The Modern Masque
or
The Night Sheela na Gig & Jenny Greenteeth encountered The Red Death
A short story
by
Jack Danya Kemplin
Dedicated to
As She Has Loved Eternally Yours
Warning: this story contains content of an erotic nature, If you are offended by such material or are under the ages of 18 do NOT read further.
The tale which you are about to read is an anonymous one. Not anonymous in author for as you can read on the cover it clearly states my name, but anonymous in that the main characters' names shall not be mentioned for I do not wish for the identity of these two very real girls in this very fictitious fantasy to be made known, & I refuse to lie to you the reader, I refuse to give these two fake names, so they shall remain nameless, & even more so they shall remain faceless as well.
The clock strikes eight on this cool, & breezy autumn night, darkness has already fallen here in Prescott Arizona. Two young ladies get out of their car, one 18 years old, the other 19. The 18 year old weighs about 200 lbs, & has brown hair that falls slightly below the shoulder, she is drinking a sports cup full of Red Bull energy drink mixed with some alcohol, she is downing it like as if there is no tomorrow, she has been waiting for this, but waited until they arrived at their destination since she was the driver. The other girl is taller & much slender, coming in at around 160lbs, she has blond hair trimmed into a bob, She appears emaciated, obviously high on something a bit more powerful then marijuana, something injected by a needle. Both girls are puffing on cigarettes, the legality of their contents can only be guessed.
They walk up a small set of patio stairs arriving at a door, as they knock they lower down over their eyes domino masks that barely hide their identity at all. A man comes to the door, he greets them, him too wearing a domino mask. As the two enter they see a familiar site, a room full of all of their friends & a few strangers, yet to become new friends, lounging around the house, drinking hard liquors, liqueurs, & spirits, those beverages keeping everyone in high spirit. Many of them are also consuming tobacco, marijuana, opiates, narcotics, & methamphetamines.
The two girls grin for this is just what they want for the weekend, it is Friday night & they have the next two days to just lay back, relax, get high, & open their thighs. It shall be so splendid, it is what they seek & find every weekend around this town. Their lives like that of everyone in between the ages of 15 & 35 here, Monday through Friday they go to their respective low paying jobs, work hard to earn their biweekly paychecks, & then come Friday night they all arrive at someone's house in town, & get lost for the next two days in the drunken high of alcohol, narcotics, & lust; Only to return on Monday to their deadbeat jobs to relive this perpetual cycle of boredom masked as fun.
The others which are found lounging about at this week's get together are all masked in cheap plastic, colored dominoes, all surely purchased in packs of 10 for 99 cents at the local party supply store. This is not the usual attire for these gatherings, normally everyone arrives dressed in their average modern street clothing as of the year 2008, for the girls that means skimpy things that if worn to work they would surely get fired for, not unless their work was, as some of them are already, that of the harlot, then it would be the uniform of choice to attract the desired John. The men on the other hand would wear pants that are so baggy their desired hight does not surpass that of the knee, well their underwear travels up to the waist on full display, plumed out so as to give room for & show off their elephantine privets which are not actually there, instead in their place being deeply hidden little white warms; their chests bare so they may flex their small muscles in a vane attempt to attract the lust of the girls, them obliging the men by hollering & cooing at this sight. This is the attire of today's youths, this is the attire of ferality, of humanity returned to their basic instincts, of souls wasted away, & dead.
But the dominoes, those are only worn tonight, for tonight has been made different. Every weekend until this one they have been greeted by the warm familiar faces of their friends, & the grinning faces of new ones yet to be, fully out in the open, ready to be embraced, sucked up, & taken in. But this evening the host who had answered the door had thought it would be fun to request of everyone throughout the week to purchase to wear or wear already owned masks, to through what they would mistakenly call a masquerade.
Though a masquerade this is not, for a masque requires a bit of grandeur, expense, & refined civility, none of which can be found here. This event takes place in a broken down house, crater like holes infesting the walls like a pox, surely brought on by pounding of a lustful rage, & idiotic stupors. The orchestrations blearing from a mechanical boombox, their rhythm & rhymes revealing the music to be that of the lowlife: lewd, & criminal, the music of the thuggish urban streets, sounds for them to hip & hop to. Even with this out of place theme the attire is no different from what they wear to all the other gatherings, the only thing of difference being these cheap, plastic 10 cent dominoes.
