“You want to know so badly.” A voice spoke in a soft, distance melody took me under, not to sleep but to another place, between reality and the cosmic ever after. A place like hell and heaven amalgamated. I couldn’t tell if they were dreams but as the drowsiness of the sleeping pills dissipated it was clear that this much more than a dream.

Lucid I resisted the hallucinations as they swam in front of me, of moments I thought were my own, memories of things in my head that were private that I had only experienced in my sleep, were exposed and being played back like a stream, a flood, ripples of ethereal visions that left me weightless and floating. Hands, my hands, reached for undulating, folding flesh, nipples, and hair. The flesh drifted through my fingers like sand. A euphony of moaning, some I swore were saying my name, aroused me from disorientation even further, plummeting me into a rabbit hole of sensual sights and sounds. Desperately I tried to grab hold of the skin but I soon came to realize the flesh was around me, smothering me with sweet aromas, hormones, and sweat. The skin, soft and delicate in some places and hard and wrinkled in others, morphed into black straps, shifting and interweaving, and wrapped themselves around me, tighter and tighter. I tried to scream out but the black straps, seemingly formed out of nylon, leather, and fishnets, wove around my neck and gripped tightly, intricate weaves coursed around my naked limbs. I was pulled into the abyss of flesh and bondage, drowned in it, only my mouth and groin left exposed. 

Was this hell? Would this be my eternity, for the acts I’ve committed against myself, for the acts I’ve wanted to commit? I couldn’t understand what was happening. I could only accept that it was happening. Otherwise, I’d lose my mind to the rush of lucid illusions. A dream. It had to be. Those girls…they poisoned me. A hallucinogenic, through my hand, when she touched me? Hold on tight, I told myself, this couldn’t go on forever. If I could have struggled, I would have but I let go of the straps around my wrists and let the diabolical forces suck me deeper in. I should have never let her touch my hand. With the blackness covering my eyes I realized I should have ended my life a long time ago. Maybe this was what dying felt like.

A cold and hard surface touched the length of my back, from the back of my head to the ball of my heel, and caused me to groan suddenly. Gravity returned as my flesh pressed against a wet slab. My eyes opened, perhaps from the bitter and tense reaction, and I found myself lying in a large, dark chamber with the only source of light coming from a hole in the domed ceiling, trickles of dust casting dispersed, attenuated rays of sun only thirty feet down, barely enough to discern my surroundings, which were eighty feet from the ceiling. From what I could see I was lying flat on a stone slab, my hands aching from the straps on my wrists and legs. The strap on my face was gone. I was pathetic in my squirming and pitiful cries for help. This had to be hell. Hell, or somewhere like it. They had killed me. I was dead and this was punishment for trying to illicit sexual acts with a stranger. My catholic parents, mostly my father, had warned me against sinful actions but I refused to listen, refused to heed their warnings about sex outside marriage. God would be angry, they taught me at a young age, that I touched myself in dirty ways, when they noticed I was spending too much time in the bathroom. It seemed irrational to me. How could they try to stop mother nature? How could they prevent an erupting volcano? As I lay there completely naked, I thought of my first sexual experience and grew flush. Vice, even with an eighteen-year-old, as innocent as I believed she was, would be my ruin.

But all my thoughts of regret evaporated when I saw the giant stone figure crouched on the outer edge of the round room, obscured mostly in the dark. I strained my head to get a better view and saw that it was the figure of a man, hunched down, his knees to his head, his arms limp laying on the ground. They were massive hands. The gigantic body reminded me of the Statue of David, except that his head was bald, hidden behind his legs. It was dreary figure, composed of mortar and the iconography of a broken man. This place looked ancient, unease and dread lurked in every unseeable corner. Before I could protest this strange situation there was the sound of gentle steps, followed by a soothing voice.

“Such fight for someone with a chance at a new beginning. Humans are so frail. I’ve been waiting for something to tear apart.” Several hooded figures stepped out of the darkness, forming a circle around me, each step towards me left me struggling to pull at my straps, each step they took caused my straps to tighten.

“Who…?” I shouted, trying to conceal the closing claustrophobia.

They were all women, made clearer by their partially exposed breasts, through their open robes. I couldn’t make out any defining features, or if they were any different from each other, as the seven women reached the slab and stood with their hands at their sides. But it was the woman that stood next to me that I recognized, her skin had a light red hue to it, sunburnt or sexburnt. “You lived in a world of obscurity, of self-loathing and regret. Now you’ll live in a world of exquisite transition — long, agonizing, and, only if you want it, cruel.”

