The Haunter of the Threshold Read Online Free PDF Page B

cross-eyed as it desperately humped, yet in the middle of the process one man dragged a cotton sack over her head and then—
    Whiiiiiizzzzzzz
    —the sack grew saturated. Hazel knew that one of them had urinated on the sack, and the sequent moisture made it nearly impossible to breathe through the fabric. Meanwhile, the dog humped on and on, that pink bone darting in and out, and as Hazel’s consciousness began fading to black, she thought, They’re going to smother me to death while I’m being fucked by a dog, and it was during the instant that this thought crossed her mind, her loins began to quake in a series of powerful orgasmic spasms. Every muscle in her body drew taut from the cannonade of gusting pleasure...
    Moments before she would surely suffocate, the sack was yanked off her head. She sucked in breath while at the same time sensing the dog’s hot, watery release. Hazel sighed from the exhausting satisfaction.
    Suddenly the men’s voices could be heard, like a mute button being switched off. “Keep her devil’s slit upward, brothers. It mustn’t spill out.”
    “T’is no transgression to defile one who blasphemes against God.”
    “Christian soldiers, let’s be about it! String her up!”
    Pulleys keened after loops were slipped around her ankles and she was suddenly being hoisted upside-down in the air.
    “This ungodly harlot needs to die full of the cur’s jism...”
    The ropes were tied off, leaving Hazel suspended. Upside-down, she watched the men leave the barn, but even in the horror of this trauma, every nerve still buzzed from the delicious orgasm.
    “Hazel, my child,” came a soft, echoic voice.
    It had come from above. Squinting, she looked up into the loft-platforms past the network of rafters. From the lower lofts, squashed, indescribable faces peered down, fang-mouthed, snake-tongued, and gibbering in delight at what had been done to her. Demons, she thought, because some of them had horns in their heads.
    “Hazel, I adjure you...”
    It was from the highest loft that the clement voice issued, and it was not the face of a demon she saw speaking to her. It was a long-haired, bearded man whose eyes radiated a strange and pristine peace.
    “Hazel, child of God. Come back. I adjure you.”
    Save me, she thought and reached up to him, but as she did so, the cross hanging about her neck slipped off her head and fell to the dirt below.

    Hazel woke up as if at a pistol shot, and after a moment of shifting awareness, she covered her face with her hands and thought, Sick, sick, sick...
    Then she jerked up in bed and shuddered.
    “I’m sick,” she whispered aloud, and when she did so she glimpsed her reflection in the mirror above the dresser and thought of The Scream by Edvard Munch. If any other woman had a dream like that, they’d throw up, she thought. But me? I’m turned on like a light. It was bleak times like this that Hazel realized no amount of rationalization or liberal shrink-talk could sway the truth. Last night when she’d snidely told Ashton that she wasn’t sick, just highly sexualized, she knew she was lying. She was obsessed— titillated —by fantasies of defilement, debasement, and all manner of rape. It’s not right. It’s all I think about...
    Well, not quite all.
    I think about Sonia, too. A lot. And these thoughts carried with them no taint of the rough and seamy fantasies that so occupied her id. Somehow, Sonia was the floodgate. Hazel’s secret love for the older woman burned so acutely that her subconscious punished her in the knowledge that that love could never be returned. Her love for Sonia Heald couldn’t have been more crystalline, nor more beautiful...but then the floodgates opened like a sewer line piped directly into the midst of her soul. If I can’t have Sonia, then fate force-feeds me filth, she knew.
    Why?
    She deliberately blanked her mind as she readied herself, then dressed in shorts, a tank top, and fluorescent-orange flipflops. This was