The Crone-Maiden

One of eleven surviving short stories/novellas I wrote in a roughly five-year period (2004-2008).

This is a prime example of the junk I was producing at the time. I had recently discovered Lovecraft and immediately took to emulating his style. Or trying to emulate; I was a sixth-rate hack, plain and simple, using my small vocabulary of big words to prop up subpar writing. The sex-negativity is also strong with this one; another distasteful quality of my writing which I've thankfully overcome. Plus a bonus demerit for "hauntingly sensual pseudo-Teutonic"; this prose is so purple it's bruised. 😬

Original spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, omissions, and alterations have been preserved for your reading pleasure.

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There are many universes parallel to our own. Each of these universes is very much like ours, but each one differs in ways either subtle or profound. In a myriad of realities exists worlds counterpart to our Earth, orbiting a sun or suns, often populated with humans (or human subspecies). On a number of planes, including that of our world, sci-ence holds sway; and the forces of magic are oppressed, kept in states of ineptitude and relative impotence. On others, though, the reverse is true.

The quantum universe the Crone-Maiden calls home is one such world.

Born originally from the same progenitor universe ours ultimately ties its origins to, this alternate Earth possesses the exact principals which govern our continuum; yet history there is widely divergent from our own, and the languages and cultures known to us have no counter-parts there. It is a technologically degraded society, dominated by feudalism, and the rise in atheism and rationalism has turned many of the spiritually hungry toward nature worship and self-denial.

You may now ask how I know of the existance of this universe, and the details of. Let it be said that there are many special projects sanctioned by the United States Government, the existance of which remains intentionally undisclosed to the general public. The project I was assigned to dealt with experiments involving wormholes and the manipulation of the fabric of spacetime. In on particular experiment, there was a horrific accident, killing many scientists, and depositing me into a rip in spacetime.

In the blink of an eye, travelling faster than the speed of light without truly travelling faster than the speed of light, I took an extradimensional trip sideways through time.

I landed in a fiflthy bog pond located with a dark bower on the far side of the world. The journey had left me disoriented and nauseous, and the birth into this world had been turbulent; thus, I slipped into semi consciousness. I pitifully flailed my arms about as liquid slip over my fingertips, and water entered my lungs. Just as my vision was obscured, I glimpsed a hazey white mirage located within the treeline beyond the pool's shore. I sank forever, and the murrky brown-green around me went red, then black, as I felt a nearly indiscernible touch on my hand.

Somehow

Somehow,  I had not died. When I awoke, I found myself dry before a popping and snapping camp fire, laying amongst the trees, yards from the pond I had landed in. And I was not alone. Before me, on the opposite side of the orange blaze, stood a woman. I started, and scrambled back-ward a number of inches.

She stood there unmoving, her gaze upon me. She was a tall, young woman with an appearance of twenty-six years of age. She possessed striking Scandainavian features: long, straight blonde hair encircling a face with high cheekbones and flowing down over slender shoulders, while piercing eyes of ice stood under near invisible eyebrows and over a straight Nordic nose, which in turn was stationed above a pair of full pink lips; her skin, which possessed a glow originating not from the flames, was pale, a soft peach which gave brillance to the white volumous robe she wore over her body.

Her facial features lacked expression, yet her eyes stabbed with a ra-venous hunger. With a swift, effortless move she unfastened her obscuring robe, drawing it open and exposing me completely to me her naked body.

I gasped. Naturally, I would have turned away, pled to her to redress. Yet at that moment I was entranced, frozen, and suddenly aroused.

She was voluptous, all firm curves. Her body was flawless, her taut breasts and buttocks shaped and proportioned perfectly — neither too large nor too small. Her entire body below the neck was lacking altogether in body hair. Her radiant skin had a exotic shine to it, as if having been anointed with oils. Her robe hung loose and hanging from her arms, in a single lithe movement she glided toward me, lowering herself to the grass.

Lay with me, she drawled in a husky, seductive voice. The voice had not issued from her lips to my ears, but from her mind to mine.