The two girls that have entered though, their masks are slightly different from the others. Well still dominoes, the others wear the cheap masks, but the ones worn by these two girls are of a higher quality, they are leather, hand painted. One a metallic purplish blue sprinkled with silver glitter, the other wrapped with varied shades of green & brown, looking almost plant like. Both masks having ornamental shapes spiraling from their tops & bottoms, forming into horns on the metallic one, & branches on the earthen one. The horny metallic one belongs to the tall, slender blond, she is the goblinness Jenny Greenteeth; The earthen Greenman one belonging to the short, plump brunet, she portrays herself as Lady Greenwood, but that is merely a facading canopy covering her true stone cold nature, for she is in actuality Sheela na Gig.
Masks are meant to give a person some form of anonymity, allowing them to seclude who they are & put up a fronting facade that they are something they are not, allowing them to reach beyond who they are & become something else, but sometimes that is not what happens, sometimes when someone picks out a mask they like, they are showing who they really are inside. In picking a mask to represent them, they are giving us a peak of what is just right beneath the surface, & therefore sometimes a person can only truly be themselves when they are wearing a mask. Traditionally when one goes to a masquerade they wear their mask to remain anonymous, & thusly people do not recognize nor refer to them by their names, for they know not who this person is, but they refer to them by their mask, for they can recognize that, differentiate it from the others, & refer to that so the other party goers can know of whom they are speaking. That being the case I find it only appropriate & fitting in this world of anonymity to refer to these two girls & everyone else, not by their names, for we do not know who they are, but by their masks.
These masks Jenny & Sheela, why are they here, what is it that has made them so different from these other cheap ones? They was obviously not purchased at the party supply store like the others, & their worth was far greater, though the girls beneath these masks are employed in the same level of jobs as the others, & they live the same lifestyle as the others, their masks should therefore be the same, but they are not, why? If it was not do to their own diversity that these masks came to be here, then what figure which once inhabited the lives of both of these girls purchased these masks for them? & if these two are now no different from those others, then what happened to that figure & why is he no longer in their lives? This is a question we may never know the answer to.
Sheela's attached body walks over to the couch where a group of people lay consuming alcohol, she reaches over & grabs a bottle of Jägermeister, pouring some of it into her sports mug of Red Bull, commenting on how much she loves & is devoted to the drink, declaring “Jäger, man I needed some of that!”
The mouth attached to Jenny asks the host what made him think of having a masquerade? He coyly answers with a slight grin that he just thought it would be kind of fun to change things up a bit. She agrees that it was a good idea, & joins Sheela by the couch. As the night progresses Jenny & Sheela find themselves separating, moving off, talking to, & getting inebriated with different groups within the house.
Sheela as the night caries on finds herself in one room with bright green walls & lit with emerald lights. She lays upon a bed draped in sheets & pillows of a vert hue, five others whom she has passed the time with position themselves above & around her, stripping themselves of their clothing & her of hers, freeing all parts of their coverings, all parts but one, as they leave on their dominoes. These five feral bipeds are of various genders & ages, none of which truly matter as they are masked, but even unmasked this would not matter to them nor Sheela as they are of a type that does not care about anything but their own pleasure, achieving that pleasure & satisfying their lust through any means, be it tobacco, drugs, alcohol, or the flesh.
They begin to devourer Sheela, feeding from her moist mouth, her luscious birthing thick thighs, her tender tubby tummy, her ripe buxom bosom, & her preciously plump pubis. This isn't the first time they have tasted her, though this time it is a bit more arousing for all of them with the added anonymity of it all, & the masks make them feel a bit kinky.
Sheela enjoys herself, her mouth opening wide as she gasps in utterly complete ecstasy, the gape of her mouth only rivaled by that of her far lower orifice, which she tugs the sides of, opening it wider for the tongues of those who lay upon her, excreting liquids of lustful preparation flowing forth from her like a drain during a harsh rain.
Without the masks this moment may not have the same thrusting power to it as it does this time, for these acts are far too familiar to her, & would most likely be considered the same old routine, not as much a joy as a necessary release for all of the stress she has built up over the week, her mind being unable to remember any other ways of releasing that stress. But in all her weekly replays of these acts has she ever done them with her best friend Jenny? How am I to know, for I have not been there.
And yes, what of Jenny, how does her night play out? Jenny also finds herself subconsciously moving towards a room in the house along with a small group of others. This room is black like the jet which can be found strewn across the shores of Whitby, almost no light can be found here reflecting off of it's walls of complete darkness, it's only illumination coming from a single blazing scarlet lamp. On the furthest wall of this room almost unnoticeable to the eye if it wasn't for it's bright silver hands, numerals, & pendulum, stands a large black grandfather clock, rising at least 7 feet, brushing across the ceiling.
