The Kundalini Ritual

(written with Peter Tennant) [Published in Sackcloth & Ashes #2]

It was late afternoon when Tamara returned from the crematorium with her husband's ashes in a cheap ceramic urn. Fabian was waiting for her, a look of anxiety on his face.
'Everything go okay?'
Tamara nodded. She gave him the urn to hold while she removed her coat and hung it in on one of the hooks in the hallway. Underneath she was naked, except for a suspender belt and black stockings. She smiled, imagining the outrage of the po-faced crematorium director if he had known. It was the sort of joke Jonathan would have appreciated.
Fabian held the urn up to the light and studied it, like an antique dealer looking for a flaw in a valuable objet d'art.
'Poor Jonathan,' he said. 'So big and powerful in life, and now this. How the mighty are fallen.'
Tamara shrugged. Something in his voice made her feel uneasy. Fabian had always been jealous of Jonathan's power, felt that he existed in the older man's shadow. There were moments when she wondered if his attraction to her was genuine or simply arose out of the fact that she was Jonathan's wife. Much of the appeal of The Kundalini Ritual for Fabian lay in the fact that Jonathan had never dared to attempt it, had always warned his disciples that it was too dangerous, even though it might have saved his life.
'I need a drink.'
'The bottle's in the drawing room,' said Fabian. 'I'll go up and finish getting things ready. Join me when you're done.'
Tamara nodded and made her way down the hall to the drawing room. The bottle stood on the china cabinet next to the big picture window, sunlight making the occult symbols on its side glisten. She picked it up and raised the neck to her mouth, sucking greedily at the liquid it contained, an infusion of holy water stolen from the local church, mixed with lime cordial, menstrual blood and little known herbs with exotic names that Jonathan had brought over from Hong Kong. It felt hot and sticky in her throat, but like a lump of ice as soon as it was buried in her gut. For three days, in preparation for the ritual, she and Fabian had consumed nothing else.
She put down the bottle and sat on the couch, kicking off her shoes. Slowly she removed the stockings and suspender belt, stretching out, completely naked. Her stomach ached with hunger and her head felt light. The elixir seemed to slosh about inside her with every move that she made. She waited until the need to piss became a screaming demand.
Then she went up to Fabian.

The big room on the third floor of the house had been created by knocking down walls and merging several rooms into one. The lodge used it as their ceremonial chamber. The walls were draped in black silk and occult symbols had been painted on the floor, while thick candles set in brass sconces provided a flickering light and filled the room with their heady scent.
On a marble pedestal at the far end of the room stood the altar, a slab of black volcanic rock that had been cut in the shape of a circle with a hole at its centre, a crude representation of the vulva, in Hindu religion symbolic of the yoni or female principle. Jonathan had discovered the altar in a temple dedicated to Kali on one of his journeys to the Indian sub-continent and had acquired it at great expense and by means of dubious legality. He had claimed that the primitive hieroglyphs carved into the altar's side pre-dated Hinduism. The altar always made Tamara feel uneasy; it seemed to shimmer darkly with a power of its own and exude a palpable air of menace. She was glad that it would not play an important role in the ritual they were about to undertake.
The room felt empty and vast, like an aircraft hanger. Normally it would be packed with people, all thirteen full members of the lodge and their acolytes, but tonight there were only the two of them. The others would have tried to prevent what they were about to do.
Fabian stood in front of the altar, chanting words she did not recognise, the sound of his speech primitive and guttural. Like her he was naked. His voice reached a new pitch and then he fell silent. He turned and walked towards her. In one hand he held the urn and in the other a silver strigil, its curved blade gleaming with blood. There were red lines on his chest and belly where he had cut himself. Tamara took the strigil and gashed her own breasts and stomach, insensible to the pain.
'Anoint me,' said Fabian.
He knelt at her feet, face raised in expectation and body tilted back. Tamara opened her legs and straddled him, pressing her vulva up against his chest. She pissed on him, a thick yellow stream gushing out of her, pungent with the distinctive aroma of the elixir she had consumed, washing down over his chest and belly, coating his crotch and upper legs. Sighing he fell back until he was laying on the floor and she stood over him, still pissing, her urine soaking his face and every part of his body, until finally she had nothing more to offer.
Fabian clambered to his feet and Tamara knelt to be anointed in her turn. He pissed on her, his stream as thick and full as yellow strands of rope, the warm liquid splashing over her face and breasts, trickling down between her thighs, the rich scent of it filling her nostrils and making her head feel giddy.