She touched my leg, running her fingers up my inner thigh. My lower body recoiled and my testicles touched the cold slab. Shivering waves of fear swept through my body and head. “Not real…This isn’t real. I’m sorry…I don’t want this.

She moaned in pleasure. “Oh, they all say that. And they always resist but it’s always the fool hearted who fight change. Fight it if you must. But in the end, we will take what we want and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

“I don’t want this. I just wanted release from the lust inside me. I can’t help–“

“Lust is a perfectly natural sensation. You can’t hide from it. It has influenced the entire history of mankind, to its kings and queens, to its religious institutions. Humans fear it but also revere it. It can influence people to do terrible things and spread disease. It can warp men’s minds beyond repair and inspire men to greatness. Sex sells, they say. But sex can also ruin entire families.”

The woman started touching my penis. My insides turned upside down, causing my heart to drop. “No.” Came a pitiful squeak from my voice. She couldn’t, not while I was awake.

“Let my hand take you. Surrender to it. Join with me. Let your fantasy out.”

“This isn’t my fantasy!” I lifted my head up long enough for my tormenter to see the pain in my eyes. But my body refused her and so did my arousal. She gave up and moved her hand to her cloak, the wicked smile ever present. With a wink she held my head back and poured a liquid into my mouth from a pouch so quickly that I didn’t even see the porch that contained it. As the liquid poured out, I gasped for air which filled my throat with the sticky, oily substance, tasting like saliva and salt water but I imagined it to be something more putrid. It spilled out onto the slab as I twisted my head.

My eyes watered and when I finally calmed myself and focus the women were gone but my worries soon turned back toward the statue. Dust crumbled from its shoulder and slowly the hunched over mass arose, its massive shoulder turning. The voice inside my head begged me to go back to sleep, to fall away from this madness, and go somewhere else, anywhere from the dark and hulking mass rising above me, leaning forward, obscured by the dark.

The hand of black marble reached out at the pinnacle of my pulsing agony, as if to flatten me, finger stretching out for my…

Washed away, everything was washed away. The dreaded, chest-tightening falling sensation returned. My body gone, a surge of water, or salt water splashed my face, acid burning, morphing me into something else. Something long and narrow and round. I shed my skin, letting the transformative ether take me. I became armless and legless, slithering through grass and dirt, the double-pronged tongue that came from my mouth licked the air, the essence of which was salty and hormonal, compelling me towards a cave opening. Something primal urged me to its oval, folds. I entered it eagerly, releasing the fervor that turned to an ache, a need, to penetrate the earthen hole. Driving myself forward I squirmed and pushed, unyielding, obliviously forcing myself in, searching perhaps for fulfillment, a wall of satisfaction that I couldn’t find, going deeper and deeper. It was warm and comforting, like a womb.

Words came. Soft, numerous, feminine, I could barely make them out. “Push. Below. Hecate Kali. Lilitu. Eisheth. Sycorax.”

My body curled into a serpentine ball and I slept. Until I opened my eyes and the hard rock face enveloped me. Gazing down I was happy to see my body again but disturbed to find that I was still naked, trapped, immobile, in a cement wall. Half of my naked form was exposed to a dark hallway that was covered with old graffiti. The only parts of me that would have offered comfort to myself, my hands, legs, and neck were frozen to the wall, while the parts that remained unprotected, my chest, face, and groin, offered nothing but vulnerability and crushing panic.

The voices came again, slow and echoed. “Society is fascinated by gender but you fear it. It is your male instinct that gives you your jealousy and rage. How interesting this will be.”

There were footsteps ahead, uneven and limping, as my insecurities seeped through my nervous system. A bum, or what I could only describe as a bum, came out of the darkness, hunched over and humming. The woman’s face that looked up from the tattered shawl was smiling when she saw me and made several vocalizations, mostly moans, that she was pleased to find me here, like this. The rules of reality felt broken, and as she came forward and started to grope me, so did I. there was no escape from her wretched, dry, and cracked hands; her lips touching mine were the same, but with a hint of melting plastic.

As the moments passed by and as she assaulted me, doing as she pleased, I told myself over and over that this was a nightmare and that it wasn’t real. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t real. Even if it was perceived as real, whoever was responsible was changing reality, so this couldn’t have been real. I had to hold onto my senses and refrain from getting aroused but I couldn’t help it. My body wasn’t my own. And that’s what I told myself, when she bent her bare back to me. This wasn’t my erect penis. This wasn’t me. This was hell.