But what is a clock like that doing in a house like this? There is no way that the owner of this house could have afforded a grandfather clock like that, did he inherit it, could it be some ancient family heirloom passed to him? & who would trust such a thing with tonight's host? For the only other things in this place of gehenna that match the quality, craftsmanship, & antiquity of this clock is the masks of Jenny Greenteeth & Sheela na Gig themselves. But if those masks are worn by their respective girls, & thusly are not from here, then one must also wonder what figure could have supplied this clock, & why to this location?
Jenny's accompanying body lies prostrate on the bed, which is as jet as the walls. The hands of the five gathered around her come smacking down on her firm, lusciously grandiose astonishing ass. They beat rough, & they beat down hard, her neck arches up with each sting of flesh hitting against flesh, sweet coos leaving her clinched lips. Her eyes close as she takes in the sensation, her left hand fondling her breast. The skin of her splendid silken rump begins to fluctuate in color like a changeling, starting out a pale ivory, then becoming a bright scarlet, before bruising & turning a deep fluorescent emerald green.
Jenny's wearer lasciviously turns her sumptuous body over, motioning with one finger for the others to come upon her in the bed. They pile on top of her, their bodies all intertwining, limbs entangled with other limbs in this orgasmic mesh of flesh & bone. Jenny's face moves slowly toward another girl's slender muscular jugular, her mouth opens to reveal brownish green tented brittle teeth, some of them jagged & broken from her constant prolonged use of tobacco, methamphetamines, & almost any other poison a person could consume. She bites down hard, licking the girl as she penetrates her, the girl slightly whimpers in pain as she moves her neck away & one can see that Jenny has slightly punctured her with one of her sharpened teeth, small drops of blood dripping from the girl's throat. Jenny laughs in an apology & offers to lick her booh-booh away, the girl happily accepts & obliges her by lowering her neck back down & surrendering it to her devious suckles.
Just at that moment from within the pitch void of darkness the grandfather clock chimes out with a ringing thud as the hammer hits the cymbal. It calls out once, then again, then ten more times, striking twelve times total, each strike more deep, penetrating, & haunting then it's predecessor, each one sounding almost as if it were calling out to someone.
And oddly at that very moment the pulsating rhythm of the urban music goes silent as if the clock has scared it into silence, perhaps even scared it to death, & when the music resumes it is no longer as it was, for it is now the song BWV 565 by the band Die Form from their album Bach Project based on Toccata And Fugue in d Minor. A figure strides into the main room of the house, he is shrouded head to toe in blood red, his clothing out of place & out of time, belonging in the 18th century, not the 21st, yet all the same this figure misplaced from time walks in, atop his head sits a red felt cavalier sprouting a vast plumage of vermilion feathers, & beneath this grand hat lies the face of Death himself, for this final & unexpected guest dons The Masque of The Red Death, that centuries old skeletal figure brought forth from the pages of Edger Allen Poe, from pages that these party goers have never read, by an author they have most likely never heard of, that's modern day education in the USA for you, a country where everyone knows where the latest drug riddled young starlet takes a dump, but they don't even know the names of the great & classic authors of humankind. It is this ignorance that has brought The Red Death here tonight. When a country is just fine being entertained by smut, kept quiet with music, & kept thoughtless with overwork, & drugs to numb the mind & stifle criticisms, & the upheaval of thought, & the people just blindly submit to this, & rest well in their ignorance, unaware of the pain, suffering, & slavery that goes on in this world, that is when The Red Death must arise to rebuke their merriment, for they stand upon the bones of those who have suffered, & in their well off state they have forgotten that they should take charge to look after their fellow man & be vigilant of each other to make sure that they are not tricked into drinking the poison of comfort which slyly robs them of their freedoms until they are reduced to draft animals half the time, & the other half they are nothing more then opium din addicts laying on a mattress drowning in their own drool, suffocating on their own saliva. Mankind likes to forget things & become negligent, & that is why it must be rebuked.
The mask of The Masque of The Red Death which this figure wears is leather like that of the two girls', but this mask is vastly superior to theirs, it is more then a domino, it is an actual masquerade mask! This event was not yet a true masquerade until this very moment, & yet now it is in question weather the event still continues or has the arrival of this phantom figure signaled the approaching death of this world as these people know it? The death of their current state & the rebirth of their hearts & minds to things as they truly are, or as they could possibly be, what now shall come of this night?
