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"'My pretty dog, my good dog, my doggy dear, come and smell this excellent perfume bought at the best scent-shop in the city.'
And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the poor creature's substitute for a laugh or a smile, approached and curiously placed its damp nose to the open vial;
then, recoiling with sudden fright, it growled at me in reproach."
-Charles Baudelaire, 'Le chien et le flacon'
“Missed us,” one of them whispers in his ear.
Which one, Ethan can’t see. He only knows it’s the one with her fingers hooked inside his collar, conveniently both choking him and keeping his tired body standing at the same time.
It’s been hours or maybe even a day since he was last released from being bound to the bed. His muscles are so sore and weakened, he wouldn’t even be able to raise his arm to swat them away like the flies they are.
“Mother told us to make you dinner,” Cassandra announces, in her hand a bowl filled with hardly cooked chunks of white meat.
It’s definitely of animal origin, nothing else matters.
Ethan can’t even remember how long it has been since he had a proper meal, one he didn’t end up vomiting back up.
She raises the bowl to him and he instinctively shoots forward, trying to catch a bite, but – of course – Cassandra immediately withdraws with a shrill laugh.
“Look at you, so desperate to eat like a lowly animal. Do you have no pride, Ethan Winters? Instead of starving like a man and dying with honor you prefer turning yourself into a dog – just for a wee little treat?”
“Pathetic,” one of the sisters behind him spits.
“Pathetic,” echoes the other.
“You defy us, yet you are too weak to survive. You shy from the rich, nutritious meat we previously served you. Instead of feasting on the flesh of man, which would make you strong enough to face us, you cough up our gifts and spit them before our feet. And now our dearest Mother has found it in her golden heart to make us serve you poultry – so you may die in the embrace of a death more worthy than famine.”
“You are what you eat,” titters Bela.
“You are what you eat,” parrots Daniela.
“You are what you eat,” muses Cassandra.
Suddenly his head drops forward with a swat that makes his vision blur.
“Show some gratitude!”
“Th-ank you,” he mutters, voice raspy and coarse. He hasn’t had anything to drink almost as long as he hasn’t eaten.
Ethan chokes when instead of being rewarded, his collar is roughly yanked backwards, almost felling him with it.
“You don’t sound like you mean it, Ethan.”
“Rude.”
“Don’t you know how to be a gentleman?”
“S-sorry,” he gags with every syllable, each one making the muscles in his throat pulsate against the leather choking him. “Th-thank y-you–– s-so muh-ch”
The pressure lessens, granting him breath. But they’re still looking at him expectantly.
He can smell the meat.
Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride. Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride. I can’t die. Fuckmydignityfuckmypride. I can’t fucking die.
“Please, let me eat,” it doesn’t feel any less like a betrayal on his tongue. No matter what he tells himself. “Please, please, please let me eat.”
“You don’t get treats without performing a few tricks first,” Cassandra retorts, her grin widening as she exchanges glances with her sisters.
He’s barely able to brace his fall – tied hands and all. The moment they push him, his body just sags to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Dogs can’t stand, silly” and there could be no warning more clear that he’d better stay on all fours.
They take a moment to examine him, on his bruised knees like a sinner pleading for repentance from his deity, trying not to put too much weight on his maimed hand.
And he does stare up at them, because for a moment they do look terrifyingly divine. Pale like corpses, speckled with the dried blood of those who failed to entertain, preying eyes which shine through darkness like those of tigers.
Three sisters, holding the string of his fate in their hands.
They move much faster than humans, for he doesn’t see the heel coming that hits his forehead, failing to stab out his eye by nothing but a hair’s breadth. If it weren’t for Bela holding his leash, he surely would have toppled over, instead it just nearly choked him again.
“Hah, you missed, suioară! Missed!”
“Shut up!” Daniela huffs, wrinkling her nose, then quickly turns her attention to Ethan.
“Now, bark for us.”
“Yes, bark!”
And so he does.
Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride.
“Louder!”
At first his barks were nothing but a series of wheezes and coughs, but the more he forces his dry, abused throat to comply, the more accurate the sounds become.
Cassandra moves her pointer fingers to them like a maestro directing an orchestra.
“Louder!”
Bela gives his leash a firm tug and Ethan goes from barking to howling.
“Louder!”
They let him howl until his voice gives out on him. At the end there is but hoarse screams.
“Passable.”
The bowl is dropped to the floor with such little care it nearly spills.
Ethan scurries over desperately, not even realizing he is doing so while on all fours. Neither does he take a moment to question if they expect him to eat without his hands, he simply does.
