Prologue
The man named Jeffrey is running his index finger through the grooves of the brick wall beside him, his breathing still heavy from the sex he’d just so quickly ended. His thin and nude body is splayed about the rickety bed, his flaccid penis having nearly returned to its natural shape as he looks around the dim and dingy basement turned bedroom. The flag above him of pastel blue, pink, and white stripes billows slightly from the wind draft that slithers through the small window beside it.
As he sits up, his hand squelches against a wet stain. Wiping his hand off with the same towel that he had used to clean the lube from himself, he gazes at the shelves of knickknacks across the room. They at first didn’t seem to hold anything of significance or notice, and nothing quite stood out— but for a single piece in particular. Among the small oddities, something shimmers ever so slightly. A small cube, black on all its faces with odd silver geometric patterns etched about its lacquered surfaces. At the center of its forward-facing side, a circular flat dial sits still, begging to be turned.
The effete man swings his feet over the edge of the bed, planting them on the cold concrete ground as he gazes at it. He can’t quite describe it, or even fully fathom it, but he feels drawn to the cube. It feels almost as if it were whispering to him, quietly beckoning him forth. He stands, looking for his underwear in the pile of clothes on the ground, and once made slightly modest, he takes a step toward the shelf.
“So, you have any plans for the rest of the night?” an oddly low-pitched voice, feigning femininity, says from the open bathroom across the basement. Dylan sits on the toilet, expelling the remnants of their sex from his body. His newly formed and small breasts hang forward, coming to an oddly angled point. He cups them, briefly caressing his nipples with his thumbs before returning his attention to Jeffrey.
“Uhh, not really, scrolling Grindr while my husband is out of town is all I had lined up for tonight,” Jeffrey calls back, his eyes never leaving the strange box.
Dylan smiles, his thin lips curving too long toward his sharp cheeks. He moves his long brown hair from his face before cleaning himself off and standing. He glances at himself in the mirror, admiring his half-transitioned nude body before winking at himself. “Well, I’m glad you came by. I needed that.” He says, tucking his penis and testicles between his legs, attempting the aesthetic of female genitalia.
“Yeah, for sure. I never really thought of myself as sleeping with a woman, I’m gay, but I gotta say, I’m glad you convinced me.” Jeffrey says, now standing face to face with the box, staring at his reflection on its surface. Dylan chuckles as he walks back into the bedroom, swishing his hips awkwardly as he moves. He creeps up behind Jeffrey, seductively sliding his small, thin hands under his arms and interweaving them at his chest. He lays his head against the taller man’s back and kisses his skin softly. “I hope you don’t think we’re done yet. I still need to get off.” He says with a sly chuckle.
Jeffrey snickers, feeling Dylan slowly stiffening between his buttocks. “I might need a few minutes to recover, but that’s fine by me.” He responds quietly, leaning his head back as Dylan’s hand slides down his body, softly grabbing at his sex, though his eyes never leave the box. His curiosity getting the better of him, despite the small, soft hands massaging and lightly stroking his plushy member, he finally asks, “What’s this little cube?”
Caught off guard a bit, Dylan peeks out from behind him, his eyes following the taller man’s gaze. He laughs under his breath some before saying, “You’re about to fuck me again and you’re worried about a puzzle box?”
“Well...” Jeffrey’s words trail off.
Dylan laughs softly as he releases his grip. “It’s fine, I get it. Looks cool, right?”
Jeffrey nods as Dylan walks to the shelf and reaches up, grabbing the small puzzle box from its perch. “I bought it at an estate sale for like, twenty-five bucks. It was a huge mansion upstate, belonged to a rich couple who never had kids, and they just up and left without a trace one day, so the bank seized their home and sold everything.”
Jeffrey’s face scrunches in concern. “Do you normally buy missing people’s belongings?”
“I like to collect oddities— you should see the collection I have in my storage unit. I have a crew coming tomorrow morning to take a lot of this stuff and move it over there. Maybe I’ll show you one day.”
“That could be interesting.” Jeffrey begins, his eyes still gazing longingly at the box. “Can I see it?”
