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Category: Dark Fantasy/Horror
Description: Black magician Mason Thurlow had survived vampires, zombies, the police and the army, not to mention enraged enraged mobs. Now he has a fool-proof plan for subjugating the Earth and delivering it up to his Dark Lord, Satan. "This time, he would concentrate on the upper classes, using the high-and-mighty Reverend Marsden to introduce him to society, the wealthy, the powerful, the influential. He would become one of them, a gentleman of means, wealthy in his own right and fit to associate with those who held the reins in this colony. Then he would gradually change them, turn them from their Christian ways using cunning and subtlety, until all were willing to follow his lead down the path to Darkness. This time, he would harvest souls worth taking, souls that would please the Dark Lord and bring greater power and wealth to himself in return." All he needs is a few willing women to participate in his bdsm-themed sexual rituals, and some new zombies. He will also need a lot of luck, for the vampires haven't given up and the police are much closer than Thurlow thinks. But most deadly of all is the woman he will come to know as the Black Widow. To gain Satan's favor, she will match him evil for evil - and more.
eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books,
eBookwise Release Date: July 2012

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [246 KB]
Words: 54099
Reading time: 154-216 min.

'Because I have no soul

I come to rule this world of Man.

Heaven cannot stop me;

And Hell but look on in admiration'

-- Mason Thurlow

CHAPTER ONE

January 9th; 1828: She crouched over his sweating body, her long blonde hair trailing over his thighs, tickling the skin and causing him to groan in ecstasy as his hands reached for her.

Her mouth moved down and up in an endless motion. He groaned again, louder this time, and she withdrew, straddling his thighs. As she began to rock back and forth, her hair swaying across his face, he threw his head back, his body becoming hard, rigid, as the ecstasy took him.

Seizing her by the hips, he rolled her over onto her back, and began thrusting violently back and forth, grunting with the exertion, sweat breaking anew on his skin.

She cried out into the night, a cry of pleasure and pain...

Suddenly he collapsed face-down beside her. Her left hand reached beneath the mattress at the edge of the bed, took hold of a long, thin flexible wire cord, and brought it up onto the bed beside her.

After a while, the man slept, snoring loudly, and the woman gently and carefully passed the cord beneath his throat and brought both ends up at either side of his neck. Moving swiftly now, she straddled his back, pulling both ends of the wire taut. Her biceps bulged as she put all her force into the wire.

Her victim awoke, began to struggle, and tried to reach behind to grasp the woman's wrist and pull the constricting cord away from his throat. She leaned back as if in the saddle, applied even more force, then gave a sudden left-right motion to the wire. It cut through the flesh of his throat and severed the neck all the way back to the spinal cord Blood spilled onto the pillow.

The woman lay for a while beside the corpse. Then she pushed him from the bed, stepped over his inert form, and went into the bathroom, where she washed herself in cold water from head to foot.

She dressed, took up her handbag, sat before the mirror on the dresser and repaired her makeup, then left the room, locking the door behind her.

Walking unhurriedly along Pitt Street, she reached the back door of one of Sydney's more upper-class hotels, let herself in, and went upstairs to the master suite. She stripped off her clothes and lay on the sheets, enjoying the luxury of giving herself the pleasure she so recently found in the arms of the man she met in a bar two hours earlier.

When her breathing returned to normal, she turned over, hugged a pillow to her breast, and fell asleep.

At the same time as the woman was shrieking her ecstasy into the night in the arms of her latest victim, a long black ship glided slowly up the harbour and came alongside at Circular Quay. Two crewmen jumped down from the deck, tied her fore and aft, and a gangway was lowered, its further end resting on the wooden planking of the quay.

Mason Thurlow stepped onto the dock, gazed disinterestedly at the numerous crates, boxes, and bales piled about the doorways to two massive storage sheds, and walked through the wooden wicket gate and out onto the wide roadway. He stood gazing up at the clear skies, the absence of cloud, and feeling the soft breeze touching his face for a moment, then found a sleepy-eyed hansom driver, boarded, and gave the instruction: "Drive me around this fair city of yours." At sea almost two years, he tasted white flesh only once, when he came across a group of castaways on an island in the Arafura Sea. For the remainder of the voyage around the South Sea Islands, his fare was native flesh, taken when and where it was available.

As for the unfortunate group of castaways, Thurlow went ashore friendly and helpful, taking them food they'd not eaten for many months, and slept with them there on the beach. When certain all were sleeping, he took the fittest-looking of the group, wrapped one gigantic hand around his throat, and when the final choking gurgle of sound issued from the man's mouth, drove his stiffened fingers into the midriff, ripped out the liver, and ate it there on the beach.

When the castaways awoke, their rescue ship was gone, a pile of food sat just above the high-tide mark on the sandy beach, and one of their companions was dead.

