"That wasn't me. That was instigated by a mischievous succubus who was meddling where they didn't belong. They have long since been dealt with in the harshest manner."
"It's fortunate you intervened, then, halting what would have been a disaster for you."
"Disaster?"
"Yes. I could have killed Karen, and came very close to doing just that. It would have ruined all your plans."
"Killed her? Ah...oh yes, it was...ah...indeed, fortunate. Like I said, the succubus has been dealt with, and your wife is safe."
A silence fell between us.
Seeing that I was deep in thought, he finally asked with irritation, "Is there anything else?"
"I'm sorry. You seemed confused just now."
"No. I just grow weary of the conversation. I get distracted easily. But that reminds me. I have a question for you. Before all this happened, you didn't believe in us."
"No. I never gave the afterlife much thought."
"You do now, however. And yet, knowing the truth of it all, having not a scintilla of doubt about our existence, you chose to side with us."
"I've been told the die was cast. Did I really have a choice?"
"We all have choices we have to make. Even me." He chuckled again, as if amused, "Sometimes those choices are limited. Sometimes we must choose between the lesser of two...goods."
"I suppose that's true. I guess I would frame my answer it this way, I didn't choose you as much as I felt abandoned by the Others. I sided with the powers that were granted me by both sides."
"Both sides?"
"Yes. Although you gave me these powers, they allow me to keep them. Isn't that correct? So, in a sense..."
He quickly cut me off. "An interesting interpretation, though I'm not sure I'd interpret their indifference as agreement.
"How would you interpret it?"
"You're forgetting about free will, and leave it at that. I will say, many of your kind feel abandoned by them at some point. As you do now. Their apparent aloofness comes off as indifference. Or maybe they are indifferent. I can never really tell. It's why I like to refer to them as absentee landlords; expecting the rent, tribute, and worship, without giving an effort to...fix things. I and my brothers, on the other hand, have been down in the trenches with humans from the very beginning, nurturing every sensation and desire you've been inspired to have."
"Yes, your influence does seem more powerful than theirs, or at least, more obvious. You called them absentee landlords as if they are unconcerned with what goes on. Don't they try to influence us anymore?'
He hesitated for a moment. "In their own feeble ways. Yes."
"Really? How? Where is this influence? If they have been trying to affect some change in us, I haven't felt it. I certainly haven't seen it in my life."
For the first I saw a part of his face. He smiled, revealing a perfect set of straight, white teeth, appearing even more stark and vivid against the darkness that shrouded him. "Their influence has been right under your nose the whole time you've walked this earth."
*
I woke up from the conversation slightly disoriented. I was in an unfamiliar room, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. The clock on the nightstand read three am.
"Fuck, only three," I mumbled to myself as I got up to go to the bathroom."
********
The Present Day
Much has happened since that day I found out Asmodeus was my antagonist.
The next day, I saw the sigil in the mirror—at least that was what I interpreted it to be, a mark of possession engraved into my forehead. It was a little, red, inverted triangle, shaped like an arrowhead, long and proportionally narrow at the base, and with what looked like the letter D in the middle. Touching it, I couldn't feel it, as I would expect if it were a real brand or even a tattoo, but it was clearly visible to me, and it was always present from that moment on.
However, as with the obsidian eyes of my companions, I was the only one who could see the manifestation. More importantly, I didn't see a sigil on any of the others that were close to me.
I took great solace in this—one of the few since—knowing that I was the only one damned. My fall from grace did not translate to them.
I was reassured that my fate wasn't shared by Karen or the others, when, two weeks later, I saw the sigil on another person—a gentleman of about my age. I spotted its distinctive triangular shape on his forehead as we passed each other on a city sidewalk.
I decided to follow him, and, given the chance, strike up a conversation.
I'm not sure why talking to him was important to me at the time. Maybe it was desire to find others like myself. A grief shared is half the sorrow... Isn't that how the old saying goes? Or maybe I just wanted to know I wasn't soldiering on with this absolute knowledge of Hell alone. I also held out hope that he may know something more about Beetlesmith, about the elixir, or about our fate. Maybe I could glean some clue on how I could escape my destiny.
Wishful thinking, I know. For when I casually dropped Beetlesmith's name and that of the elixir, he feigned ignorance of the whole matter. Even when I pressed him, assuring him I was also a client of the inestimable Mr. B, he wouldn't admit knowing the old fraud or his potion.
Beetlesmith certainly hammered home the, 'Silence is Golden,' trope. It precluded him from speaking to me about the matter at all.
One thing I did gather, it was evident that he was ignorant of the mark of Asmodeus he bore. Confirming for me that I was the only one aware of its presence. I left him happily ignorant of the mark, and of his fate in the afterlife.
I have seen others bearing the mark. Not many, but occasionally they would cross my path. Each person, man or woman, was a current client of Beetlesmith, and each one professed ignorance of his existence and that of the elixir. All, except one.
She was about twenty-five years older than me, mother of four and grandmother of seven, and lived in an apartment in the city with her husband.
We had a pleasant conversation over coffee. I think she even had pie. She told me all about her exploits—when she met Beetlesmith, what happened the first time she administered the potion, all the perfunctory information that I really had no desire to know. She was quite candid and unabashed, telling me that she uses the elixir mainly on young men and boys so that she can have sex with them in front of her husband. Other than that, however, she knew very little else about Beetlesmith, or the elixir, and as I've come to realize from everyone bearing the mark, knew nothing of the sigil so clearly visible to me on her forehead.
