For many years, Sister Nikoletta was in the service of a higher power. She prayed nine times a day. Her life was work, prayer, a few fitful hours of sleep, then more work, more prayer. Thousands of her pious words floated up to the ether, but no answer was forthcoming; only a cruel, empty silence. When her depraved dreams became too overwhelming, mortification of the flesh was the only answer. She remembered the sainted Father Escrivá’s maxim on suffering: “Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain. Glorified be pain!” . . . and so she used the whip with greater vengeance, but although she assaulted her flesh, nothing could chase the demons from her mind, those familiars that had tormented her all her life.
Throughout her childhood, entering an order was the only option available to her—the one way to cleanse her heart of the many sins her parents were convinced she had committed. “Every sin, no matter how inconsequential, is a blemish on your soul and will lead you to eternal damnation,” her mother used to say. According to her parents, her every thought, word, and deed was sinful. There was no relief from the guilt. No relief from the remorseless burden of her countless transgressions. And no relief from her rage, which she hid from the world along with her dark fantasies of revenge and pain.
Sexual thoughts and acts were forbidden, of course, but that didn’t mean these evils left her alone. Perhaps celibacy made it worse, although how was she to know? She’d been sent straight to the nunnery at the age of seventeen, without even kissing a boy, let alone knowing what it was like to be with a real man in the real world, flesh to flesh. And she would never know.
During her early days in the convent, in an attempt to save her rotten soul, Sister Nikoletta made the appearance of perfect devotion, to prove to the other Sisters that she had a vocation. Her every act was irreproachable, and every word she spoke was blameless. The strain of such unrelenting good behavior, of maintaining such a mask of utter innocence and sanity, was almost unbearable, but her parents—who suffered from an overdose of scrupulosity—had brainwashed her into believing that this was her only way to salvation.
Her predicament got worse when Father Xavier was appointed to celebrate Mass every morning. He was so handsome, so virile, so different from the dried-up old men that had previously seen to the nuns’ spiritual needs. Sister Nikoletta was convinced that many of the other Sisters felt as she did about him. She could sense their spirits rise when Father Xavier came into the room. Feel the heat from their bodies as they knelt before him and he tenderly ministered the sacraments to them. The occasional accidental touch of Father Xavier’s hand on her mouth when he gave her the Host sent little electric shocks through her body. Sister Nikoletta lived for that random physical contact, even though she knew it was meaningless to him.
Every night, after the others had gone to bed, she would mortify her bare flesh until she bled, but that didn’t chase the thoughts of the good Father away; it just made her suffering more sensual. She imagined that Father Xavier was the one with the lash, beating her senseless. She’d fall to the ground exhausted, bleeding, eyes shut, body completely open and vulnerable, imagining his presence standing over her. Still with eyes clenched shut, she would use the leather handle of the whip, pretending it was him—thrusting inside of her, hurting her. His pain was loved, his pain was sanctified, his pain was glorified. She’d stuff a rag in her mouth to stifle her cries. Sister Nikoletta came for the first time like that: bloody, naked, sweatsoaked, lying on the cold, stone floor. Momentarily sated, yet forever unsatisfied.
After a while, she refined her technique. To heighten her pleasure, she’d take the end of the whip and wrap it around her neck, pushing the handle deep inside her at the same time; each thrust tightening the lash and ever so slightly cutting off the oxygen to her brain to make her orgasms more intense. She would come again and again, shuddering like an old car dieseling on a frosty winter morning. But the taste in her mouth was bitter, because when she opened her eyes, she was alone. Sister Nikoletta would always be alone. No man would ever come and fill the dry, empty well of her passion.
So she would get up, clean herself, wipe away the tears of anger and frustration, kneel on the cold floor and flog herself again and again for her despicable thoughts and acts.
