For Everything, A Season
#6 of Hellraiser: Hellsent
Have I teased you enough Sprocket, kneaded your curious flesh and thoughts? Does the thought of bittersweet dark romance make your knees quiver, your mordant heart thunder? We have been through much, you and I, on this risque, wicked little series. Tarry just a little farther with me, will you? My paw in yours. I can not fathom that the Second Layer will nearly as satisfying without you. All characters, living, dead, possessed, or undead, are copyright Eldyran. Hellraiser and its intellectual properties are the rights of Clive Barker. Please ... Tease Happy Fun Ball (tm) just one more time ...
Hellraiser: Hellsent
6th Piece - For Everything, A Season
Germany, 1284
2006 by Eldyran
As Josef and Raymon watched the procession of children recede in the hilly distance, the clip rondo of a demented piper leading them to into the bowels of the Underworld, they could not but feel left behind. The small German village that stood around the two canids seemed abandoned; no other wayward souls milled about. While the white wolf and the black fox stood alone in the center of a lifeless town, they could not shake the desolate, shared sense of abandonment.
For Raymon, who had been born lame in one leg, it was just another cruel jest from a cruel God. As his white lupine ears snatched the entrancing call of the mad coyote's flute, his ensnared mind floated away, and his body yearned only to follow the haunting melody.
His spirit was willing, but his body, his leg, could not.
For Josef, he stood there and watched impassively as his peers followed the queer yote dressed in a motley of styles out of town. Like always, he wanted to tell the world how he felt, but the black fox did not have the words to express them. As Ueuecoyotl's seductive tune fell on his deaf, vulpine ears, Josef could not help but wonder what had drove the other children to follow this stranger out of the protective reaches of Hamelin.
His spirit too, was willing, but his body, his muzzle and ears, could not.
When the demon in coyote's skin came to town, seeking conscripts, many of the adults hid in the church, praying for their souls. Some less stalwart villagers flung themselves into the Wesser river rather than be taken in servitude to Hell. This meant little to the Trickster, who marched to the beat of a different drummer. And the repetitive, insistent beats from the Engineer did not differentiate between young or old, rich or poor, male or female. The village elders had already shown their brand of courage.
And this is why the children suffered.
"Josef," the white wolf said, tuning to his only friend, "I don't know if it was God's will or Devil's indifference that spared us, but now, it is just us. Let's make a promise never to leave each other's side, lest the devil's yote come back for us. Agreed?"
Josef, not hearing his friends initial words, turned and watched the larger wolf's muzzle lips ask for his paw in eternal companionship. He nodded gently, a small tear sliding down the sable fur of his cheek, before turning back to watch the other children disappear in the fiery orange sunset just past the farthest outlying fields.
The dying rays of the orange semi-circle seemed to almost ignite the rolling, dried stalks of barley and rye, now caught in a early eve's breeze. Murders of crows fled into the west skyline, their shrieks and cries trailing the procession of children. It was June, almost harvest time, and the farmers would soon be out, their desperate souls reaping what their broken backs had sown. Perhaps that is what the Devil had sent his minion for, to harvest souls. Josef could not help but wonder if the Devil would come eventually for Raymon and himself.
Like all good harvesters, he would. But not for seven hundred more years.
Florida, 1974
Joshua Merchant awoke to someone slipping into his bed. The humid, thick night air seemed to hang on his sweat matted fur, but whoever had come to wrap their arms around the young fox's slender body did not seem to care. Disoriented and groggy, Joshua squirmed in the embrace, the physical contact unwelcome and unwanted. His adolescent whimpers did not fall on deaf ears this time.
"Joshua ..." Adrien said, sniffling, "I'm sorry ... I ... just had a bad dream ..." His cousin withdrew his arms and rolled over in the other fox's bed. Joshua rolled on to his back, regaining his bearing, and for a few minutes, stared up at the ceiling. The call of crickets drifted through the open bedroom window, but other than the typical calls of the Everglades nocturnal denizens, silence once again claimed the two young foxes' bedroom. Just as Joshua was drifting back to sleep, the vulpine form next to him rocked with another set of deep, uncontrollable sobs.