She removed my clothes as swiftly as she had her own, and thrust her body against mine; my erect organ penetrated her smooth, shaven, tight, orifice. She uttered a moan of ecstasy, a true moan, not one of tele-pathic origin. I ran my hands over her smooth, hairless body, fondling her firm bosom and posterior. We melted together, and she brought her robe up and over us, hiding our sex from the outside world. I cannot say how long we coupled. When we climaxed, she withdrew from me, a smile on her perfect lips.

We have shared each other. You are mine.

With those words suddenly came an influx of images, thoughts, memories. As I grew aware onf the gravity presented within these uploaded items of data, a horrendous dread seized me.

This is what I quickly learned to be the truth of this hauntingly sensual pseudo-Teutonic. Hundreds of years into the past of this universe separate from mine, this girl had once been human, an innocent daughter to a pair of kindly peasants until she had been seduced by a darkly hand-some man from outside her home village, a reputed sorceror who dabled in the black arts. He awoke in her heart lust, and stole from her her chas-tity and virginity; feuled by evil, she willingly devoted herself to her immortal lover and his diabolical practices, sacrificing her own parents upon a stone altar in his honour. They stayed in the village of her birth; in time, they came to be feared, and reproachable , their house avoided by all.

As the years went by, the townspeoples' hatred for the two demon-worshippers grew in potency. Though they had engaged in the most profane acts of inter-course, they had been unable to spawn any progeny. In order to fulfill their desire to pass  their knowledge on to a younger generation (as well as for the ritual sacrifices they observed on a monthly basis) sthey had begun to steal into the homes of parents, and kidnap their little ones. Finally, after finallu retrieving evidence that directly connected the two magicians with the missing children, a murderous mob organised, and came in a wave to their cottage weilding farming tools and flaming torches.

They forced their way into the dwelling, overturning tables cluttered with obscene objects and shelves stacked with tomes covered in obscure characters and frightful covers. They beat down the two lovers, then dragged them out in the open and into an animal cage. The riot forced open the basement door, where they found children, and the remains of children, huddled together in piles upon the stone floor covered in filth. The two criminals were given not any trial, but were instead led out into the forest depths by wagon, where their cage was ultimately unloaded. The carriage departed, and they were left to die within under the dark canopy of trees.

The sorceror eventually died, from hunger and thirst; what became of the girl, I could not positively identify from the content I had absorbed, but I do know that in the wake of her husband's death, an unquenchable hatred arose with her, as did an undying addiction for vengeance. She embraced completely the powers of the dark side, was transformed, and in doing so lost any humanity that had remained in her after her slaying of her own parents. She became a living corpse, forever immortal and youthful, yet bound to the forest wherein her partner had met his end; if ever she were to cross beyond the trees of the woods, she would immediatly age and die. She was unable to return to the village, unable to exact her revenge.

In time, she escaped the cage that had been her prison, and continued to develop her black magic. She knew she could not go to them, but, how-ever, they could come to her. A plan began to form.

She began a daily pattern in where she would build a large fire at the mouth of a cave she had located and begun to dwell within, the idea to attract any passersby within the forest in search of passible shelter. A year had passed since her lover's demise when she encountered her first wayward traveller, a homely young male amateur cartographer. She beck-oned to him telepathically, inviting him into the foul depths of the cave which smelled of rodecaying flesh and mould, where she seduced and lay with him, enslaving him forever.

This procedure would commence anytime she encountered a man capable of intercourse. For years since her transformation, she would on occassion encounter vagabonds, exiles, disgraced and dejected theives, Sodomites, adulterers, murrderers, etc. Weakening their minds with her abilities and seducing them with promises of pleasure or power, she would have sex with them, and hold them for many dawys, until their essence was spent and they became living corpses as she was; their minds would remain active, but they would have no control over their own bodies, which were commanded only by her to do one thing: bring living men to her, to increase the numbers of her minions and take her revenge against the members of the living.

Tales of the living dead girl and her cadaverous servants, as relayed from escapees who had managed to avoid the fate of those undead forest-dwellers, begun to circulate amongst the villages and towns nearest to the forest. They came to know this undead and undying witch as the Crone-Maiden, as she was as ancient as she was youthful.