I woke after my consciousness had faded and another form was waiting to take the wretched woman’s place. Over the next several hours other haggard figures walked down the same hallway and did what they wanted to the naked man stuck in the wall. Women and men both, touching, groping, using me, leaving me sobbing in the damp dungeon. Why, I thought as my inflamed and stretched skin started to bleed on the floor — why this? As each person came, I thought they would be the last but they weren’t and each time my fear was overcome by indifference and shock. Useless, used, and drained.

“Oh, my beautiful creature, I’ve smashed you to bits. Splattered on the wall like a blood stain. You agreed to this, you wanted sex while you slept, well, now you have it.”

“No.” I cried to the female voice. “I just wanted to get away…from it, from me, from…this thing. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt a woman; the way other men do.”

“Is that really…” the voice, hot and throaty, dissipated, along with the torment in my muscles and skin, “what you want…Or is this how you surrender?” The wall itself dissipated, leaving me to fall on my knees and vomit bile onto the floor.

Choking and coughing, trying to convince myself this still wasn’t real, I stood and found myself in an even longer hallway, this one concluding in a doorway with light to the outside, which appeared red and full of dark spots. Bodies were hung along the corridor, hung writhing on chains and straps. As I continued cautiously towards the hot, red light the bodies, of both genders, were strung up in odd angles, the light and heat gave their skin reddish tan. One woman, who was writhing, was hung from a single strap, forcing her head down to her chest and her legs wide open. A candle was underneath, generating heat to her privates and thighs, the mechanism of her agony. The smell, fueled by the candles under each victim, was that of human flesh and sweat. These lanterns guided me along the path, and, after seeing the first woman, I could only look ahead, towards the stone door and hope I wouldn’t end up like any of these squirming people. 

The closer I came to the stone door, the worse the heat became. As the light blinded me, and my eyes adjusted I came to a horrific sight, laid out in a gigantic chamber of flame and smoke. Down the stairs from the door there was a hellscape of terrors, harrowing screams, and a sea of human figures suffering for their sins in various forms of torture. At the end of this great hall, surrounded by a fiery cavern, where the tortures ended, a giant throne sat, made of skulls and bones. On this throne of hell sat a twelve-foot woman, who was less of a woman and more of a demon witch with a forked tongue, spiked tail, red lustered skin, and razor-sharp fingertips that rubbed her red nipples. This…was hell and this was my punishment. 

After experiencing my own horrors, I chose to accept my fate, as weak and exhausted as I was, and marched down the cobblestone path, never even realizing I was still naked. It didn’t matter. I tried to ignore the screams of the tortured, as their bodies were piled on each side of me, penetrated by objects, unseen creatures, and probably each other. Horrors untold. I didn’t want to see. Instead, I focused on the devil woman who sat with her leg over one of the throne arms, revealing herself to me in all her glorious wickedness and smiling behind devil horns. It was then, as I came to her feet and stared up that I noticed the wings attached to her back, folding over the back of the chair. She was a goddess and I was underservant to even look at her. 

“Welcome to the bottom.” said the demoness with a twirl of her fingers. “Do I not enchant you?”

The smoky air was oppressive, “I can’t look… I was raised to not look upon a woman, in that way. It’s indecent.”

“You were taught a lot of things, weren’t you?” She shifted on her throne and raised her chin when she spoke, “But is that truly what you believe, or the remnants of a chaste mind?”

As I finally managed the willpower to look up, the alluring eyes of the demoness froze me in my place. “When I was little and… insignificant I believed what I was told. Never allowed to have any fun. I’m not like the rest of humanity. I kept it down, repressed, like a good boy. I don’t deserve this, this nightmare.”

“Hmm, a good boy.” A giant red hand quickly bent down to grasp my body. My stomach lurched as I was picked up and brought to the oval face of the demoness, closer to her purple lips. “That prick of yours has given you plenty of nightmares. Youve always hidden behind your gender, behind masculinity. A fear of being called homosexual. You do it every day. When you try to sound more manly. When you look in the mirror and pretend to be oblivious to the roundness of your ass, afraid you might find it…attractive.”

The notion was absurd but I couldn’t focus on anything other than her lips, giant and all-consuming. “I’m not…gay.”

“So defensive, such a crass, primitive mind. But you are afraid. If I can’t enlighten you perhaps my sisters can.” Her tongue, large and saliva-covered, protruded with eager intensity from her gaping maw and entered my ear. My eyes rolled back from the unwanted pleasure. The sponge-like tongue edged deeper, wetness touching my mind from the inside. And I succumb to it. Her giant face faded, along with every one of my senses.