"He's always there! Grinning at me. Laughing at me, Joshua." Adrien placed a pillow over his head, trying to stifle his cries as not to awake his father, Gabriel. Joshua continued to stare up at the ceiling with a expressionless gaze, not sure what to say or do. It was becoming more and more like this, ever since he had left Brazil, following the death of his father, Armel. The emptiness inside seemed to steal the words from his very lips, the feelings from his very heart. Whenever he tried to reach out to someone, either by words or touch, they always seemed to die in gruesome ways. He found himself withdrawing inward, where he could not hurt anyone, himself included.
"He wants to kill me Joshua." Adrien said between tears. "I know it sounds crazy, but I can see it in his eyes." Another fit racked his cousin's lungs, and the mattress shook with his violent sobs. Not knowing what else to do, Joshua took a shaking paw and placed it on the naked shoulder of the other eight year old. The other black fox took the pillow off his head and rolled over, placing his arms once again around his cousin.
"He's after all of us. You. Me. My father ..." Adrien paused, opening his eyes to give a hesitant look to Joshua. "Your father. His father. And his father before that. From even before our great great great grandfather. I saw him. In his workshop." Joshua flicked a nervous glance back to his cousin, but said nothing, the soft weight of the other vulpine lulling into a sense of false security. Adrien continued, ranting as Joshua held him in his scarred paws, just listening.
"He used to make toys, before the coyote got to him, did you know that?" Adrien asked, moving his muzzle so that his gentle breath washed over Joshua's vulpine whiskers. "I see Philip in my dreams. Laughing and crying at the same time." He nosed his cousin's chest, his square canid nose parting the silky back fur there. "The Devil made me do it ... that is all he can say ..."
Joshua said nothing. The diabolic trickster haunted his dreams as well, grinning at him like some cheery bedtime stalker. His distant gaze centered on the far wall suddenly snapped into focus as Adrien's muzzle lips met his own, the sensation of hot, moist flesh pressing into his own catching him off guard for a single, fleeting moment. And yet, memories of his ocelot friend from Brazil flooded his mind from the mist of painful memories. The last he had seen of Philipe, the paramedics were loading the feline's stretcher into the ambulance, his blood soaked muzzle pointed up to the rain filled sky, his soulless, blank eyes not even flinching when the thick Rio de Janeiro raindrops hit them.
Adrien's lips felt almost as good as Phillipe's, different of course, the contrast between feline and canid muzzle lips very acute in Joshua's mind now. A sudden gush of tactile sensation coursed through Joshua, and he whimpered as his cousin's paw tips worked their way through his belly fur, the rough ridges of his paw pads skirting his prickling flesh there. Joshua's free paw moved to touch his cousin's chest, and Adrien's rumble of mutual need send delicious vibrations through his arm.
They laid in the darkness like that for what seemed like an eternity, savoring the taste, the feel, of each other.
As the call of the crickets drifted throughout the humid night, two sets of cautious, curious paws explored each other, hesitant at first, then growing bolder with each new inch conquered under their eager touch. When one of Joshua's claws grazed the night, hard nub of his cousin's nipple, Adrien gasped, shuddering against the other fox. The offending paw mistakenly hesitated, before minor groans of insistence urged them onwards. Even through the darkness and his own blurry, failing vision, Joshua's wide, astonished green eyes trembled at Adrien's bare, slim hips as he arched gently into the air.
The smallest hint of tapered canid tip spilling from its furry sheath.
Joshua's first real good look at exposed male sex sent a rush through his inexperienced vulpine body, but before he could reach out and touch that alluring tip and its slippery, leaking slit, a paw closed around his own. He grunted, tried not to close his eyes as his cousin's paw gripped his sheath and the swelling flesh that now stirred inside. The black fox watched in near silent fascination as Adrien's paw slid down the furry covering, gently cupping his balls. Adrien's ears perked up as Joshua spread his legs a bit and moaned, before the black fox slipped a paw tip just inside his cousin.
Joshua gave a ragged gasp at the wonderful invasion, his member slipping even further out as Adrien's probing digit bumped up against his prostrate. His own paw worked down Adrien's belly, before Joshua closed his paw pads around the other fox's slick shaft. Entranced by its feeling, his paw tips worked up and down the sacred flesh, squeezing a bit at the base as his cousin's knot began to swell.
Adrien's other paw drifted down as well to stoke the almost identical shaft now bobbing, spurting so close to his, the heat from their aroused sexes sending waves of pleasure through them both. A pair of vulpine gasps and groans escaped their intertwined muzzle lips as they both began to beat off each other's swollen knot. Adrien rolled partway on top of Joshua, their furry bodies rubbing in tandem to the mad stokes of their eager paws.