Dylan looks at him in half-annoyed amusement and, after a moment of thought, raises a sharp eyebrow. “On one condition.” He says, finally grabbing Jeffrey’s attention from the box. “That being?” He asks him. Dylan smirks, “Sit back on the bed while you try to solve it,” he says, his voice laced with his idea of seduction. Jeffrey agrees, taking the cube from his hands and sitting on the edge of the bed.
No sooner than when his bare butt touched the damp sheets of the bed, Jeffrey began to examine the puzzle box, running his fingers along its smooth surfaces, looking for any manner of groove or pressure point that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another. He doesn’t even notice as Dylan ties his hair back and slowly drops to his knees before him. Jeffrey turns and rotates the puzzles, gazing at his ever-distorting reflection in search of something, anything that would begin the puzzle's unfurling.
Dylan runs his hands up the insides of Jeffrey’s thighs, sending an erotic chill through his spine and pelvis before softly cupping his shriveled testicles and leaning forward. Jeffrey sighs in pleasure as he feels Dylan’s tongue slide up the seam of his scrotum before lifting the head of his penis into his gaping maw. The sodden warmth of Dylan's mouth redirects his blood flow downward as the slow build of stiffening arousal pulses through his genitals rhythmically. He gasps suddenly, though not in reaction to Dylan’s sucking on his stiffening member, but to the rotation of the puzzle’s flat dial.
It clicks as if pushing some inner mechanism into place, thus beginning the box’s first configuration toward solving. Dylan gags, forcing his head lower and swiveling his tongue with more primal fervor. His head bobs up and down as he suckles loudly, gagging and slobbering down Jeffrey’s thighs, and though his penis stands fully erect, throbbing with increasing ecstatic pleasure, his attention stays firm on the puzzle in his hand.
Encouraged by his former minute success, Jeffrey proceeds to toy with the box feverishly, quickly finding fresh alignments of fluted slots and oiled pegs, which in turn reveal further intricacies. With each solution and each new half-pull or twist, a further melodic element is brought into play. The tune of mechanisms, clicking and whirring into place, slots sliding and gears turning, develops into a hypnotic symphony as the initial caprice becomes lost in ornamentation.
At some point in his ornamentations, whether it's been minutes or hours, the ecstasy of Dylan’s deep oral pleasuring and the feverish excitement of nearing the puzzle's conclusion begin to intertwine. Jeffrey’s body ripples and sings as he is overcome with sensations both physical and mental. His carnal and cerebral journeys have come and in unison begin to reach their climax. He moans loudly as his penis throbs inside Dylan’s throat, drawing a smile from him. Dylan begins to move faster, deeper with every bob of his head, and the sensation overtakes Jeffrey completely.
The puzzle sits in his hand nearly complete, now an amalgamation of vertical slides that need only be pushed down to reach their final configuration. His body trembles and his back arches as his muscles clench and unwind, forcing his orgasm up from the depths of his loins. The pleasure fires through his body all at once, and in his orgasmic eruption, he pushes the puzzle box together, interlocking all of its slides into a single cube of new design. Something akin to an oddly angled star. A loud click sounds from the thing in his hands, but the sound falls on deaf ears.
Dylan gags and coughs, swallowing all that he can as he chuckles in accomplishment, noticing Jeffrey fall back flat onto the bed. His arm outstretched beside him as his chest heaves up and down, and his legs tremble. Jeffrey is numb to sensation, his mind scrambled, and his eyes blinded by the force of the orgasm that Dylan had thrust upon him. His ecstasy-fueled sensory deprivation is short-lived as, not moments later, a searing pain shoots through his arm and body, instantaneously ripping him from his sexual reverie.
He cries out, startling Dylan as he sits up, noticing exactly where this sharp pain has originated. His left hand holds the now completed box, and from within it, a curved blade so sharp that its tip is nearly invisible pierces through the palm of his hand. His blood stains the sheets, joining the rank mixture of bodily fluids there previous. Eyes widened and hands trembling, Jeffrey screams.