During the day, Sister Nikoletta would wear a cilice—a small metal chain with inwardly pointing spikes—around her thigh. She would pull the cilice as tight as she could without cutting off the circulation. It was supposed to remind her of Christ’s suffering, but all it did was bring back memories of her private moments with the phantom Father Xavier. Her sexual fantasies were now beginning to torment her during the day. The irony was she could not make penance and cleanse her soul, because the only person she was allowed to confess to was Father Xavier. So the sins just piled up, one on top of the other, multiplying and becoming more putrefied with time.
Then a new scenario began to fester in Sister Nikoletta’s mind. She would confess all her sins to Father Xavier. He would be horrified and drag her out of the confessional to the altar, rip her robes off and scourge her using a whip with metal tips, degrading her flesh until she begged him to stop. Her cast-off blood would stain the fair linen altar cloth and splatter the faces of the saints’ statues. Then Father Xavier would take her, right there on the marble floor in front of the altar, underneath the enormous suspended golden crucifix. His cassock would fall away from him and reveal the wonders of his flawless body and his sex. She could only imagine what it would look like: ivory in color, hard, and shaped like a Knight Templar’s sword perhaps. In her fantasies, Father Xavier used not only his saintly member to impale her but any other implement at hand—the holier the better—to sanctify and cleanse her polluted body and diseased mind.
Sister Nikoletta felt her sanity slipping away, fueled by her feverish, obsessive thoughts. Haunted by her desires, she continued to torment her wretched body until it was laced with scars. She asked to be assigned to the library archives in the convent’s catacomblike cellar as a way of calming and cooling off her mind. There were thousands of books down there, ancient papers, letters and epistles, missives from popes and cardinals. Perhaps she could immerse herself in history to distract herself from her miserably empty present.
It was there, late one night, that Sister Nikoletta found an ancient manuscript in an old leaden box whose lock had long since rusted away. It was hidden in an alcove far from the entrance, forgotten for centuries. The box was littered with crunchy, long-dead black beetles, a few bloodred dried roses, and a dusty mummified crow; beak open and tongue lolling out as if in accusation.
The book was called the Grimorium Enochia and it was written in the fifteenth century by Raphael Athanasius. Sister Nikoletta spent weeks trying to translate the Latin text. For the first time in years, something was taking her mind away from the bloody world of her profane imaginings. She soon realized that she had discovered something far more engrossing than her fantasies. Athanasius was an alchemist, necromancer, and cryptographer, and was a friend of the notorious serial killer, dabbler in the black arts, and brother-inarms to Jeanne d’Arc, Maréchal Gilles de Rais. At first glance, Athanasius’s book appeared to be about his accounts of summoning forth and speaking with angels and demons. However, it soon became obvious to Sister Nikoletta that his manuscript was more than a few incantations and stories.
Athanasius’s invocations were a pathway into another dimension: a place where the chthonic inhabitants might understand her needs. These beings were called Cenobites and were members of another kind of order altogether, where pain as pleasure was the norm, not a hidden vice. She was intrigued and hopeful that somehow she might be allowed access into this world, to find an answer to her torment from those who seemed to be fellow travelers.
She knew by now that she was tired of her life, disgusted by it, not because of what she did to herself, not because of her secrets and sins, but because she had always been a slave to other people’s demands. She had never been in charge, never allowed to follow her cravings, subject to countless indignities of the spirit. She was soul-sick, but it wasn’t her fault. She needed to get out and Athanasius offered her the way. Not back to the real world of pathetic, ordinary people, which she despised because it reminded her of her parents and all those other contemptible, hypocritical sycophants, but into a murky, labyrinthine sanctuary of lust, pleasure, pain, sensuality, power, and blood ruled by the undivine Order of the Gash.
After several abortive attempts, Sister Nikoletta finally deciphered Athanasius’s infernal recipe. Of course, the correct procedure was important, but as she delved into the text, Sister Nikoletta realized that she already possessed the most essential and vital ingredient for success: the overwhelming desire to invoke the schism that would allow the Cenobites to enter into this realm and show her their marvels.
