Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II by Monica J. O'Rourke Page A

cell into which her body had been tightly packed; squeezed
into in an uncomfortable squatting position, sitting almost on her
heels, her knees pressed up tight to her chest, breasts squashed
flat against her. The confines of her prison were too cramped to
allow her to shift positions and take some of the pressure off her
calves. The muscles burned, the tendons strained beneath the weight
of her body. Her body shivered and shook. Perspiration trickled
down her skin in a steady stream as she bit her lip against the
pain.
    “Help. Help me. Oh God, I’m so sorry. I want to go
home. I’ll do anything, just let me go home.” Her voice was barely
more than a whisper. She’d been repeating the same prayers for
days, screaming them first at the listless walls and her hostile
tormentors until her vocal chords failed and she was reduced to a
hoarse squeak.
    The bars of the cell were hot. Bits of her skin
stuck to it, sizzling and blackening from where she’d leaned
against it in exhaustion. She wasn’t allowed to sleep; perpetual
exhaustion was part of her torment. Sleep was a luxury of the
blessed. Gloria was damned.
    Gloria’s head hung down between her knees from both
the pressure of the scalding hot cage lid pressing down onto her
cervical vertebrae branding stripes into the back of her neck and
the weight of the ghastly necklace locked around her throat.
    It was a thick iron collar hung with tiny putrefying
corpses … fetuses. Another insult. Six in all. Each a different
size representing the trimester in which they’d been aborted.
Unwanted pregnancies had been an unfortunate occupational hazard.
Gloria could smell the fetid reek of their decomposing flesh but
could also feel their heartbeat fluttering against her chest. Their
tiny hands and mouths groped for her nipples, starving for
sustenance. Somehow they were alive, even while clearly rotting
away. Their touch was an abomination that made Gloria’s skin
crawl.
    She had no idea how long she’d been in her cell. It
seemed like days. Her head was covered in some type of animal-skin
sack cinched tight around her throat with twine. In its sweaty
animal musk, she could smell the pain and fear the animal had died
in. If it had died. Perhaps in this place animals lived on without
their skin; raw muscle, and nerves exposed to the cruelties of
hell. Just as her own soul lay naked and exposed.
    When she’d awakened in the darkness with the sack on
her head and her body folded nearly in half, she’d screamed in
terror, believing she would suffocate. She imagined that she could
feel her own breath steaming back in her face. But Gloria wasn’t
breathing. She was dead. And where she was there would not have
been enough oxygen to breathe even without the sack on her head.
The flames consumed the oxygen breathing nothing but carbon dioxide
back into the thin polluted atmosphere. Gloria’s lungs expanded and
contracted out of habit. She no longer needed oxygen to fuel her
body.
    Gloria’s eyelids were pasted shut with tears; still
she was awake. Not once since she’d woken in her cage had she been
allowed to sleep. Whenever she dozed, she was cracked with a whip
or poked with hot metal. The harsh voice of her demon lover barked
orders at her, spittle flying from his lips and coating her in its
vile spray. Sometimes he cooed softly and seductively and then
would slide his enormous cock between the bars of the cage and
masturbate on her. Sometimes he would urinate or defecate on her.
The thick toxic sludge of his excrement coated her skin in a crusty
shell. She was grateful for the sack over her head. It at least
offered her face some measure of protection.
    Gloria could not remember how long she’d been left
to rot in that cage before the sack was finally removed from her
head. How long it was before the day the demon released her from
the cage in order to rape her. How her relief at being able to
stretch her stiff tortured joints had turned to horror as the thing
had