Their squeaks and yipes of onrushing climax finally broke, their rough paw pads bearing down hard on their pulsing, slick orbs. The new sensation, almost painful, was enough to push them over the edge at the same time, and with short yipes, both of the squirming vulpines came all over each other, matting down the black fur of their quivering stomachs. Their young, hedonistic paws continued to beat off each other's thick knot even as creamy spurts of hot fox cum coated them, made the sensation on their prepubescence flesh even more indescribable.
Their gasps and breaths evened out after a few minutes, and the two foxes clung to each other, sharing in the afterglow of such exquisite sensation. The call of crickets once again drifted through their open window, and for a while, Adrien was just content with rubbing the slender chest and fur of his cousin. Finally, after what seemed like half an hour, he finally spoke.
"Joshua ... you won't let the coyote take me, or my father ... will you?"
Joshua's emotionless green eyes looked his cousin dead center, the grim look on his muzzle relaying everything so that his lips wouldn't have to. Joshua rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving his cousin to hug a pillow, trembling in fear ...
Florida, 1984
As Raymond sat on a series of short steps in a dark hallway leading out from the school's gymnasium, his head hung low for the first time since that terrible time ten years ago, when he had found out that his only friend, an older female wolf, had been murdered in her apartment. While booming music from the homecoming dance echoed from the gym a way down the empty hallway filled with streamers and banners, the white wolf fidgeted with his tux, the running back not feeling as secure without his football varsity jersey on.
Someone had stole it from his locker a couple of days ago, leaving his wallet and the keys to his new Camero untouched.
Something about the theft bothered Raymond, something that he could not place. He doubted that it was his ex-girlfriend, Jessica, but after what the coyote bitch pulled on an introverted black fox named Joshua, he didn't want to put anything past her. When Lisa, a rumor-mongering vixen, had called him last night to tell him she saw Jessica force herself on the shy vulpine, he didn't know what to say to his girlfriend.
Everyone pretty much knew the fox was gay, even if Joshua never said a word about it. Raymond called up the popular cheerleader and promptly chewed her out, before dumping the cruel yote. The white wolf shook his head, still hanging low. He couldn't remember what had possessed him to agree to go out with the vain and vindictive cheerleader, but it was over now. A few furs opened up the entranceway, laughing, and started going up the stairs the athletic lupine sat upon.
"Hey, is that you Ray?" a bulky bear said, his thick arm around a slim female wolf. The crew he walked with also stopped in their tracks. Raymond looked up, and grinned to the nose tackle, a guy who he had known for over two years now.
"Hey Peter, yeah. Good sack out there in the third quarter. Things would have been a lot harder out there tonight without great D."
"Hey ... thanks," the ursine said, narrowing his eyes a bit in surprise, "I wouldn't have thought to hear that from someone on offense, sometimes I think our quarterback thinks he's a one cheetah show."
"Well," Raymond said grinning, "Maybe if he would stop tossing the ball to the other team, that might be true. What's he up to, fourteen pickoffs this year? I hear Coach Barker's going to have his skin if he keeps it up." The crew behind the nose guard laughed it up, before grousing around with each other.
"Hey, Ray, where's Jessica?" the bear spoke up, ruffling the furry ears of his girlfriend. "I figured she'd be hanging on your arm, trying to wave down cameras for the upcoming Homecoming Queen crowning. I hear you guys are a shoe in."
"Oh ..." Raymond said, suddenly losing his smile, "I doubt that's going to happen. Things didn't work out between us ..." The bruin gave him a odd.
"Then who you waiting for?"
"I promised I'd hang out with Joshua after the game ..."
The small crew of peers grew uncomfortably silent, sharing uncertain glances at each other.
"What do you wanna hang around that creepy fox for?" The female wolf under Peter's arm barked, "But hey, maybe that black little Queen is perfect to wear your crown." The crew burst into peals of laughter, before an unexpectedly menacing growl cut them all off.
"I'm sick of hearing trash like that coming from my friends." The white wolf's blue eyes store them all down, the seams of his tux straining with his bulging muscles, bursting now with a pent up rage. Raymond's growl was low, but the deep rumble punctuated his complete sincerity. "I dumped Jessica over such stupid shit, and I swear to GOD, if I even so much as hear another whisper on the field, I'm going to take someone's fucking head off."