Thurlow felt no guilt over the murder of this unfortunate individual: it was simply a matter of opportunity thrown his way, and he took it. That the castaways might die alone on this forsaken beach did not enter his thinking. They were mere fodder, provided at a time when he was hungry, and so he dined.

The city changed during his absence. Now home to a population of more than ten thousand souls, it boasted hotels, hansom cabs, shops, some known by the title 'Emporium,' and more streets than he remembered.

Industries established themselves, black smoke pouring into the atmosphere from factories and workshops not present twenty years ago.

And the population was swelled to thirty five thousand.

Thurlow walked the streets in the dark, feeling the heat on his skin yet attracted by bolts of lightning flashing across the sky at great distances, lighting up the night for a brief instant then returning it to the blackness ruling it.

He strode the wide roadways, ignoring the few people he met along the way, above them and yet part of them, seeking the one being to whom his superhuman senses would guide him.

A young man crossed his path at the junction of Bridge Street and Pitt Street, weaving unsteadily on his feet, the garbled words of a song trickling from numbed lips. Thurlow turned and followed the solitary figure, remaining at a distance until a narrow laneway loomed up on his left. Immediately he increased his pace, drawing abreast of the stranger quickly, coming out of the night at such a pace the young man was left no defence.

Two strong hands seized him by the coat-front, hauled him headlong into the darkness and filth of that narrow causeway between one street and the next, and a hard fist slammed into his midriff, dropping the figure to its knees in the grime and detritus of the city.

As he doubled over on his back clutching his middle, Thurlow knelt beside him, forced the hands away from the stomach, and drove the stiffened fingers of the right hand straight down, like the blade of a dagger, penetrating flesh, and continuing on through to the soft tissue beneath.

The hand opened, found the liver, and ripped it from the body as the young man gasped in the grip of a pain he did not believe possible. Blood spilled into the abdominal cavity, and he died even as Thurlow brought the warm organ to his lips and began to devour it.

When he was finished, he wiped his face and hands on the clothing worn by the now-stilled corpse, and rose to his feet, glanced quickly around, then left the deserted alleyway to continue his hunt further out of town.

Two constables passed him, truncheons swinging from clenched fists, minds engaged in a conversation Thurlow was not interested in overhearing -- a modernising change from the uniforms of the so-called Rum Corps patrolling the streets two decades ago after the erring and misunderstood Governor William Bligh was removed from his post.

In minutes, the tall man's long pace left the heart of the city behind, moving out into the area where the first buildings of Sydney University poked their sandstone spires upwards, reaching for the heavens. He moved on up City Road, coming to the suburb of Enmore, where tenements, shacks, and lean-to panels of corrugated iron sheltered the less fortunate from the weather.

As the blood of the young man flowed through Thurlow's veins, he felt a new strength within himself, a zest for life, absent for so long, and actively began searching for a second victim, shortening his stride and gazing into each face he passed, his thirst becoming a craving not to be denied.

A woman who might have been eighteen years of age but was worn down by the roughness, callousness, and brutality of the life she led loomed out of a doorway, a thin chemise wrapped around her thin body. She smiled at him, a gap-toothed grin meant to convey sexuality, lust, all the things a man on the street at night might be seeking, and he stopped.

"How much?" he asked, and the woman held up two fingers: "Two shillin's, luv."

He dug a gold coin from his pocket and allowed the moonlight to flash off its surface, noting the hunger in the eyes of the female.

"Luv, that'll buy yer the night," and a hand took him by the arm and led him in through the open doorway and up a flight of narrow stairs lit by a red lantern.

He followed her into a room dominated by a huge double bed from a long-ago age, its sheets torn and wrinkled, stains discolouring the material from the activities of many men before him.

The chemise dropped to the floor and the thin body stretched out on the bed, legs apart. Thurlow knelt beside her, smiled into her eyes, and drove his fingers down and into the belly.

She gasped, tried to cry out, but the pain of the organ being ripped from her body silenced her, caused her eyes to fly wide open, the mouth to gape, and Thurlow watched interestedly as the glow of life faded slowly from the eyes and the head fell back on the pillow.

He sat on the edge of the bed and ate, taking his time, knowing no person would disturb them now. Morsel by morsel he swallowed the warm tissue, the blood running down over his chin and dripping onto the floor at his feet.

Moving to a night-stand on the opposite side of the bed, he doused his face in the filthy water floating there, then scrubbed his hands, found a nail-brush on the floor and worked it beneath his fingernails, then reached for the pillow beneath her head and wiped his hands and face.

He tossed the gold coin on the foot of the bed, grinned at the dead face, and left the room to make his way back down to the street level.

Replete now, he took his time making his way back through the sleeping city and down to the wharf where the 'Black Orchid' awaited the coming of her master.