It seems all of Beetlesmith's clients are damned, but I was the only one who knew it.
When we were about to part company, she invited up to her apartment. I knew why, of course, and even though I really wasn't in the mood and she wasn't really my type, I decided to give the old bag a whirl. Actually, in looks and demeanor, she reminded me of Judi Dench of the Bond movies—minus the British accent, of course. So in that regard, I didn't mind fucking her brains out in front of her husband.
All in all, doing the old biddy turned out to be another error in judgment.
When she introduced me to her husband, I saw that he bore the sigil of Asmodeus, as well. I asked him if he had also administered the elixir, and he said he had on several occasions to very young acquaintances that struck his wife's fancy.
So, again, my assumptions seem to be correct. Only those who purposefully give the elixir to another are damned, and only I could see them for what they were.
Once the introductions were out of the way, she tied hubby to a chair in their bedroom. It seems he likes being the captive while the young men bone his wife, and she loves raining insults over his head as she's fucked silly, and all while assaulting him physically in the most egregious ways—ways Gabby would never even consider doing to her husband Phil. I made what little of her day she had left when she saw the size of my cock.
Long story short, she took it in the ass several times, screaming and squirting for each. After each session, I made her suck my cock and balls to clean it off. She wasn't thrilled about that, but did derive some pleasure out of the looks her cuckold husband gave her. And I was having some fun treating the old bitch like a used-up whore. So things were going well from my perspective, as well. That is, until I dived back into her now, loose ass, again. Just as I sent her into another shrieking fit of butt quake, she has a heart attack. Right there on the bed with her plump ass in the air and in mid-squirt.
It must have been a massive myocardial infarction. She was dead before I even pulled out of her. At least she had a smile on her face—though I don't suppose her smile lasted very long once she met the two grunting guardians down below.
There was no way I was going to be bothered with the cops or the coroner. What a nuisance that would have been. Instead, I wiped hubby's memory clean of my existence, and left their place with him still tied to the chair. About two hours later, I made an anonymous tip to the local police. At least I think I did.
After that, I didn't bother engaging anyone else concerning the sigil.
********
All that sigil nonsense aside, my new, overriding philosophy became: make hay while the sun shines.
Regardless of what Beetlesmith had said, I felt that the sunset of my life was fast approaching. And even if Asmodeus allowed me to live after performing my manly duties, I was sure it wouldn't be with the benefit of the powers I now possessed. I figured I had until the appointed hour, according to Beetlesmith's timetable, before those powers would sunset.
So make hay before sunset. Embrace the powers granted. Carpe diem, asshole.
So much irony permeated my life. Looking back over these many months prior to the knowledge of my outcome, I exercised restraint using those powers, but to what ends? I'm still going to Hell. What's the point in restraint now? Will my destination be any different if I continue to curb my appetites? Now that I was living with one foot in Hell, I might as well take full advantage of its fetid waters while I'm still able, and dive in.
There's a market for what I could offer. I live in a time where all manner of people thirst to indulge themselves in the debauched and the lascivious. Why not enrich myself giving the people what they truly desire, and at least bequeath to Karen some measure of wealth and comfort when I'm gone?
The day of the sigil was the last day I went into work, and the only reason was to invite everyone on my floor to my house Friday night as kind of a bon voyage party.
Not surprisingly, everyone came, as well as all the others from the last orgy,
sans
Jack. Even the snooty assholes came. The ones that looked down their noses at me when the rumors spread across my office floor like wildfire—hypocrites, all.
When all was said and done, there were close to sixty people gathered in my home. I supplied beverages for all the guests. I did this mainly to provide me a focal point, a smaller object that I could mentally project the emotional essence of what the elixir did to people—all of the routine of administering the elixir, without using the elixir itself.
Over the subsequent weeks, I've learned how to imbue a large group of people with sexual frenzy without using the mental crutch. Prior to learning the trick, however, I was still new at the mass manipulation game, so I relied on a fixed focal point that they would ingest.
That first time using mass manipulation worked better than I anticipated—actually, it was almost too good.
There was no slow ramp up to sexual frenzy, where the individual's ethical and moral walls were broken down, bit by bit, as with the potion. All it took was one sip of my mentally infused drink...poof...they barely had time to put their drinks down before their clothes came off.
Karen and I stood in amazement watching the interior of our house ignite in sexual decadence that went beyond our wildest imaginations.
Women dropped to their knees, clawing at the pants of the nearest male—or female for that matter. Within moments, they were all sucking cock, and begging and demanding their new partner, or partners, to fuck them like sex slaves as they chugged and slurped on any and all naughty bits thrust in their faces.
It didn't matter if several men found themselves momentarily with one woman. They ravaged her simultaneously, wantonly sticking their stiff members into any available opening, much to her squeals of delight.
The floor of our house became a great, flesh-colored sea, with bodies slithering and sliding about each other, looking every bit as ripples on the surface of the water. All manner of sexual deviancy went on display without either Karen or I providing any further mental prodding.
However, it was chaos that first time. If you ever witnessed starving dogs fighting over a morsel of food, you have some idea what it was like watching three women viciously service the same cock at once. There was blood.
I pushed them too hard into frenzy. Jackie made a half-hearted attempt to restore some order by organizing some structured sex games, but the rest of the 'combatants' were having none of that. She was quickly pulled back into the great mass of flesh. I barely saw her over the next two days.
