every cell and atom in their forms. They no longer had a place in the pattern of the universe.

Reality rejected them. They started dying. I called it Dissolution—Dissolving—

Ed watched as hordes of the things writhed in their floating towers and down in the streets. Moaning, spasming, their flesh turned porous like thin-sliced sponge over aching organs and brittle bone. He was dimly aware of his own stomach contracting, clutching like a spasming fist—

Croatoan
! They pleaded.

Great
Croatoan, maker of machines, master thinker, help us!  Use your knowledge make us whole again, keep us alive!

So I toiled, I worked—

Our world was contaminated, dying itself, poison in the air, earth, water and the very fabric of reality there.

I told them: we must leave.

I opened a portal in the fabric of the universe, led them to a new world—blue-green with forests and oceans and life. The portal would barely stay open, only a few hundred survivors made it across…

But even on this new planet, the Dissolution proceeded. Slowed by still deadly…

They blamed me… ME! Who’d tried to save them! Called me a failure, a deceiver.

Still, I labored. I made deep, dark wells, protected in the Earth, where we might rest until a solution was found.

Ed saw the demon-things crawling into wells in the earth, crystal-lined shafts inlaid with crisscrossing veins of silver. They curled up, slept, hibernated. But their brains were still working on some level, there were whispers mind-to-mind in the dark …

Locked me away from the others. I,
Croatoan, the savior of them! For my own safety, vital to the plan, they said. That was the consensus.

But they sought to punish me. I who had served and trusted them
. Trusted!

So I was ISOLATED.

In the dark ALONE. Alone alone alone ALONE.

Awake in my well, can’t sleep, mind works and works and works and works and works. A thousand thousand years of mind working and no one and nothing and ALONE.

Now, eons of time and suffering flash by Ed’s perceptions before focus returns suddenly, violently—

There is a village on an island, men and women—Englishmen, colonists-- in the clothing of two centuries past.

I woke and still alone—

But the planet now is inhabited with pink-fleshed walking apes, creatures fragile yet adaptable.

Humans—my new materials for my experiment, my hope…

Ed watches as Croatoan—the name of the demon-thing—emerges from his pit to create a device of silver and glass. He uses it, nearly kills himself with the effort of his psychic push…

I wanted to take them all, possess their minds and souls! My body was dying but I, Croatoan, would spread my soul to ALL of the humans, becoming immortal—an entire race of ME.

And then the others of my kind who rejected me and locked me away by myself would PAY dearly. I would dig them up out of their wells and…

But the experiment went wrong.

Ed watches through Croatoan’s memories, horrified, as the men, women and children in the island village sicken, then die… Their very flesh and bone dissolving into nothingness, billowing away in clouds of dust and gas… Until the village is deserted, the people vanished—literally disintegrated.

Experiment FAILED, so I came north, to the place I had prepared eons ago before they locked me away. The cavern here…

I slept another century and more… and waited… and then a sympathetic one came—the one called “Rector”…

My tool he is! And now I shall continue my experiment and conquer--

Ed can feel him now, stirring and thrashing in his pit.

The demon Croatoan claws the ground, screaming—

They are still out there in their wells.

The others of my so-called “kind.”

Would kill
me—would betray, HAVE betrayed—

Alone but now must be alone
—all I have is HATE.

HATE HATE HATE HATE.

They’re against me, would destroy me—All against me now!

First I will take over these pathetic humans, body and soul—and then I will dig them up from their wells and make them PAY!!

#

“Against me,” the youthful Constable whispered. “Against me now. Hate.”

In the shadowy basement laboratory, Rector Powell watched Ed Bolt, studying him. Strapped inside the upright wooden circle of their crudely built
psychic amplifier, his hands and feet bound by silver manacles, the youth was in another world: the realm of the Master’s thoughts and desires.

The young Constable’s face glittered with sweat in the pale
alien light that radiated from a slit in the silver cylinder on the floor. He was clearly suffering through an ordeal, the Master’s perceptions and memories burning his mind …

But there was no visible change yet, no
remaking.

When the change did come, Powell wondered if it would be as bad as it had been with Reverend Mott.

Would the new refinements in the process work? Or would all the subjects emerge looking like worm-eaten corpses? He looked to Mott, who stood nearby, mumbling to himself and grinning his deathly smile.

“Is it happening yet, Sir?” Powell’s servant, Mr. Starks, asked. The bearded man stood nearby, biting his lip apprehensively.

“No, Mister Starks. It will take a while, I presume, as it did with the Reverend Mott. But he can’t fight forever.”

“At least he’s stopped that awful retching,” Starks observed.

The Rector nodded. “Physical reactions like that come from fighting the process. Once he accepts his fate, things will go quickly.”

“Excuse me, Sir,” Starks asked, “but what if he
doesn’t
accept it? Can he win the fight?”

The Rector reached out and touched Bolt’s damp forehead with a fingertip, allowing himself to be distantly sympathetic to the boy’s plight.

“He can’t win,” the Rector explained. “Being merely human, he stands no chance. No chance at all.”