“No, no!” she tried to shout to them. “I think! I am in terrible pain! I need help! I am truly alive!” But nothing came out. She had no power to move or communicate in any way.
“But her eyes are partly open some of the time—like now,” the nurse pointed out. “I’d swear she knows we’re here.’’
“Yes! Yes! I do know! Oh, help me!”
“We’ve tried talking to her, getting her to blink if she understands us, but it’s no use. Forget it, nurse. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. Just maintain the current levels and keep the monitors going.” He sighed. “Poor thing. With the size of that annuity for her and even today’s medical knowledge, she could be like this, for the next fifty years…”
She was still screaming at them inwardly, unable to control a thing, when she was aware that both the pain and the vision were fading and she was floating once again. The experience was so horrible, the absence of pain so intense a relief, that she almost passed out. She didn’t know how long the episode had lasted, but it was the most horrifying experience of her entire life, the stuff of nightmares.
“Choose,” came the voice of the Dark Man from all around her. “Now choose, but consider this alternative.”
She opened her eyes and gazed deeply into the fire and drew strength and power from the spirit it contained. She crouched there a while, but then stood and raised her arms and beckoned all the spirits and demons to attend her. And they were there, and responded to her call, in every tree, in every blade of grass, in every brief gust of wind that struck her almost naked body, and they let their power flow into her. Her body tingled with a totally erotic sense that none else here could understand, the power begetting power and giving off pleasure as a side effect.
She was a virgin, by their standards, yet the tribe all called her Mother and she saw them all, young and old, male and female, strong and weak, as her children. What could they know, from their few minutes of climax, what the spirits and demons could give to one who was one with them, give eternally and on demand?
She gestured with her right hand, and the fire flared up, a torchlike column that seemed to have a life of its own suspended in air. In its illumination she could see them all, her children, on their knees to her, praying to her, watching with awed eyes and fear in their souls, fear she had placed there and fear they had accepted as the price of her protection.
She gestured with her left hand and a great wind came, like some living thing, and swirled around the column of fire and kissed each of the worshippers in turn, then flowed inward to the small stone idol that sat on a bed of straw between the fire and the crowd.
It was crudely fashioned, but now it seemed to glow and pulse and throb like a living thing, and they all saw and made supplication to it, calling on it by name.
“Dobak! Dobak! Protect us! Dobak! Dobak! God of the Hapharsi! Protect thy children from harm and bless our hunt!”
And the demon flowed from the idol into her body, and took it for use as its own, for certainly it was Dobak’s to use and willingly so. And while it performed its magic rites and demanded its sacrifices and its blood, her own self was plunged into a realm of indescribable pleasures and delights, orgasm after orgasm, through her mind and body, and she heard not what was being said or done in her body and cared not. So wondrous were the sensations that although a tiny corner of her saw her hands come up, then descend with the knife and plunge it into the writhing, crying body of the infant girl-child upon the altar, she did not care. And at the moment the sacrifice died, she felt that sensation rise to undreamed-of heights as the youth and energy of the child’s soul flowed into her while the agony and pain were absorbed by the demon within.
“The sacrifice is good,” she heard the demon say with her lips, “and the hunt will be good, and the women of the tribe will be blessed with many strong and healthy children who will not die too young. This I grant, so long as you worship me.”
And they roared and chanted its unholy name, and buried their faces in the earth. And the sensations slowly subsided as the demon flowed from her body and back to the idol, but she felt the lingering, tingling sensations and would for some time to come, and she knew her power was increased and her body made well of all its ills and younger, too. As the demon prepared to leave its effigy, she, too, sank to her knees and prayed to the great god of the tribe in thanks, and suddenly she was floating once again.
“Now choose and merge,” said the Dark Man’s voice all around her. “Choose not with your mind but with your inner feelings.”
He had shown her two kinds of Hell, and she rejected both choices, yet he would not offer any alternatives. The pain returned, the horrible pain and the quiet and the horror of the hospital room…
And so it went, fading from one sensation, one life, into the other, for what seemed like an eternity. She struggled against it intellectually, but the pain of the girl in the room was too intense and too real, and she found after a while that no matter what the horror of the demon and the ritual sacrifice she could no longer willingly leave that existence, that she fought in her mind to remain there, to not go back to that sterile hospital room filled with pain and no hope at all.
Given a choice of hells, she could no longer bear the hopeless agony contrasted to the power and pleasure of the other, when she was forced to choose.
Her body still tingled with those wondrous sensations, but she felt the hard floor of the cabin and looked up at the Dark Man, not illuminated by the flickering kerosene lantern, from her kneeling position.
“A primitive tribe in any time, remote from civilization even in this modern age,” the Dark Man said softly. “They are beset by disease, lack of medicine and sanitation, and the vagaries of the hunt which is their only source of sustenance. Yet they are not ignorant. The missionaries had come, but with independence the missionaries had been foreced to leave, and the corrupt new government cared little about the primitives in the bush. They had prayed to the spirits of nature, and had received nothing. They prayed to this white God of the missionaries, and that God sent them nothing. So they prayed to the power, the elemental forces that were the very agents of their misery, and they received help.”
“They sold their souls to your master,” she managed.
“Ah, but consider the alternative! Did you not just do the same? A high tech hospital, the wonders of medicine and the arrogance of ignorant doctors. He might have given her the benefit of the doubt and shot massive doses of a strong opiate into her, but that risks complications with the heart, liver, and other organs, and considering the millions of dollars in donations and grants in aid that depend on keeping her alive—perhaps his own job—he does not risk it. You knew he wouldn’t. Faced with a life of eternal agony or one of pleasure and power, even if it means the sacrifice of innocents and taking a demon lover, you made the same choices they were forced to make.”
“But I had no other choices!”
“Neither did they.”
“That girl in pain—that was me, wasn’t it? Keeping me alive, indefinitely, to safeguard your precious computer!”
“It might be. That is your choice. It is always your choice. One or the other.”