“Good doggy.”
For the first time Ethan experiences what he’d call an ‘animal instinct’. Scared the daughters might take the food away, he is frantically guzzling, not even noticing any taste with how desperate he is it to consume every last bite. He can’t help feeling ashamed (still? After all this? Still?), knowing what he must look like, unable to ignore the cold sting of their piercing gazes and snide words as he is perched over the bowl.
Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride. It doesn’t matter. I just have to get out of here. I have to save Rose.
“Daniela, would you get us some wine?” Bela orders, an arm lazily flung around her other sister.
Daniela, looking displeased, exits the room with a childish pout. Now there’s only two witches, but in his current state that is still too much to hazard a new attempt at escape.
“At least we can still get some entertainment out of you, now that Mother won’t let us fuck you anymore,” Bela sneers, wrapping her hands around Cassandra’s hips and resting her chin on her shoulder. “That was the one thing you were good for – and even then you were still utterly disappointing.”
“Do you know how many men threw themselves at our feet and kissed our shoes, begging for the grace of a single touch? How many tried to impress us with their willingness to sacrifice themselves and others? How many men ruined themselves for us to be worth being spared a fleeting glance? And you dare reject us!” Cassandra utters between gritted teeth. As if to showcase their qualities, her sister gives her left breast a tight squeeze.
“Hah, when will you finally cease this silly farce, Ethan Winters!? All men are the same, slaves to their primitive lust. Did it not excite you when we touched you? Did you not stain the sheets with proof? You may lie and ease your conscience with your ridiculous act, but your body speaks the truth! Face it! Your wife’s been dead for less than a season and here you are, fornicating with women. You are an animal, a pet, and as such you must serve your masters. Don’t pretend you don’t delight in it – not when it is your sole purpose of existence!”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Bela puts her cheek against her sister’s and then, with a tone of voice as sweet as sugar, says,
“If it were not for Mother’s orders, we’d neuter you and feed you the remains of your pitiful masculinity.”
They both break out in hyena-like laughter and something tells him it wouldn’t be the first time they did something like this, nor the second or third.
These creatures may guise themselves in the shape of humans, but in truth they are the animals, not Ethan.
The increasingly more spine-chilling atmosphere is broken by the sound of the door creaking open then shut.
“I went through his belongings,” Daniela comes into view, holding a bottle of wine in one hand and something else in the other.
Ethan’s poor, tortured heart ceases beating, for just the sliver of a moment, when he realizes just what it is.
It’s the photo of his family. The only thing he has left of them, the only thing which gave him warmth in this cruel, icy hell.
The others peek over Daniela’s shoulders.
And then the laughter starts, louder and ghastlier than ever. Like the screeches of banshees, sounds that could never belong to something human. Monstrous. Heartless.
“Look at that ugly shrew of a wife!”
“Hah, just the kind of bitch a toothless mutt deserves!”
Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride.
Ethan turns his gaze downward, continues eating, pretending he doesn’t hear them. Like their words aren’t cutting deeper than any wounds they inflicted on him.
But it’s not mine. It’s Mia’s.
“Can you believe this fool is still pretending he prefers this hag over us? Over Mother?”
“Did she enjoy your tiny little cock, Ethan? She looks so frigid I bet it’d feel no different fucking her rotten corpse.”
Rose. Rose. Rose. Think of Rose.
And he does. He thinks of her tiny hand wrapped around his thumb. Thinks of her angelic smile. Thinks of the warmth and unimaginable joy he felt when he first held her. His baby girl.
Ethan doesn’t notice the single tear falling into his bowl.
“Do you have nothing to say?”
“Aren’t you going to defend your dead hag? Insult us? Vow to make us eat our words?”
Fuck my dignity. Fuck my pride.
“Seems we’ve already beat that out of him.”
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. None of it matters. Fuck my ––
Suddenly there’s the sharp press of a heel in the space between his shoulder blades. Ethan can tell it’s the same as the one from earlier, slick as it is with his blood. One of them yanks at his leash, pulling his head upward, cutting off air.
His spine bends painfully and his hands automatically shoot to his throat, trying to loosen the collar’s stranglehold.
“You’re a sham, Ethan. All bark and no bite!”
They let go and he collapses to the floor, gasping, coughing out chunks of half-chewed meat. His face burns and he just wants this to be over. Ethan doesn’t registers at first, but they finally managed to squeeze out the tears he’d been suppressing, along with his breath.