Usually the lodge's magic ceremonies were elaborate affairs, mannered and aesthetically appealing, almost effete in their minute observance of detail. There was something more primitive and raw about The Kundalini Ritual, a power latent in its very brutality. Tamara felt her self-control slipping away as she surrendered herself to the demands of the ceremony and a sense of intoxication filled her head.
Chanting Fabian opened the urn and scattered Jonathan's ashes on the floor. He fell to the ground. The two of them rolled over and over, grey flecks adhering to their wet bodies until they looked like the victims of some hideous leprous growth. They stood up and danced facing each other, stamping their feet hard on the ground, every impact jarring their bodies. Fabian lay on the floor at her feet and Tamara trampled on him, her bare heels drumming against his chest and belly. He snorted and threw her off, like a rodeo stallion tossing its rider. They went at each other in a fury, insensible of what they were doing, biting and kicking and scratching, blood and sweat, urine and ash all mingling. Fabian forced her to the ground and took her from behind, nails gouging into the flesh of her flanks and drawing blood, his penis sucked into her sopping wet cunt. He came almost at once, thrusting deep inside of her, propelling a great wad of sperm and ash residue into the cavity of her womb. Tamara screamed until her throat felt raw.
The room fell silent, except for the laboured sound of their breathing. Fabian flopped to the floor in an exhausted heap, his wet body gleaming and the lingering traces of Jonathan's ashes spread all over his skin, making it look as if he had bathed in some weird charred substance. On her knees, Tamara studied him, her eyes drawn to his penis which still stood proudly upright, full of masculine power and beauty. Their union had been so intense, so incredibly savage, and yet more enjoyable than she had ever imagined it could be. She felt completely sated.
'How long do you think it will take?' asked Fabian, his breathing still ragged and irregular.
Tamara shook her head. 'I've no idea.'
There was no guarantee that anything actually would happen. The ritual might not have worked, but if it did the benefits would be incalculable. All magic ceremonies were performed at great cost to the magician; they drained him of spiritual energy. Jonathan, perhaps the greatest magician of the age, had died at only forty one, his body that of a man much older, ravaged by a cancer that had eaten him from the inside. By performing the forbidden Kundalini Ritual, Fabian hoped to avoid such a fate for himself. For centuries magicians had used the techniques of tantric yoga to delay orgasm and harness the latent power of the libido for their conjurations. The little known Kundalini Ritual acted as a short cut to such power, a sort of psychic circuit breaker. If successful they would tap into a virtually inexhaustible supply of spiritual energy and Fabian's position as Jonathan's heir and head of the lodge would be assured.
Now that she was no longer caught up in the throes of lust Tamara found the stench of urine offensive and wrinkled her nostrils in distaste. She looked around, her gaze drawn to the altar. The hieroglyphs carved into its side seemed to be alive with a red glow, as if they had been painted over with fresh blood. She shifted uneasily, disturbed by the unexpected sight. Jonathan had always warned them that The Kundalini Ritual was too dangerous, but Fabian had refused to believe him. For the first time she wondered if they had made an error of judgement.
'Jesus!' Fabian suddenly muttered in a strange whisper, as though his voice did not belong to him any more.
Tamara turned back to him, and almost at once she noticed that he was beginning to shiver in an uncontrollable manner. As he lay spread-eagled on his back the movement became even more pronounced, until he was twitching and shaking like a fish out of water, as if he were suffering some violent epileptic fit. She crawled over to him and grabbed hold of his arms trying to make him be still, shocked by how cold his flesh felt.
'Is this supposed to happen?' she asked, knowing better than to expect an answer, aware that no-one among the living knew exactly what was involved in The Kundalini Ritual.
'Yes,' said a voice inside her head. 'This is exactly what is supposed to happen.'
It was Jonathan, speaking to her from beyond the wall of death. A memory buried deep in her subconscious that had now slipped to the surface.
'You're fools if you think that I don't know what's going on between the two of you? I know, just as I know that conceited jackass Fabian won't be able to resist attempting The Kundalini Ritual, even though I've warned him it's dangerous. Of course I haven't told him everything, just enough to whet his appetite. I haven't told him the true purpose of the ritual!' He laughed, the sound bitter and scornful.
The noise died away inside her head and left Tamara full of anguish, certain of nothing now except that they had made a terrible mistake. She remembered having that very conversation with Jonathan, but she had forgotten until now. Jonathan had used his mastery of hypnosis to keep the knowledge from her until now, when they had attempted the ceremony and triggered the hidden memory.
'Oh God! What have we done?'