Startled and confused, Dylan jumps back, falling on his flat rear end. “What!? What happened?” He cries, his usually high-pitched voice now suddenly several octaves deeper. It doesn’t take long before he notices the wound.
“What the fuck is this thing?” Jeffrey screams, gripping the box harshly with his other hand. He pulls it, slicing the blade out of his hand and throwing it at the floor with a yell that is equal parts agony and anger. He stands quickly, Dylan watching in shock and disgust. “Get up! Come help me wrap this in the bath-” His words fall silent as both he and Dylan realize the unsettling events beginning to take place around them.
Jeffrey’s blood drips onto the floor, but it doesn’t pool beneath him; it instead flows like a thin river. It flows toward the box. As it makes contact, the blood rises through the small grooves, outlining the silver patterns across each of the box’s sides. The blade slowly retracts within the configuration, and cold chills ripple through the men’s bodies as the silver patterns begin to glow an electric blue.
The blood stops dripping from his hand, some droplets even freezing in mid-air. Jeffrey raises his hand in bewilderment, staring at the wound as it ceases to bleed. All the remaining blood on the floor slithers to the cubic star, and the droplets that once levitated in stasis, float to it as well. The cube absorbs all the blood, leaving no trace of it behind...and it begins.
The basement bedroom rattles with no more force than a small earthquake, and the dingy white grooves in the brick wall before them begin to release small wispy trails of smoke. “Dylan...” Jeffrey mutters, but Dylan is petrified in fear as he watches the smoking grooves begin to glow with the same vibrant blue as the etchings on the box. Though their minds scream at them to run, though every ounce of every fiber of their beings begs them to flee, the claws of their terror have rendered deep within them, cementing them in perfect stillness.
The bricks on the wall all begin to flip and rotate, moving outward from a single point at their center. The glowing blue becomes brighter as they move, creating a rectangular opening, a doorway. As it reveals itself more and more, blue flames whip out from beyond it, and the scent of vanilla fills the air. This sweet smell does little, however, to hide the horrific stench beneath it: sulfur, blood, and rot.
Tears fill Dylan’s wide and unblinking eyes, Jeffrey’s body trembles, and they stare as from beyond the flaming blue portal, something begins to take shape. A dark and shadowed figure, slender and tall, from the other side. As it draws closer, the sound of the moaning flames that conceal it gives way to another auditory sensation. The guttural cries of agony, the anguished and damned screams of torture.
They stare in shocked awe as the Cenobite steps gracefully into their realm. It’s an androgynous humanoid thing, tall and thin with no discernible features of either gender. Its skin is pale gray, and its eyes are black as pitch. Every inch of its head had been scarred into a grid, and at every intersecting point of horizontal and vertical, a jeweled pin had been pushed through flesh and skull. The clear, round tips of the pin glitter in the blue flame-like light, presenting almost a perverted halo.
Its clothes, some of which are sewn to and through its skin, are like a mockery of priestly robes. A long black cassock, made of leather, chains, and small hooks that pierced through to its pale skin. A similarly crafted apron of sorts rests below the waist, boasting all manner of rusty and bloodied apparatus that would find its place in the hands of only the most sadistic and skilled of torturers. The robes billow softly as it turns its sharply featured face toward the men.
Its attention then slowly moves to the box, which sits on the concrete floor just below it. It lifts its arm out, its hand palm down, and then, pulsing with hellish mysticism, the box levitates into its grasp. The Cenobite rotates a long index finger over the dial at the box’s center before pulling it apart, rotating it, and pressing it back together, effortlessly reconfiguring it back into its original cube shape.
“Jesus Christ!” Jeffrey cries.
“Not quite.”
Its voice is not at all as they had expected it to be, though in their terror, their minds hadn’t been able to conjure much of anything. Its voice is light and breathy, notably feminine, but undercut with a gravely pitched rasp. It examines both men closely for a moment before asking, “Why have you summoned me?”
Dylan stays silent as he trembles, prompting Jeffrey to scream “We didn’t summon you!” but the Cenobite only cocks its head slightly aside. Jeffrey screams as a hook tailed by a chain sinks into his wrist from the shadows. The chain pulls back, lifting his arm and exposing his punctured hand. He reaches for his wrist, gripping it tightly in agony.