His mask though leather is the color & shape of a real skull, so lifelike that you would swear it was one. It starts from before the hat ends, & it ends with the upper teeth sitting over the real upper teeth of the person underneath it. That person's true lips are sown together with black thread, sown shut so that he may not speak a word, nor make a sound.
He without hesitation walks over to the green room, his cloak trailing behind. Inside of it the ferals have not even payed any note to the chimes of the clock nor the change in music, they are still working away, rubbing, grinding, & licking to satisfy & quench their thirst. They don't even notice the figure entering the room, nor him rounding the bed. The five of them still gorging themselves on the body attached to the mask of Sheela na Gig. The Red Death approaches Sheela, like a viper his left hand strikes at her throat, & grips down hard with a crushing force. The eyes behind Sheela are so intoxicated that they don't realize that there is a sixth person above her, all she knows is that she has always been turned on by the thought of asphyxiation play, but has yet to fulfill that fantasy, her thoughts are relief & ecstasy that finally someone has stepped up to bring forth her fantasy into reality. She gasps in pleasure, squirming in joy, but then she senses that something is not quite right, that this person is playing a bit rougher then she imagined as he tightens his grip on her throat tighter, tighter, she feels her neck muscles giving way & collapsing under the pressure, her closed eyes pop open & she sees less then an inch away from her own eyes, those of the barer of the mask glaring down at her, angry, malevolent, & seething with spleen, his stare penetrating right through her, dissolving past her mask, even past her flesh into the very heart of her being, he sees deep down inside of her, he sees everything as she is lain naked before him, not naked like how she is in front of all these other people, but truly naked through & through, he can see everything inside of her, & he sees her fear. He clinches it tight, clutches & squeezes it, before pulling up, tearing, & ripping it out.
In a rush she rises to a sitting position, startling everyone else who was feasting upon her, them wondering why she rouse so quickly, if they had done anything she did not like, or else something that she liked too much. They are perplexed by her panicked, confused look. She rapidly glances around the room, & when her eyes make it to the doorway she thinks she sees the end of a long red cloak slide out across the floor. She then thinks to herself that she needs to cut back on the junk or else at least get a better dealer who won't sell her bad stuff.
Jenny's Fräulein is lying flat on her back atop the bed, the five others working their tongues across her ivory, scarlet, & green splotched flesh. She stares up at the ceiling her eyes fully open & alert, when she begins to feel a hand different from the others, as the others pull, grab, & tug in pursuit of satisfying their own pleasures & urges, this one is different, it's gentle non-sexual, fully loving caress demonstrating that it only wishes to comfort her, & be there for her whenever she needs someone to cry on, & just hold. The others just continually take from her, raping & pillaging her of her goods until there is nothing left but a hallow, empty, dead shell, but this one only wishes to give to & be there for her; to find her empty heart & fill it once more with all the joy & love that it could possibly ever hold, & more then she could ever imagine that it could hold, he wants to fill her up so badly with his love, & compassion, where as all the others want to do is feel her up, & fill her up with their warm gooey white phallic liquids. She remembers this touch, she knows who it is without even seeing him, though she is ecstatic when his head moves into her view. She brings her face close to his masked face, she looks deeply into his eyes, staring passionately back into them, both of their eyes well up with tears as their gazes lock & their souls exchange bodies, freely flowing from one into the other...interlocking. Unconsciously she finds herself being drawn closer to kiss his threaded lips, to have hers caress his sown ones, but just as their tips are about to touch she feels his fingers rise up in between them, gently pushing her lips back, & with a tear falling from his eye he nods his head “no...” in an unspoken whisper. She begins to sob uncontrollably, so much so that her tears completely obscure her vision. When she regains her vision he is gone, she turns her head right, & then left looking for him, her vampiric phantom, but the most she gets to see is one last fleeting glance of his crimson cape slipping out the doorway, caught in the glow of the scarlet lamp, their colors intermingled for a split second & then gone.
At that very moment the clock strikes the half hour mark, as it does she looks up to the clock & inside of its shaft cavity, behind the silver pendulum for a brief, but enduring second she thinks she sees him standing their, gazing at her, whispering a silent “I love you...” then he is gone again, this time seemingly forever.
She rushes out to the main room, as does the other girl, the urban music once again blearing from the boombox. They speak of the man they saw, which no one else did, they question weather the man they saw was the same man, or two different men dressed in the same costume do to his conduct, attitude, & mannerisms being completely opposite for each girl. After awhile they agree that they was sold some bad drugs, & they return unchanged to their same perpetual cycle of self death brought on by boredom.
There is nothing more to tell.