She prepared for their entrance with care, finding an abandoned, airless room next to the library where she equipped a makeshift altar with artifacts of torture that she thought would amuse the Cenobites. In the hospital adjacent to the convent, she found a terminally sick child who was too far gone to notice the pint of blood that she furtively collected from him at the fourth hour after midnight. She mixed this with some of her own menstrual blood and poured the liquid into a chalice that she appropriated from the convent’s chapel. She also added her own scourge and cilice as personal decorations to her altar.
As Sister Nikoletta uttered the final cadence of Athanasius’s Latin invocation, she heard the tinkle of chimes, almost too cloying and sweet to her ears, then a mournful bell tolling. The sounds weren’t coming from above but from somewhere near her, down here in the dark catacombs where not long ago, dead bodies of nuns (and as rumor would have it, their illegitimate murdered offspring) were buried. The lights fluttered in time to the bell and she knew that it wasn’t just an ordinary power fluctuation. Something, someone, was coming. A twinge of regret touched her heart, a touch of panic, but she pushed it away with a mental growl. She was sick to death of fear, tired of being ashamed of nothing, weary of being a weakling. She wanted strength and power and sensation for its own sake. She longed to discipline others, to make them feel as she had. She wanted to be destroyed and remade again, in the image of the Order of the Gash.
Another sound entered her mind, the sound of a metronome ticking, ticking, ticking—in time to the quickened beating of her heart. The walls of the room groaned in time to the metronome; they bulged and heaved, and between the cracks of the stones, she saw light—a yellowy, sickly white light. The walls shuddered and she stumbled back to the doorway, ready to make a hasty retreat if her courage failed her. Finally the walls parted, dust erupted in a brownish, rancid cloud. Light spilled into the room, and voices beautiful but discordant, warbled in the background, like a movie soundtrack played at the wrong speed.
A tall male Cenobite entered, followed by a few others, but she had no interest in them. She gasped, not in horror, but in admiration. The leader was stunning, a fallen angel, his princely beauty still shining through even though his face and body were mutilated and twisted by scars, lacerations, pins, wires, and nails. His black eyes were liquid with eternal suffering; eyelids stapled permanently open. His long, black leather apron was soaked with blood and speckled with bits of flesh. His naked arms were laced with multiple cilices and the razor-sharp inward spikes poked deeply into his flesh. Barbed wire was wrapped around his chest, and chains bound his legs.
He held a black leather and steel-capped cat-o’-nine-tails in his gloved hand and she knew who it was for: a special gift just for her. Sister Nikoletta sank down to her knees and opened her arms wide in a pretty, Madonnaesque pose of gratitude. He smiled, showing perfect bloodied teeth, filed into flawless little points.
A strong, warm wind scented with vanilla billowed up from behind him, knocking Sister Nikoletta down to the ground. Her robes fluttered up, exposing her secret places and momentarily blinding her. She lifted her arms above her head, and her clothes and veil ripped off and flew into the darkness, like an enormous, demented crow.
He stared at Sister Nikoletta—the naked, surrendered nun—and he was still smiling, almost puzzled by her rapt acceptance. He spoke, his voice echoing in the chamber, “Do you know what you are asking of us? Do you know what will happen to you?”
Sister Nikoletta answered, “Yes, with all my heart. Take me. Make me one of you, if you think I’m worthy. I’ll give anything to you. Soul, body, mind, heart. You know they are already yours if you want them.”
