The Defiled One

"It isn't that I hate Halloween, Mary, and no, I don't have a wife or family that I have to be with or kids to take Trick-or-Treating. It's just that I totally and absolutely hate being on duty at a state psychiatric facility on Halloween. That's why at the very beginning of every year I put in for a week of vacation from October 28th through November 2nd. You approve it every year, including this year. I do that because I do not want to be here nor do I have any desire to be on call at all this week."

Dr. Marion Hudson, director of the Madison State Psychiatric Hospital slowly shook her head and replied, "I know, Frank, I have always honored your request, but Dr. Wilson didn't plan to have a heart attack this week either, and until he can recover or we can get a temporary replacement it is you and me to cover as supervising psychiatrists. And since I have to testify before that congressional committee in Washington tomorrow, for the next four days, YOU are on call. There is nothing I can do about it. I am very sorry that you might be called away from your Halloween party this year, but that's the way it is."

I muttered something vulgar under my breath about not going to any Halloween parties and walked out of the office. I haven't gone to a Halloween party in years. In fact, ever since I started working at a mental hospital years ago as a lowly resident, I have had no use at all for Halloween. One of the reasons I bought a place way out in the country is so that I can totally avoid Halloween. Out there, I don't have to put up decorations; I never get Trick-or-Treaters; and I don't have to keep the porch light on. For me Halloween is a time to retreat to my isolated twenty-seven acres of land and enjoy a quiet evening at home. Unfortunately, I knew that wasn't going to be the case this year.

Halloween brings out the worst of the delusional, the drugged-out, and the just plain weird. Some of those most affected by Halloween will end up at the facility, and some junior psych on duty will decide that he or she can't handle it. Then they will call the attending super - me, and I will have to come in to the hospital to deal with whatever it was that they thought a psychiatric resident intern couldn't handle. It will be messy and difficult and will end up burying me in weeks of followup paperwork. No wonder I hate Halloween.

Exactly as I expected, the phone rang at 9:30 on Halloween just as I was settling down in front of the large screen TV with a dark ale and some of my home-made chili. It was Larry, a just-out-of-school psychiatrist who looked younger than the high school boy I have help me with the yard in the summertime. "I hate to bother you, doctor Walters, but this is way beyond my pay grade."

I hate that expression, but decided now was not the time to instruct a subordinate on not using obnoxious cliches and just replied, "Give me the summary."

"Police brought her in about two hours ago. She was turning tricks in the back room of a bar downtown and they were going to charge her with prostitution, but she didn't have any money on her and wasn't charging the johns, so they couldn't make a prostitution charge stick. Actually she didn't have anything on her... including clothing. Once they figured out what was going on, they decided she needed to be brought here. The officer who brought her in said, quote 'She was pulling a free, around the world train for anyone who would come into the room. She tried to take my partner's pants off and kept waving a little notebook at us and screaming that she only needed two more'."

"When they tried to arrest her for public intoxication as an excuse to bring her here, she went wild on them and scratched the hell out of the officer. They ended up having to call in backup and EMTs. She came in here literally wrapped in restraint belts and tied to a Gurney. She was still screaming her head off. Medics said she was maxed out on everything they could give her and it wasn't making a dent. When she came in the door the first thing she said to me was "Fuck me. Please fuck me. I only need two more and he is coming at midnight. If I haven't fucked a thousand men by then he will come and tear me apart and eat me."

I listened calmly and tried not to sound too sarcastic as I replied. "So far this sounds like just a really severe Halloween delusion." I silently added, "Even you should be able to handle this without me," then I continued aloud, "And why do you think I need to come in?"

Larry almost shouted into the phone, "She says that she is Harold Aldridge, and the facial recognition software gives a 62% probability so she is most likely at least a relative."

That got my attention. Harold Aldridge was one of "The Thirteen." He and his buddies were investment brokers who somehow had managed to keep ahead of the market regardless of what it did. They always seemed to buy just before a stock soared and sell just before all hell broke loose. The S.E.C. had investigated them upside, downside and inside out but couldn't prove any wrongdoing. They claimed they had a secret system, but whatever it was they weren't sharing it with anybody.