Fabian was convulsing like a mad thing, his whole body contorting. Her attempts to restrain him were futile. She spotted a certain strangeness in his eyes. The transformation took place so quickly, a change in colour from blue to deep grey and then to the darkest black, as if some bizarre eclipse had taken place within his eyeballs. As events spiralled out of control Tamara felt panic taking hold, her mind running round and round in circles like a desperate animal scrabbling madly in a trap.
'Help me,' cried Fabian, his voice choked with suffering.
Tamara was knocked aside as he suddenly jumped to his feet and started to move towards the altar. His body was tilted at a forty five degree angle and his feet were dragging along the floor. It was as if he was moving against his own will, being pulled by some invisible force that he was helpless to resist. His jerky movements were like those of a marionette, a creature controlled by strings.
Tamara put her arms around Fabian's waist and fought with all her strength to hold him back, but it was a hopeless task. With a sudden wrench he was tugged out of her grasp, his body sailing through the air to land in a crumpled heap at the foot of the altar. As she looked on in horror he stumbled back on to his feet and crouched beside the altar, gripping its sides with his hands and placing his penis in the hole at its centre, rubbing himself up against the stone in an obscene parody of their earlier lovemaking.
Fabian's penis had swelled to an impossible size, as thick as a man's arm, the veins standing out on its side like lengths of rope. The altar appeared to be alive, closing around his manhood in an embrace of stone. It seemed to palpitate as she watched, and felt warm to the touch, oozing with a black substance of tar-like consistency. The room reeked with a terrible charnel smell. Fabian's face was twisted in agony, his jaws stretched wide to release a silent scream.
And then his scream became real, a deafening shout of pain and ecstasy inextricably mingled. A shudder ran through his whole body and his penis pumped against the altar even harder in the irresistible throes of orgasm. Aghast Tamara stared at what was happening. The hole in the altar was coated bright red. Blood was spurting out of the end of Fabian's penis like water from a fire hose, and caught in the flow were lumps of meat and bone, but although the hole ran straight through the centre of the altar none of this substance was emerging on the far side. Fabian's body seemed to be shrinking, caving in on itself, as if all his internal organs were turning to mush and gushing out of him in that terrible ejaculation. As she watched his penis swelled even larger about its middle, as if something too big to find egress had got stuck inside. Tamara was reminded of a picture she had once seen of a giant snake trying to digest a pony. Then, with a sound like the cork popping from a champagne bottle, the obstruction came free, and something that looked like a human heart rocketed out of the end of Fabian's penis and was sucked into the omnivorous hole at the centre of the altar. Unable to help herself Tamara turned aside and vomited, the contents of her stomach erupting from her throat in a volcanic flow. When she turned back to the altar the unholy union had finally been consummated. Fabian's head lay on the ground, mouth stretched wide in a rictus grin of death, eyes devoid of intelligence. All that remained of his body was an empty sack of skin. Looking at the sad remains Tamara thought of a blow up doll from which the air had been released. She started to laugh at the absurd and inappropriate image, finally slapping herself hard in the face before hysteria took hold.
Unsure what to do she wiped the tears from her eyes, her whole body trembling with fear. To her horror she noticed that Fabian's cadaver had begun to move. The red bloodlines on what remained of his chest were rippling with a loathsome animation. It was as if some alien force was trying to push its way out from inside the bag of skin. Whimpering with fear Tamara scuttled away as best she could, her arms and legs bereft of strength. Fabian's chest inflated like a balloon and burst with a soft plop. A draught of cold air hit her bare skin like a blast of arctic wind.
There was no blood, no bones, no heart; nothing at all to suggest that Fabian had ever possessed the internal organs of a normal human being. Instead there was just a ball of shimmering blackness that hung in the air over his midriff, like the ink expelled by a squid to deceive its enemies. As Tamara watched this darkness began to leave him, to erupt from his insides, a shifting, swirling cloud of black vapour that quickly spread to fill the entire room. Her surroundings were plunged into gloom, with just the ghostly images of the flickering candle-flames for illumination.
There was an ominous rumbling behind her. Tamara turned back to face the altar. The black stone was shaking, as if subjected to an earth tremor, the hole at its centre contracting and expanding with a nauseating sucking sound. There appeared from within the altar a glowing object, and then another and another, until a dozen similar items had been expelled, things that gleamed and flew around the room at a dizzying speed. With a gasp of revulsion Tamara recognised them as severed human heads.