“Your wound betrays your tongue.” The cenobite says flatly.
Jeffrey screams as he attempts to yank his arm away, but the hook has burrowed deep into bone. His other hand reaches for the chain, but it too is suddenly pierced and yanked aside by a hook and rattling chain. His scream is music to the Cenobite as he falls to his knees. It glides closer to him, releasing its hold on the box. The cube floats in the air for a moment before vanishing in blue flame, leaving behind only embers that float and fizzle into nothing before it reappears similarly back on the shelf.
“Why are you here!?” Jeffrey cries through his defeated and pathetic sobs.
“The box, you opened it, I came.” It replies.
“It’s just a puzzle box!”
“No. It is infinitely more.”
The Cenobite raises its hand, its middle and index fingers being the only two pointed, and the chains pull back and up even further, lifting Jeffrey from his knelt position. A pose he quite often liked until now. His feet dangle inches from the floor as several more chains slither from the dark, each one sinking into the exact spots where his ribs meet his sternum. The streaks of bright red blood race down his body and trickle from his feet to the ground.
Jeffrey begs and pleads, screaming “Mercy! Please! Let me go!” as the pain sears through his body. The Cenobite only gazes at him longingly, harshly replying, “No.”
Several more chain reveals themselves from behind him, zipping through the air as they come around his head. Two sink their hooks into his skull from beside his eyes, and two more slice into his open mouth, pulling back his cheeks, ripping them. The final two sink into his nostrils, piercing deep into the bone of his skull as all the chains pull back, stiffening and leaving no slack.
Jeffrey kicks his feet wildly in protest as he screams, his blood staining the floor in incoherent spatters. The Cenobite, this hellish priest, looks at him, the faintest illusion of pleasure crossing its emotionless face. “Still yourself,” it orders, and as if on command, more hooks and chains shred through the flesh and bone of his legs, pulling harshly and stilling them. Unable to move, Jeffrey hangs in the air, crying out in pain, and the Hell Priest observes him.
“Desire. Sensation. Pleasure. These you have sought endlessly.” The Hell Priest says as a swirling portal of blue flames opens on the floor beneath him and on the ceiling above him. From below, a particularly evil spiked chain rises like a charmed cobra, capped with a four-pronged hook of equally vile design. It slithers up, stilling itself, though for only a moment before striking upward at blinding speed.
The hook shreds through his anus, ripping him open to the back of his scrotum, which itself is hooked by another chain at the seam, covering the entirety of the inside of his thighs in deep red. He roars out in agony as the wicked hooked chain shreds through his rectum and begins to snake its way through his intestines, slicing and gashing them as it makes its way. The paleness of his belly’s skin reddens from his internal bleeding, and his screams of agony become gurgling coughs as the blood and bile rise to his throat.
From the swirling portal of blue flame above him, another chain, the twin of that that shreds his insides, lowers tauntingly. His bleeding blue eyes stare at it in woeful anticipation as it comes ever closer. A small hook rises up, piercing through his chin and pulling down, forcing open his large, wide mouth. The ceiling hook enters his gaping maw, slithering its way down his throat, ripping and goring his esophagus as it squeezes into his gut.
Jeffrey’s body convulses in his suffering, his mouth pouring over in blood. Rose-red tears stream down his cheeks as his icy blue eyes stare at the demon before him, gleaming with terror and torment. Still, its expression hasn’t faltered in the slightest, and it finally finishes its earlier sentence.
“I bring them to you.”
It quickly flicks its two raised fingers downward, and on command, the chains rip Jeffrey apart. His flesh is torn from his body, and his insides are ripped and shredded out of existence. His skull is ripped open, being made to resemble a freshly bloomed hibiscus of gore. The explosion that is caused by the chains violently yanking away sprays the basement in the remnants of Jeffrey’s bloody annihilation, covering the walls and floors in his viscera. All that remains is the bloodied swaying chain, and at the center of it all is a fleshy and limbless skeleton, with both the top and bottom chains tangled together inside of it, dripping in chunks of intestinal muscle and tissue.