A little over two weeks ago, the police found twelve of them apparently chewed to pieces in a clearing in the woods south of town. There was barely enough of them left to identify. The gruesome nature of the deaths and the charred and blackened stone altar standing in the middle of the clearing had all of the earmarks of some sort of Satanic ritual, but no evidence of who... or what tore the men apart was found. The police were baffled. One of the thirteen remained un-accounted for... Harold Aldridge. Some residue on the altar was DNA tested and the conclusion was that it had to have come from Harold's sister - perhaps a twin sister. The only problem with that theory was that as far as anyone could determine, Harold Aldridge was an only child.

"I'll be there in about an hour," I said into the phone, and then yelled an obscenity at the wall. I think Larry clearly heard my verbal tantrum, but he ignored it and asked, "What should I do in the meantime? She is tearing through almost any restraint that we have and I can't give her any more drugs without the risk of killing her."

"Just do whatever you need to do to calm her down until I get there. And DON'T talk to the police or any reporters or anyone else on the staff about who you think she might be. Do you totally understand that?"

I got a rather stiff, "Yes, sir," and Larry hung up the phone.

I ignored two texts from Larry on my way in. Both asked, "How long?" It was like a little kid asking, "Are we there yet?"

Because I live in the country, it takes a certain length of time to travel from my house, where I wanted to be, to the high-security mental ward, where I didn't want to be on this particular night. Since I really would have preferred to have spent the evening nursing a couple of dark ales and watching old movies, for some reason I wasn't breaking any speed limits to get there.

I arrived in just under an hour. Larry met me at the door. "Status?" I asked.

"She has calmed a little. I told her that you would speak with her and help her solve her problems when you got here. That seemed to help a lot."

"It sure did, you naive twit," I thought to myself. "She calmed down for you, but a stupid promise like that plants seeds of expectation so she will melt down or blow up or go catatonic on me, and at the case review, I'm the one who will have to explain what I did to trigger it." I really felt like giving Larry a little education in practical psychiatry in a lock-down ward, but instead just asked, "What room?"

"Room 6. Full observation system is in place. It was down for about twenty minutes while you were on your way in, but all video and audio systems are up and running now."

When I entered the room, she was sitting up on the cot naked, her back against some pillows, her legs splayed, rubbing herself lightly with her fingertips. As a psychiatrist, you see everything in this place, but I wasn't prepared for this. I had expected a strung-out druggie, but instead, she was a totally stunning woman, even in her disheveled state. Her hair was a flaxen shade of blond that normally could come only out of a bottle, but the highlights, especially when it was as mussed up as it was, could only occur with a natural blond.

There was no other hair on her body, not even on her forearms. Normally, in that case I would assume that someone had done full-body permanent hair removal, but looking at the area around her vulva I could see that there were no indications of hair follicles - none of the little plucked-chicken bumps that give away dense hair removal. She looked like one of those raunchy drawings of a frat-boy's wet dream idea of a perfect woman. That idea was reinforced by her first words as I entered the room, "Are you going to fuck me?"

I stopped and looked at her eyes and then she added, "I just need one more and I will be at a thousand. I only need one more before midnight to save myself."

Maybe Larry wasn't as naive as I thought. The initial reports indicated that she was yelling that she needed two more. I guess I know what he did to calm her down. At least he knew to shut down the observation system.

"You want to tell me about it?" I began. The usual response to that question is normally a silent stare, but she grinned at me and asked in return, "Will you fuck me if I tell you what happened?"

I smiled back at her and answered, "If you tell me the complete story, I will seriously consider it, if that is what you truly need."

"It's what I absolutely need and you will understand once I tell you the whole story. A lot of what I am going to tell you will seem unbelievable, but you must believe me. My life depends on you believing me... and fucking me."

