She stepped around the man seated in the chair, who was quivering with terror, and approached Pieter until she was face to face with him, her eyes looking through her mask and seeking his.
“We have raised the dead Pieter. From this very place. We have accomplished the impossible.”
Through gritted teeth Pieter hissed back, “I’ll fucking kill you. You crazy, deranged psycho!” He spat at the goat-skull.
Lotte ignored him and turned away. “This place. Do you know what it was once used for? No, you probably don’t even know where you are. Well, let me enlighten you. The building above us, above the catacombs here, it was originally one of the old city gates and part of the defensive wall surrounding Amsterdam during the fifteenth century. The Sea Dike which kept the flood waters back went right by this location. Merchants would come and go, and pay their taxes and weigh their goods here, to keep Amsterdam thriving as one of the world’s biggest sea ports. Later, it was used by the Surgeon Guild as an anatomic theatre where they performed public dissections. Lecturers and medical students would come to watch corpses being cut open, and afterwards the bodies would be stored down here in the crypt. Hundreds of them, lining the walls in this secret catacomb. There they are Pieter, look at them. But thanks to our achievements they no longer remain at rest. Can you imagine that? Life from Death? To gain the ultimate knowledge we desire we must raise life from death!”
She tilted her head, smiling through the jaw bone.
“Your father doesn’t need to stay dead forever.”
Pieter moved as if to lunge forward and jump on her, but a pair of strong arms hauled him back and one of the men at his side brought up his wicked-looking scythe and pointed the sharp tip at Pieter’s throat.
“Hold him there,” Lotte ordered them. “He will witness for himself how we can realize this marvellous feat.”
She clicked her fingers and someone stepped forward. From within the folds of their dark robe they produced a small hypodermic needle. Pieter thought at first that it was meant for him, some kind of drug to either subdue him or knock him out, but instead the masked figure bent forward near the naked man sitting in the chair and injected something directly into his penis. Pieter cringed, wondering what the hell was happening, and the man panicked, his breath coming through the sack in quick and short bursts.
After a moment he settled. Still conscious, but calm.
Lotte in the meantime had drifted across to stand before her brother. She turned and unfastened the rope around her waist, and then shrugged out of her robe to reveal her full nakedness to the gathering. Bart, a big leering grin on his face, feasted his gaze over her naked flesh and reached out to cup one of her breasts in his huge hand. She gently slapped his hand away. “Not now,” she told him mildly. “Later.”
Watching this, Pieter felt revulsion flip his stomach over, leaving him queasy. He averted his gaze, but now saw that the man seated at the centre of the circle of people was now fully aroused. Whatever they had injected him with it had sexually stimulated him thus, in spite of the terror he must be feeling.
With a sense of the inevitable he now found it impossible not to watch, no matter how repulsive he found the whole episode. It was like being witness to a terrible road accident or an act of frightful violence: even though your natural compassion told you it was wrong to look, you did so anyway.
Lotte looked over, her eyes flashing through her mask. “This should have been you having the honour of sharing your life force Pieter. Instead I had to visit you in your dreams.”
She moved across to the man tied to the chair, and turned to face away from him, so those gathered could bear full witness. Parting her legs, she lowered herself onto him, a quiet sigh escaping her lips. The man grunted in response.
Lotte glided up and down, her rhythm initially slow and smooth but after a few moments her pace increased and her breathing became louder, together with her gentle moans. Throughout, she maintained eye contact with Pieter. Then she was squirming on the man and her tempo became fast and frantic, and the man was thrusting into her.
“Come on,” Lotte was grunting, “come on,” and she was breathing hard through her nostrils, becoming more like the animal she was portraying, the goat-skull tilting back as she peaked, and the man cried out in simultaneous ecstasy.
Lotte remained there, her chest rising and falling as she gradually recovered from her exertion, the man still again. Then, when she was finished, she pushed herself to her feet. Walking back over to Bart, she ran her hand across his stomach, and once again his beady eyes were transfixed by her body. Then he leaned down to listen as she whispered instructions to him through the muzzle of the skull.
Bart dutifully moved across to the seated man and, grabbing the top of the hessian sacking, he pulled it free and tossed the material aside.
Underneath, the bald-headed man was weeping and trembling and he could not bring himself to glance up, so complete was his shame.
“I’m sorry Inspector,” officer Joos murmured, his drugged voice sounding all slurred. “They jumped me on my way home from work. They came out of nowhere.”
Pieter felt such sorrow in his helplessness he could think of nothing to say.
“Bart, shut him up!”
Her brother made a small signal with his hand and the two henchmen holding the scythes moved towards Joos, their weapons held high, bringing a cry of terror from the policeman’s lips.
“No!” shouted Pieter. “Don’t! Leave him alone, it’s me you want!”
Bart, who was enjoying the whole spectacle, shouted back, “It’s not you she wants, it’s what you have in your balls that’s important!”
“Lotte, please!”
It was no good. The two masked
