Page 78 of The Flesh Remembers
This was a sacrifice.
The faithful did not just touch and take.
They offered themselves.
Their flesh, their moans, their minds, their souls.
Some bodies had already begun to change, their skin melting, stretching, and reshaping as the ritual consumed them. Limbs fused, tongues elongated into grotesque sigils, fingers transformed into tendrils that reached for more, for everything, for nothing. Their cries of pleasure turned into something else entirely.
Some did not survive the transition.
They were dragged into the altar, their bodies absorbed into the living stone, their final gasps swallowed by the apparatus itself, which had begun to quiver, bulging with stolen flesh and essence, pulsing with sick anticipation.
Among those who were permanently melded with the apparatus was Assistant Edgar Frye. He realized too late that he had been right, but there was no chance to flee by then. He had fused with several others; their bodies grotesquely entwined into one mass of quivering flesh. Arms and legs stuck out at odd angles while their pained and horrified faces stared with sightless eyes and screamed silently. Frye’s mouth and black beard were still visible, though much of his face had melted into the surrounding flesh. The last semblance of Frye that could be seen was his mouth, open in agony, his tongue growing unnaturally long and slithering out of his anguished mouth like some hideous red snake.
And yet, no one resisted.
No one fled.
They offered more.
They gave everything.
Because they wanted this.
They had come here to be devoured.
James stood at the centre of it all, or rather, he loomed.
He was no longer just a man.
No longer just a lover returned from the dead.
He was the abyss given form.
His skin no longer held shape; it stretched and shifted, glowing and darkening. His veins pulsated with somethingthicker than blood, something ancient, something waiting to be set free. His eyes, if they could still be called eyes, burned with a light that did not belong to this world.
When he moved, the very air fractured.
When he spoke, the worshippers cried out, their bodies reacting as though his voice alone was a caress, a whip, a brand burned into their souls.
"Eleanor."
Her name was not just spoken.
It was etched into her.
Her spine arched at the sound, her breath stuttering, her body instinctively preparing for what would come.
She had never belonged to herself.
James had always known that.
And tonight, she would prove it.
She had come here with the thought that she still had a choice.
That she could save him.