She paused like she was waiting for a response, but when I said nothing, she exhaled deeply and began speaking almost as if she were dictating case notes. "To begin with my name is Harold Aldridge and I am 243 years old. That sounds impossible - both that I am that old and that I used to be a man, but my friends and I..., we made a deal with the devil - well, actually he's a minor demon, but the effect was the same."

"His name is 'Quello Caduto,' The Fallen One, but he goes by 'Quello,' or in English,'The One.'"

"He is called 'The Fallen One' because he started out as some sort of good spirit or benign natural force somewhere over in Italy, but then a couple thousand years ago he got really pissed off when he was betrayed or turned down or rejected or whatever by the leader of a coven that followed him and drew their power from him. He became consumed by his anger and it turned him evil. Whatever he used to be, he is now definitely one, mean, son-of-a-bitchin' demon."

She laughed and drew in a deep breath. "Our deal with him was simple. There had to be thirteen of us. He gave us eternal youth and the ability to know what ships would come in with good cargoes and what companies would be profitable. In return we would supply him with a defiled white witch for him to rape and consume once every fifty-two years. I know that you are thinking that witches don't exist either, but there are more of them than you can imagine. And the true witches - especially the white, or good witches - are not the 'dress in black, cast an evil spell old hags' that the novels and movies portray. Witches are, for the most part, rather young and beautiful young women - and sometimes men - who are totally in tune with the powers of nature and the spirits that inhabit this world."

"The highest day of power for witches is Samhain, and that is NOT October 31st. The Witch's Sabbath, if you want to call it that, is the dark of the moon following the autumnal equinox. Usually that is at least a week or two before the 31st. When the Romans brought Samhain back from England, they moved it to the end of October because they had a solar, not a lunar calendar. Then the Christian church tried to bury it by overlaying it with a day of the dead called "All Saints Day" or "All Hallows Day." All Hallows Eve became Halloween and somehow the witches got blamed for it, but the days are not the same.

Once every 52 years, however, the solar and lunar calendars complete their cycles together. In that year, for some reason, Samhain - the night of the true witch's sabbath - is even more powerful, and in that year Quello can physically materialize on the earth. He commands that we procure for him the purest witch that we can find, defile her, and deliver her to him one hour before dawn begins to light the sky on the morning after Samhain. I think that is the exact time that witch-goodie-two-shoes turned him down."

She looked at me, half-grinned in a strange, almost seductive way, and continued, "If you do something only once every 52 years, most people don't notice the pattern and even the most careful covens get careless. It was just a matter of us watching and planning and preparing very carefully. We would always use special enchantments which Quello had taught us so that we could hide in the woods, concealed from even most powerful enchantresses of the local covens. Our concealment spells were so good that we could even be close enough to watch their naked bodies as they danced sky clad around their sacred fires and joined with nature on that darkest of all nights."

"At midnight, at the end of all of the rituals, when they had exhausted themselves from dance and song, the final action of the ritual was to walk silently away from the sacred fire carrying glowing coals from the fire out into the world. Their paths went straight outward from the fire like spokes on a wheel until they were far enough away from the fire and each other that the glowing coals they carried in the carved out turnips was the only light by which they could see. At that point there was a final chanted prayer for them to bring light into the darkness of the world, and then they would put their clothes back on and return to their homes."

"Every 52 years, however, one witch in one coven somewhere in the world would not make it home and would never be seen or heard from again. The thirteen of us would surround her chanting the spell of darkness that The One had taught us. We would then close in on her like a noose."

"For that, we were chanting capture spells, also taught us by Quello. By the time we reached her, she would be unable to speak or move. We would then take her back to the center of her coven's clearing and lay her upon their sacred altar. Quello was very specific with what we had to do to her. Each of us was to use her mouth and ass and her cunt. She was to be fucked thirty-nine times so that she was completely defiled by the time The One appeared in the hour before dawn."