He tries to collect himself but the opposite happens. Instead of regaining his breath, his body lets out a long sob and more tears force their way out. He’s disgusted by his own weakness.
(The idea of wanting to end it all, himself, has never even occurred to him. Not in Dulvey, not here. An unnaturally strong will to live has been baked into him, one that outweighs all pain. It’d be different if Ethan was by himself. But he has to live for Rose the same way he lived for Mia. He doesn’t have the luxury of wanting the pain to stop.)
The daughters watch him smugly as Ethan eats the meat he coughed up, then resumes with his bowl, even lapping at the juices once there is nothing else left.
All the while, the bottle of wine passes between them like an offertory bag.
“Cleaning his plate like a big boy,” there’s a drunken lilt in Daniela’s voice.
They seem slightly pleased at his accomplishment of the task. If he degraded himself a little more, acted more like a dog, it could soften their wine-dulled edges and get him out of this situation without being hurt again. Ethan immediately grows ashamed at the thought. Despite himself, there is still a part of him proud enough refusing to debase himself unless he’s explicitly forced to.
The daughters drift off talking to each other in Romanian. Every so often they will cast a fleeting glance at Ethan, still on all fours, then chuckle to themselves. At times the conversation appears broken, like one was going to say something but the other two already knew what it was going to be. He wonders how they work, if they’re one or three separate swarms. What kind of consciousness do they have?
Maybe they’re all and nothing of the above.
To these immortal creatures, who cannot even leave their home, wine, torture and sex must be the only means available to distract themselves. Ethan holds no sympathy for them.
“Soon this is going to be you,” Cassandra slurs, her eyes wide and glittering with excitement as she swirls the wine around in the bottle.
The times they forced the stuff down his throat, it didn’t just taste wrong. It made him feel wrong, too. In the literal sense. On edge, numb. They must spike the wine with something. Something other than blood.
This knowledge doesn’t stop his throat from aching, though.
“I don’t get why Mother thinks his blood’s stale. Of course this wretched little bou wouldn’t even have the decency of making great wine. But it’s not bad either. Passable.”
“Unimpressive. Like everything else about him.”
Without a word Bela snatches the bottle from Cassandra’s hands and downs the remaining third in one go. She’s had the lion’s share of the wine, her position as the oldest giving her privilege to.
“You must be thirsty,” Bela giggles. The liquor has her losing her form, flies keep crawling out of her flesh masquerade and whirring about his cell. “Oh, but you don’t like the exquisite wine of our mother? You really are a filthy mutt, Ethan Winters.”
He says nothing. Bela scrutinizes him, disappointed at his lack of reaction, then her gaze drops to the bottle and her smile darkens.
“Pull him up,” she commands, making Cassandra and Daniela hurry to his side, yanking him to his feet.
He doesn’t like having Bela this close to him. Just like her sisters, she reeks of death and stale gore – it’s beyond nauseating.
“’You shall not draw blood from him nor make him perform carnal services’ – those are Mother’s orders. But she didn’t tell us not to hurt you.”
Her blood-crusted nails dig into his cock as she presses the tip to the hole of the bottle.
“We’re not going to let you piss the bed again and have Mother make us clean the sheets.”
Ethan shivers. He knows what she means. The sisters holding him start grinning broadly and cackle at the new game they’re playing.
Fucky my dignity. Fuck my pride.
The words have started sounding meaningless in his head. They don’t change anything about the situation or how it makes him feel. They bring no comfort. It’s just his way of telling himself there’s nothing he can do (and that the option of refusing and dying as a result would be selfish).
Fucky my dignity. Fuck my pride.
He’s had pressure on his bladder for hours, so it doesn’t take long until his body starts urinating.
Given his lack of hydration, there isn’t much of it. A glass full, maybe. Ethan can’t decide if this result is favorable or not. Less to taste, but also less to sustain and keep him alive.
He closes his lips around the bottleneck. He doesn’t want this, but he needs it.
(Strange how being forced to do something shameful changes things. If he were still trekking through the forest and found himself needing to do this for sustenance, he’d feel no shame. It’d be by his own choice, for his own survival. Even though what is happening right now, too, is for survival, he can’t detach himself from it. Because he isn’t doing it for himself but for the amusement of these terrible women.)
Of course, it’s disgusting. But far from the worst thing they’ve made him taste. Ethan holds onto that thought.
The bottle is tilted at an angle he has to be careful none of it will go into his wind pipe. He tries to slow down the stream of his own piss by gritting his teeth, but it is still gushing too fast down his throat for him not to gag.