Dylan at last lets out an ear-piercing screech of terror as everything hits him at once, both figuratively and literally. He scatters backward, colliding with the wall in an attempt at escape. The Cenobite looks at him languidly. He pulls himself up, scraping his fingers and nails against the wall in search of the door, but to his dismay and horror, it is fused into the wall itself. There is no escape.
Dread courses through his body at the realization that he is trapped in here with that demon. His blood-soaked skin ripples in gooseflesh as he can feel its presence draw closer. His lips quiver and tears roll down his surgically raised cheekbones as he turns around in no hurry. It stands just a few feet away from him, seeming to slowly glide closer.
“Please....” Dylan whimpers pathetically.
The Hell Priest observes him emotionlessly as it comes to a halt. “What is it that you desire?” It asks, its voice softer than before. Dylan trembles, his vision blurred and red, but he can still see the shape of this monster. “I just want to leave...” He cries.
“No.” The Hell Priest says to him. “You desire...transformation.”
Dylan’s body shakes uncontrollably as it glides closer to him, its black leather robes flapping at its feet. “Wipe the blood from your eyes, see me fully.” It commands, and without hesitation, Dylan obliges. Seeing the creature more clearly, Dylan’s dread strikes even deeper within him.
“You desire transformation.” The Cenobite repeats. Dylan only nods slowly in response. A moment of silence passes between them before it says, “I will bestow upon you that which you desire. I will gift you...transformation.” Its words are cold and calculated.
Dylan shakes his head, crying as he silently pleads, but his fate has been sealed. The ground rumbles softly as behind him, blue embers swirl along the ground that grow into flames, and from within them a dark pillar of salt rises. Before he can even realize it, his body is pierced by hooks and chains from all directions. He screams out in agony, urinating on himself in terror. The chains lift him off the ground, and with another flick of the Hell Priest’s fingers, they pull him back, constricting around his body and holding him firmly against the pillar.
His blood trickles down its surface, seeping through the links of the chains that hold him in place. His body throbs in pain from the impact and stings from the punctures of the dozens of hooks. Two smaller chains reach down, piercing through his finely plucked brows and pulling his head back, exposing his neck. He sobs as the Hell Priest comes before him.
Once again, it raises its hand, pointing only its middle and index fingers at the bottom of his neck. It methodically moves its fingers in a straight upward line through the air, and Dylan’s body shakes in pain as the skin of his neck slits up the middle— as if sliced by an invisible and precise blade. Small threads of blood trickle from within the cut, and Dylan cries out. Two small chains come from the darkness on either side of him, crossing each other as the chain from the right sinks into the skin on the left of his slit, and the chain from the left sinks into the right of it.
“I don’t want to die...” Dylan whimpers.
“Death is mercy.” It replies sinisterly.
The chains both pull back, uncrossing themselves and ripping open the gash to expose his throat. He screams, his exposed and bloody esophagus visibly expanding and contracting. The Hell priest reaches its hand to the top of its head and pulls out a long pin that gleams red at its tip. As the pin is removed, another rises in its place. Dylan watches in fear as the Hell Priest holds the pin in front of it.
It opens its hand palm up, and the pin levitates effortlessly. It glows blue before separating into two identical copies of itself. Their sharply pointed tips angle toward Dylan, and with agonizing slowness, they float forward. The pins slowly press into the flaps of separated skin on either side of Dylan’s exposed throat, pushing through the flesh and muscle until they are fully pinned through his neck and into his trachea, effectively holding his wound open as the two small chains pull back into obscurity.
Dylan screams and cries at the pain, but The Cenobite is far from finished with him. “In the labyrinth, I will create your true self.” The Cenobite says as blue flames begin to swirl around them, growing bigger with every passing moment. “You’re a demon!” Dylan cries. As the azure flames consume the small basement, the Hell Priest replies, “Demons become angels to some.”
Dylan’s screams, though loud and agonizing, fade into silence as the flames subside and they are gone.
