Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

For additional titles see my
Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your
comments. This is my 100th
blog, so you will be commenting
on a historical artifact!

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.

Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer #99: Horror, “The Gremlin.”

I don’t write a lot of horror—some, but not much, since I prefer paranormal and fantasy writing with a little literary fiction mixed in. But I do indulge occasionally. I have written several stories for The Horror Zine, one of the best e-zines of that genre on the web. One of them was “The Gremlin.”

Most people know that Gremlins are creatures who tear up airplanes. RAF pilots in World War II reported seeing them—probably a result of fatigue and stress from flying too many missions. They began to appear in novels and stories and became famous with the publication of a book by Roald Dahl, better known for later stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and Giant Peach. They took their place in mythology, a specialized sort of elf or imp. But they weren’t always cute little creatures. Many people remember the episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” from The Twilight Zone where William Shatner sees a Gremlin on the wing of passenger plane. Everyone remembers the scene where he pulls the curtain back and the Gremlin is staring at him, its face pressed against the window.

I had been trying to write a story in response to a call for submissions of Indiana stories. After repeated attempts to write a tale about my hometown of Kokomo, Indiana (yes, there is such a place; no, it is not the place the Beach Boys mention in their song), I gave up on my original story and decided to switch it to a horror tale. For some reason, I chose a Gremlin.

Elwood Haynes and early automobile

One of Kokomo’s claims to fame is that one of the first automobiles was invented there. It was built and driven in 1906 by a man named Elwood Haynes (who also invented the process for making stainless steel). I had originally meant to write a story of his first drive down a road called Punkinvine Pike, but the story just would not set up. So I switched it to a story about a young man and young woman driving down the pike who are attached by a Gremlin.

Why would a Gremlin attack them? I’m not sure. But those creatures seem to have an aversion to mechanical things. I got the idea that Haynes’ development of automobiles ruined their peaceful environment and they still harbor a lot of chagrin toward mechanical things. They hit the gremlin, call the police, but the creature manages to get away before they police arrive. They ask Alex (the main character, Alex Haynes, is related to Elwood) what happened. He tells them they hit something, some kind of animal that looked like an orangutan but had green fur. The police ask if he has been drinking. His girlfriend’s parents take her home. Alex then is taken to the police station. He asks why. They only say they want to question him further out of “concern for public safety”—the creature he has described, they say, might be dangerous, might have escaped from a zoo.

Gremlin from Twilight Zone

At the police station he is questioned by federal agents. They tell him the blood and fur samples on his car are not related to any species except some they found on British aircraft during World War II. Then they ask him if he knows anything about Gremlins. Alex answers:  “Gremlins? Well, it was a car produced by American Motors in the 1960s. Or a monster—one of them scared the hell out of William Shatner on an old Twilight Zone episode. Other than that, I’m not real up on them.”

They reply that they are concerned because Gremlins really do seem to exist, evidence of them has been found in the Middle East, and they are concerned this may be a threat to national security. “So he might be working for Al Qaeda?” Alex asks. After more questioning, they let him go. He returns home. The Gremlin comes after him.

It breaks into his house. He has a .22 hunting rifle—not a lot of velocity—but puts enough bullets in it that the creature flees. When he jumps out the window he broke in through there is the sound of machine gun and heavy weapons fire. The local SWAT team and the federal agents are there. He knows a SWAT team member from school. She tells them they have to take him in:  standard policy for anyone they find with a weapon, and he still had the .22. There, the Federal Agents tell him they thought the creature might come back and so they and the local police staked the place out. “If this was a gremlin, we need to study it. Unleashing such creatures on our military installations, especially in the Middle East, is something we must be concerned about—at least about the possibility. We want learn as much about the creature as we can. And we don’t want the existence of the creature to leak out so that we have an uncontrollable media event on our hands. We’ll have to ask you to keep quiet about this—in fact, we’ll have to insist on it.”

Alex understands. The Federal Agents say they will pay him “compensation” for all that has happened. If the government can’t throw you in jail, he muses, they can always pay you off. He feels some sympathy for the Gremlin, who takes on the stock role of the pitiable monster—like Frankenstein or the American Werewolf in London. He wonders if Elwood Haynes perhaps first woke the creature when he drove his early automobile; if the creature perhaps hibernated but was awakened by the scent of a relative’s blood. He wonders where it all will end. He also wonders how many more gremlins will begin to awaken now.

The story appeared in Shadow Masters, a publication put out by the very fine publication, The Horror Zine. It is available through Amazon. 

For more good horror, get a copy of my vampire saga, Sinfonia.

For additional titles check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy horror readings. Be afraid; be very afraid.