“Look at him, suckling like a newborn.”
His dry throat rejoices, despite nearly choking on it.
(He can’t stand it. He can’t stand how they keep tricking his body into enjoying wrong things.)
Ethan is surprised at how quickly he manages to get over with the task. His thirst was so strong, he barely even tasted anything.
But in return, Bela’s face twitches with contempt at the brevity and the bottle remains pressed to his lips, even though there is nothing left to humiliate him with.
“You’re worth nothing. You can’t even please us,” droplets of her filthy spit hit his cheek. “Now you better give us a good show at least.”
The bottle presses further into his mouth, scraping painfully over his teeth.
“Pretend it’s a man.”
For a moment, Ethan is simply frozen in place, his brain trying to wrap itself around the strange request. But then Bela seizes a fistful of his hair and rams the bottle down his throat, springing his body into motion.
She holds him and the bottle steady as Ethan clumsily works his mouth up and down its neck, a brutal caricature of a mother feeding her child.
“He doesn’t look like a sodomite, but he sure is weakling enough he’d never manage to fight one off,” even though Cassandra isn’t addressing him, her face is so close, too close, as if she’s whispering in his ear. Underneath her voice he can hear the buzzing of insects, growing in volume.
Ethan yieldingly swallows their insults just like the urine they forced him to drink.
He’s never done anything like what they’re trying to imitate here. But it’s strangely similar to what he presumes it must have felt like to Mia whenever she did this for him.
With one difference. There is no flesh, no warmth or softness, only cold glass.
Glass that could easily shatter in his mouth.
There is nothing pliable about it either. The bottle doesn’t bend down his throat like flesh would. Even lathering it with saliva doesn’t make it any less painful.
“If I were a man you’d be dead already for such a poor performance.”
Bela takes initiative, steadily working the bottle in and out of him until his lips go numb. He’d call it ‘fucking’ but there’s nothing alive between his lips. None of them are getting any pleasure from this. (Which makes the whole act bizarrely pointless. It’s not even rape but a simulation of it.)
“You really are good for nothing – not even sucking cock!”
From behind him a hand closes around his neck, fingers tracing the in- and deflating bulge the bottleneck makes in his throat.
“Worthless little muist.”
A wet hot tongue licks over the lobe of his ear, the stench of which stings his eyes.
“To think someone like you could father the Vessel.”
“You are better suited to be a meal, a toy, a dog.”
There are bugs on him. Bugs on his shoulders. Bugs on his thighs. Bugs nestled in the thicket of his pubic hair. The soft wings of a bug flutter against his limp cock.
“Our dog.”
Don’t listen.
“Our toy.”
Don’t feel.
“Our meal.”
There might be bugs in his brain, in his lungs, in his heart, because at this point Ethan can’t think of any place of him that could be safe from them.
Just stay alive.
Stay alive.
They (the bottle) go too far and with his very next breath, Ethan is regurgitating the food he humiliated himself so horribly for all up again.
“Ew.”
As if they’d just found an apple with a worm in it, the daughters let go and his ragdoll body drops to the floor.
His limbs are too numb to catch himself. Ethan’s head hits the floor full-force and his vision dilutes.
“You truly are a foul creature.”
Another spate of vomit bursts out of him, forming a tiny puddle of saliva and bile.
There’s some blood in it too and nothing to gain by pondering whose.
“Now this is how you intend to thank us? We give you food, we give you drink and all you ever do is spit it out like a stubborn child.”
“Then suit yourself, stay hungry.”
“Eventually, he shall learn to behave. Any wild animal can be tamed into a pet, if you beat it enough.”
With a bored flick of Daniela’s wrist, the wine bottle they repurposed into an instrument of torture hits the floor and shatters into a decent amount of pieces. The sight is satisfying to Ethan in the same nonsensical way as seeing the gun that shot you being destroyed would.
“I’m bored of him already,” Bela sighs. “Let’s go.”
The younger two each grab a pair of his limbs and shackle Ethan back to the bed, still covered in his own filth. If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll manage to lick some puke off his chest later on.
In the corner of his eye he spots some of the bugs, some of them, sticking their tiny little trunks into the puddle on the floor.
You’re foul.
You’re animals.
They turn off the lights and–––
“Goodnight, little one. We’ll play again tomorrow.”
“Sleep tight.”
“Sweet dreams.”
“Don’t let the bed bugs bite you.”
–––finally finally finallyfinallyfinally leave.
In the darkness of the room and of himself, Ethan thinks about being alive.