"The spell that we used prevented her from making a sound, but it didn't stop her from screaming and crying out silently. Her thrashing attempts to get out from under us made the rape of her ass and mouth all the more enjoyable. And when it came time to fuck her cunt, it was as if I was an erupting volcano inside of her. On no other occasion would I cum so heavily with such copious amounts of hot, sticky cum. By the time Quello arrived, she would be truly defiled and would be curled up silently sobbing on the altar as Quello Caduto appeared above her."

She shuddered like she was swallowing something bitter and distasteful. "Watching what he did to her was truly horrifying, but at the same time truly fascinating. His long, snakelike tongue would slither all over her body until despite herself she would begin to respond to his caresses. He would curl his tongue around her breasts until she was panting and moaning and across her cunt and clit until she was thrashing and bouncing upon the altar. Finally as the light of dawn first began to change the sky from darkest black to deepest purple, Quello would utter a spell and her voice would return. He would growl out the same words each time, 'Beg me to fuck you and make you one with me!'"

"The witches response was also almost always exactly the same words, 'Please fuck me. My body needs you so desperately, but I can never be one with you for you are evil'."

"Quello would then plunge his massive member into the thrashing witch and within a few moments they would climax together. Then he would ask her one more time, 'Will you be one with me?' When she again refused, he would tear her apart and consume her bloody flesh. Then he would disappear for another 52 years."

"Afterwards, we would always go home and get blind drunk trying to get the images of what had occurred out of our mind. It was terrifying and terrible and we really wanted to end it, but you don't exactly break a deal with a devil, even if he is just a minor demon."

She stopped and stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I had heard many weird and strange delusions, but this was the first time I had ever felt a twinge of belief rise within me, and rather than turning the narrative toward the basis of her problems like I was trained to do, I asked, "What went wrong this year?"

She smiled a strange smile at me and answered in an impersonation of Humphry Bogart in Casablanca, "Of all the bars in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." Then she began giggling in that strange high-pitched, demented way of someone losing control of their mind. She was laughing at a joke that only she understood.

After a few moments I seriously considered calling for an intern and more meds, but she suddenly stopped, looked me directly in the eyes, and calmly asked, "Dr Walters, do you know how many people there are in the world?"

"Close to seven billion," I replied.

"So the odds of accidentally finding any one person on any one day at any one place anywhere in the world would be one in seven billion, right?... ONE in SEVEN FUCKING BILLION!" She again started giggling.

Finally she composed herself, paused and looked at me with very wide eyes that for some reason reminded me of a little child looking at her parents as she told them something wonderful or terrible that she had done. "But I did it. I picked out that one exactly wrong person at exactly the wrong time in exactly the right place. I was the one who picked the coven we would target and I was the one who picked which of the witches of the coven we would capture that night. I chose her not because I thought she was the leader, but because she was the most beautiful of them all - possibly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her hair was perfect. Her body was perfect. Even her voice was perfect as they chanted and sang beneath the night sky. I chose her because I knew that she would be the perfect offering to The One whom we must obey."

"Everything went exactly as we had planned. The spell was cast. She was captured. She was bound to the altar and we each had our turn in her mouth and her ass and her cunt. Then Quello appeared. He did his bit with his tongue until she was writhing and panting like she was in heat, then he released her from the binding spell and stated his demand, "Beg me to fuck you and make you one with me!"

"To our surprise, she answered him in Italian. I don't speak Italian, but for some reason, I could understand her. She said, 'Quello Caduto, I refused you a thousand years ago because you were obviously misdirected and I knew that in your deepest heart you were evil. Your heart has not changed, and you are still just as misdirected. What you seek, you do not need. What you need, you do not seek.'"

"Quello roared at the sky as she continued, 'You seek a pure woman to defile and it does not fulfill you... because it can't. You do not need a pure woman who has been defiled. What you need - and what will finally satisfy you - is a woman who is already truly defiled to the depth of her being. You need a truly defiled heart. Such a defiled one will give you what you seek, which is not love, but obedience and raw, powerful sex.'"