“Where am I?” Jerry asked.
One second he had been naked on the bed, waiting for a beautiful woman. Now he lay in darkness. The floor below him angled slightly.
The voice of a man answered his question with a question. “Were you picked up by an attractive woman?”
Attractive was an understatement. She was blond and had a huge chest, like a woman from a fantasy novel.
“Yes,” Jerry answered.
The man immediately stated more questions. “Did she get you in her car, ask you how old you were, and then ask if you were a virgin?”
“Yes,” Jerry replied.
“And what did you tell her?” asked the man.
Jerry hesitated. He was embarrassed.
The man said, “Listen, you can tell me. My name is Wayne. I’m thirty-one and live with my Mom. I’ve never even touched a girl’s boobs.”
Hearing that, Jerry felt like he could tell this stranger the truth. He said, “I told her nineteen and that yes, I was a virgin.”
Jerry had never even dated a girl. As far as he could tell, none had really liked to look at or speak to him. That’s why he had been stunned by the stares of the girl in the coffee shop.
“There’s one more guy here, but he’s asleep” Wayne said. “His name is Matt. He’s a fifty-year-old priest.”
“Wow!” Jerry exclaimed. “She seduced a priest.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s pretty screwed up over it. He says he’s normally pretty repulsive to the opposite sex and had never really been that tempted. Then she came into the picture.”
They were quiet for a few seconds, and then Wayne asked, “Did she get you to wear the blindfold too?”
“Yeah,” Jerry responded. “I mean, I was just . . .”
“I know,” Wayne kindly interjected. “You wanted to do whatever she said, just so she’d go through with it.” Wayne smirked. “I vaguely remember smelling something odd before waking up here.”
Now that Wayne had mentioned it, Jerry thought he could recall the odd scent too. They had been drugged, probably with chloroform.
“How long have you been here?” Jerry asked.
“I don’t know for sure, but the priest was here before me. I don’t think I was here more than a day before they dropped you in.”
“Dropped?”
“Yeah. There’s some kind of hatch above.”
Jerry got to his feet, almost falling down the slope. “Does the entire floor slope down?”
“Yeah, on all sides. There’s a small hole in the center, like a drain.”
Jerry was afraid to move around too much in the dark. “Have you tried to find a way out?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Wayne responded. “But I ended up cutting myself. Two of the four walls are covered with spikes.”
Jerry got a mental picture of what he’d just heard described. It caused his heart to race and his stomach to hurt.
“Holy crap!” Jerry exclaimed. “Why have we been brought here?”
“I don’t know, dude,” Wayne responded in a disheartened tone.
Just then, there was noise below like a door opening, and then a small beam of light appeared.
“It’s coming in from the drain,” Wayne said.
Jerry crept toward the light, got down on the floor, and looked down. The light stung his unadjusted eyes, but he kept looking. He only saw a blur below, but he heard a familiar voice.
“This is disgusting, Mother,” said the girl he’d met at the coffee shop. “Are you sure it will even work?”
The next voice spoke with a strange accent. It sounded like something from an old vampire movie. “My beautiful daughter, I am four-hundred and forty-eight years old. Tell me, am I still radiant?”
“Of course, Mother, but it is my first time, and I am nervous.”
His eyes were seeing better now. Through the small hole he saw the first naked woman he had ever seen in person. She was standing below.
Both he and Wayne remained quiet, but the priest started to moan, as if having a bad dream.
The girl’s mother said, “You need not be afraid. After I faked my death in the old country, I started refining my methods. Back then, I used virgin girls. Then I learned that virgin males were better. Twenty years ago, I found that one-hundred trips around the sun was the magic number and was able to restore myself to child-bearing years and have you. Now trust me, my dear, when you are finished, your aging process will slow to almost nothing.”
Jerry remembered the ages of the other two men. The numbers added up. He was a nineteen-year-old virgin, Wayne was a thirty-one-year old virgin, and the priest was a fifty-year-old virgin. That totaled one hundred virgin trips around the sun.
“I do trust you mother,” said the girl. “Let’s start my shower.”
Jerry heard the girl’s mother laugh and say one last thing. “We Báthory women will live forever and always be beautiful.”
The priest must have awakened, because he stopped moaning and started whimpering. There was an electronic sound and then a mechanical sound.
“The walls are closing in!” Wayne shouted.
Jerry moved around frantically, cutting himself on the spikes a couple of times. He screamed and begged for their lives as the walls closed in. It was all in vain. The young woman would have her bloody shower.
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©2011 Joshua Scribner
Joshua Scribner is the author of the novels Mantis Nights, The Coma Lights and Nescata. His fiction won both second and fifth place in the 2008 Whispering Spirits Flash Fiction contest. Up to date information on his work can be found at joshuascribner.com. Joshua currently lives in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.