He laughed, joined by the others hidden back in the darkness. His merriment didn’t frighten Sister Nikoletta, it just exhilarated her and made her desperate for his embraces. She longed to stand up and go to him, but her limbs refused to move. Sister Nikoletta felt something tightening at her wrists and ankles, looked and saw silvery, spiked chains pulled tight by unseen hands disappearing into the darkness—stretching her limbs out to their fullest extent, as if she were strapped to an invisible torture rack. The pain of the diamond sharp spikes digging into her skin was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the new sensations that were flooding her body. It was as if all her nerve endings were on fire, alert to every mote of dust that landed on her exposed flesh, every grain of dirt being ground into her back and buttocks. She felt like she was being burned at the stake; even breathing hurt—the air stung her lungs. But the pain, instead of being maddening or frightening, just sent her deeper into a bizarre ecstasy. Below her waist, the epithelial fire was flickering up her thighs, then darting inside her—burning her internally with wave after wave of searing, orgasmic thrusts. Sister Nikoletta screamed and writhed, pleasure and pain mixed in an infernal cocktail. It was what she always dreamed of, but more.
He laughed again, enjoying her delicious agony, and began working his personal magic with his scourge over her naked breasts and genitals. How was it possible to feel more pain? How was it possible to feel more ecstasy? In the shadows, the other Cenobites applauded the show. They hadn’t seen anything this entertaining in ages.
The metal hooks on the leather strips of his scourge dug into Sister Nikoletta’s skin and gouged out her flesh. She felt that not only her body was being flayed, but her soul. She didn’t care; she desperately wanted release from her old self. She was happy to trade that tired bag of flesh for something else, something beautiful—like him. She wanted to be him: intractable, indomitable, powerful, a slave to nothing but desire. She wanted his nails, pins, wires, fingers, and teeth to bite into her, to destroy and then transmute her sad sack of sin into a blood-drenched angel of darkness—the envy of all the other demons. She sent this message to him in her shrieks of horrified delight, pleasure, and gratitude.
He finally stopped and dropped his drenched whip. He walked over and stood astride her body. The pain hadn’t abated and Sister Nikoletta still cried out. He sank down slowly, a knee planted on each side of her chest, and took out a thin-bladed surgical scalpel. He leaned over, placed his hand under her chin, and gently pushed back her head. Unable to scream, feet pummeling the ground, Sister Nikoletta made muffled sounds of anguish as he slowly and artistically carved a new orifice for her. He laced thin platinum wires through her cheeks and, using these as an anchor, hooked and pulled the skin away from her gaping wound. When he had finished, he straightened up and lifted his apron to show her another present he had prepared for her.
The skin fire was nothing. Her bloody wound was nothing. The agonizing whips and chains were nothing. Whatever happened to Sister Nikoletta next would obliterate her forever, tear her apart and send her whirling down into an abyss of divine degradation, to that special place she had longed to go to for so many years.
The Cenobite entered her, using every orifice, old and new. Sister Nikoletta’s choking, dreadful moans of passion gurgled from her lips, but the sounds were triumphant, and her frantically thrashing body echoed her exquisite feelings of the ultimate in sensual suffering.
Her shadowy Cenobite audience applauded yet again. What a girl! Sister Nikoletta’s adoration for mutilation, sensation, and agony would be legendary, even in Hell.
For many years now, Sister Cilice has been in the service of the Subterranean Power. Hellbound to glory. She has no thoughts, no worries, no guilt, no empathy, no passion, no dreams, nothing to do but to satiate desires that can never really be quenched to the full, but hell, nothing is perfect. She assists her leader in his work; they are a perfect team. They even finish each other’s threats to those who dare call upon them, and take turns flaying those unfortunates who thought they knew what they were doing when they opened the Box. The silence from above no longer greets her words, but screams for mercy. They pray to Sister Cilice now. They are her supplicants, not the other way around. The mortification of her flesh no longer gives her quite the pleasure it used to, but the delight in the pain of others is truly enriching. She is no longer concerned about the demons in her mind. She is a demon herself now and woe betide the mind that comes across her.
In a tiny corner of the shriveled, blackened brain that once belonged to someone called Sister Nikoletta, Sister Cilice hears an echo of one phrase above all others: “Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain. Glorified be pain!”
They are the only words that can still make her laugh.