The heads were both male and female, their skin a bilious green colour and covered with suppurating sores, their crowns naked except for a few hanks of hair. Each possessed a set of clacking teeth and eyes so dark that Tamara guessed they could never have belonged to anything claiming to be human. They dashed madly here and there in the thick miasma that was the room's atmosphere, crashing into the walls and ceiling like bluebottles searching for an open window. It was as if they were trying to escape in a desperate effort to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the black stone altar that had given them birth.
And then Tamara heard a strange sound, like the poignant wail of a trumpet playing last post. At once the heads clustered atop the altar and with military precision lunged to the floor, where they began to lick up traces of urine and ash with ugly tongues that were bleeding and abundant with appalling glutinous pustules. They gobbled at Tamara's vomit and then fell on Fabian's remains, their razor sharp teeth shredding his flesh and greedily devouring it. To Tamara's horror, freed from its tatters of skin, Fabian's head was infected with the same unholy animation. Eyes filled with darkness and skin aglow it took to the air and joined the unnatural brood.
Tamara curled up into a ball to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible in the hope that the heads would ignore her, but it was in vain. Bobbing up and down in the air they gathered around her, Fabian in the vanguard. She tried to move away from the hideous things, to get to her feet and run from that room of horror, but her limbs had turned to jelly and she could barely move. The heads closed in, like beasts of the jungle preparing to feast on a carcass. Tamara tried to defend herself, but they effortlessly pushed aside her lifeless arms. Their tongues scraped against her skin, lapping up the wetness of the piss that Fabian had sprayed over her body. One nuzzled next to her face, seeming almost affectionate in the way that it licked drool from her chin. She was entirely defenceless, unable to deny them anything; even the most intimate areas of her body were violated by their moist caresses. They lathed her with a pus-like substance that oozed from the sores on their tongues, making her whole body slick with the odious gruel, which reeked like the festering remains of a dozen dead men.
One bit her, its teeth tearing away a chunk of skin from her kneecap. Another nipped at her toe. Stung by the pain Tamara tried to get away from them, shuffling on her bottom across the floor, but the heads hemmed her in on all sides. Fabian swooped down on her, fastening his teeth in her hair and pulling with an unnatural strength. The others followed his lead, sinking their teeth into her flesh. One gripped her pubic hair, another champed down on the fingers of her left hand, and two of them caught hold of her breasts, the sudden excess of pain making her scream. They made a concerted effort and Tamara's body was dragged towards the altar. She tried to fight them, but they were too strong for her.
As one the heads lifted and Tamara was carried into the air. She looked down and below her saw the altar. It had fallen onto its side and the hole at its centre gaped like an open wound, beyond which lay a black infinity. The heads released their grip and she fell towards it.
Tamara spun madly in the air, the wind rushing by her, a crazed howling in her ears. Far below the hole at the centre of the altar swelled to impossible dimensions, as if it wanted to swallow her wholesale. With a scream she tumbled into its depths, rolling over and over in a tangle of arms and legs.
And then she was sliding down a black tunnel, warm and fleshy, fetid with the pungent odour of urine, the walls lined with thousands of tiny hooks that caught at her body and tore her skin. She felt as if she was being turned inside out, her whole being twisted into some terrible shape, her old personality scoured away by the abrasive lining. A black tar-like substance oozed from the walls of her prison, seeping into every one of her orifices, filling her lungs so that it became the very medium she breathed, passing through her pores and congealing to form a new epidermis in place of the skin she sloughed off.
Far ahead Tamara could see a circle of light. The brightness stung her eyes and forced her to squint. The walls of the tunnel contracted about her and spat her forwards in a rush of noxious black matter. She screamed as she fell towards the light.
Then looked up to find herself standing on a plain of sun-baked earth, bordered by mountains on the far horizon.
Slowly she clambered to her feet, feeling unsteady, swaying from side to side. Her familiars floated in the air before her, their teeth clacking and the wind screeching through their open necks in an unholy cacophony. She hit one of them with the flat of her hand and hissed, her necklace of human skulls crashing against her skin, and the severed arms around her waist flapping about, the cold hands caressing her silky thighs. The heads retreated at once, mewling in terror, but one of them was not swift enough. She reached out with her fourth arm and grabbed hold of it by the hair, clutching the thing to her breast and forcing a coal black nipple between its putrid lips.
A fleshy tube passed between her legs and ran along the ground, disappearing into a large hole from which spewed black liquid. With a downward slash of the sword she held in one of her right hands the goddess Kali severed the umbilical cord that held her to her old life and screamed with unholy joy, revelling in the dark energy that flowed through her veins.