I returned to reality as a sigh of satisfaction, a true vocalised one, escaped her lips. She rose to her feet, pulling her robe back into place and tying it shut, hiding her body once again within the sexless robe. I lay there, frozen and naked, breathing heavily from the sex and the terror that came with my newfound information.

"You — you used me!" I stuttered, excstatic. "Took advantage —"

I merely released your inhibitions and gave you what you would have wanted, she thought. Your essence is spent for now, but in time you will be replenished, and we will experience each other once more.

And that is when my mind snapped. In a fraction of a second, I went from sane to frightened to completely and incurably insane. My throat tore as a frightful amnimal howl escaped, and I was up and off before the pleased smile of my tormentor could vanish. All I could think of was my likely fate, and knew death was my only escape. I ran headlong back to the stagnant swamp pool, diving into the water and algae, fighting downward to the bottom, in hopes of drowning myself; as the liguid, I felt the slender but strong arms of the Crone-Maiden encircle me, attempting to haul me up and back to dry land.

Suddenly, I was elsewhere. I was still wet, but layed out upon a plat-form of titanium steel, not floundereing in filthy water. I was semi-conscious and full of nausea, yet I could make out dark shadows, damaged machinery, and smouldering corpses. Above and around me stood the forms of scientists in white loaboratory coats; all wore, as near as I could tell, fearful and concerned expressions upon their faces.

"Sturrmer!" one obscurre visage uttered, his or her voice distorting as I slipped out of the conscious world. "What happened? Where did you..."

The voice faded. Just as darkness overcame me, I turned over on my side; as I did so, a brittle, grey skeleton, clad in a white robe, came apart over me and scattered around the platform in pieces.

It would seem that the rip in spacetime that we had created had remained open after the initial incident, and had not sealded shut after I had passed through into the alternate reality. When I had raced back into the pond in search of death, I had stumbled into the rip which had originally brought me there, and returned to my familar world. It would seem that as the Crone-Maiden had caught me, she as well had gone through to the portal. As she was bound by magic to the forest, when she left her entire universe for mine, she aged rapidly and was nothing more than bones when we arrived. The author-ities never did learn about the nature of the female skeleton, or where I had gone; the rip had never closed, so the goverment cancelled the project, and had the base closed down and put under heavy guard.

As for myself, I never did recover. I am as mad now as I was mad then. For you see, although the Crone-Maiden's physical form had ceased to function, she was not dead! My initial ramblings upon regaining consciousness after my return led me to my comitmittal to an insane asylum. I was put in straight jacket and padded cell to in order to protect me from myself, yet nothing could protect my dreams from her visitations! My first night there, I was visited by the Crone-Maiden within my troubled nightmares, where she slept with me again, and has been doing ever since; she is as beautiful as she was in life, and as pleasurable.

But now she tells me that she tires of incorpereal existence and incorporeal lovemaking! She desires to dwell within the natural world again, to have intercourse with live flesh!

Now, at this moment, I hear the sound of the door of the padded cell unlockeing; and watch as it swings inward. In steps a woman in a white nurse's uniform. She closes the door, locks it, and turns to me. She is visibly dissimiliar from the Crone-Maiden I remember, a Latino with long black hair, brown eyes, and an olive complexion; yet she is tall, and as alluring.

"I just want to say," she uttered, as she began to unbutton her dress. "I never planned to absorb you into the ranks of my living dead slaves. You are not of the stock that killed my husband and dis-graced me, thus you were never subject to my venegence. You were meant to be my new bridegroom, and I was to place within you eternal life. You and I would have ruled the forests together, and took of the flesh of the living together. Now that cannot be. But I can still give you solice, some comfort to make the rest of your life in imprisonment somewhat easier. Do not worry, my love, I will visit you often, and give you vast pleasure until the day you die."

She pulled open her uniform, exposing a smooth, shiny voluptous body of firm curves and hairless features. She left the white clothing drop to the padded floor.

I scream now, as she comes to me, forcing my pants down, my mind shattering further, thankfully, into animal nonsenttience.

The End