His teammates stood in shocked silence. Even the towering bear shuffled his hind feet, not quite holding the lupine's stare, instead, looking down at the unwaxed, scuffed up floor. It had been two days since its last polish. Maybe the raccoon janitor was off locked away in some basement with someone, having the time of his life, and was too busy to do his job.
"Now ..." Raymond said, the booming music from the gymnasium just down the hallway overtaking his tert growl. "... Fuck ... off ..."
The silent, uncomfortable crowd stood there a second, before moving on. Raymond, tried not to snarl as they left, and instead buried his face and muzzle into his paw pads. He didn't know what was coming over him lately, especially after what Lisa had told him what Jessica had done to the introverted fox.
He didn't know why he was so angry over the non-consensual kiss.
All he knew was that something buried deep in the past haunted him, his piecemeal memories of his childhood psychologist muddled and bittersweet. The white wolf hadn't thought about Laura in about ten years. Ever since he had met Joshua that one night in the alley behind her apartment complex, after the all cops had swarmed her place. Raymond never questioned meeting the young, quiet fox there, but as they left the scene of his older friend's grisly murder, he thought about how odd the chance meeting had been.
Still, despite going through three different schools together, Raymond realized he never had really hung out with his oldest childhood friend. Joshua had always been there, looking at him, the sable vulpine's secretive thoughts and desires known to no one but himself.
It seemed like he had known Joshua forever.
As the distraught lupine contemplated these muddled, confusing feelings, the doors to the entranceway and gym closed on their own accord. They latched and locked shut, muffling the haunting tempo of Corey Hart's "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night."
From seemingly out of nowhere a dark, canid form stepped out of a thickening pool of deep shadow just behind the hunched over, oblivious lupine. The short, sable vulpine stood just behind him, his leather trench skirting the floor around his ankles, his bushy black tail off to one side. The short and slender canid dropped the backpack on his right shoulder, the Lament Configuration tumbling out onto the tiled floor with without so much as a clatter. A pair of dark sunglasses rested on his broken muzzle, the fur matted with dried crimson.
_I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Watch you weave
then breathe your story lines
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Keep track of the visions in my eyes_
Joshua silently watched Ray, as he had done for ten years now, waiting for the perfect time. This time. The time to tell Ray how he felt about him. How he needed him. How he was going to have him.
No matter what.
As if hearing the fox's thoughts, the white wolf turned and looked at the strange canid dressed in unfamiliar attire. Despite the raven black vinyl pants and charcoal designer sweater, Raymond could have swore that Joshua was now standing before him. He stood up and turned to the almost sinister stranger.
"J ... joshua?" When the dark vulpine said nothing, Ray breathed a sigh of relief, until he saw the shorter canid's split scalp. A white and red streak of skull glistened just underneath, from where the force of Jessica's pipe wrench had taken Joshua off his hind feet.
"Josh! What happened!" The wolf ran over to the fox, his paws already touching the wound gingerly, also working over the gashes on Joshua's muzzle. "Did Jessica do this to you?" The fox nodded gently, before reaching his scarred paws up to cup the white fur on the back of Ray's head.
He drew the larger canid in, and he tilted his muzzle up to press his lips against Ray's.
Raymond, momentarily shocked, held the tender kiss tempered with the taste of blood, before his eyes grew wide and pushed the fox away.
"Josh ... what ... what are you doing?" Joshua looked at the object of his obsession and his hopeful, trembling muzzle lips began to move.
_While he's deceiving me
It cuts my security
Has he got control of me
I turn to him and say_
"Ray ... I ... I ... Love you ..."
The floored lupine stood there speechless for a moment, before looking at his classmate, paw held upturned toward him in apology.
"But ... Joshua ... I'm straight ..."
_Don't switch the blade
On the guy in shades, oh-no
Don't masquerade
With the guy in shades, oh-no
I can't believe it
'Cause you got it made
With the guy in shades, oh-no_
For a moment, all was silence. Not a single follicle of fur moved on Joshua, and Ray just stood there watching in the shadowy reaches of the decorated hallway to see how the black fox would take his rejection. A small lump of ice formed in the pit of Raymond's tight stomach when he watched the gay fox's muzzle lips start to tremble, a hint of tears sliding down past the rim of shades to seep into the bloody gashes of his broken muzzle.
"I ... killed them ..." Joshua whispered, the anger in his shaking voice mirrored in his clenched, trembling paws. Small drops of blood fell from them to splatter on the tiled floor as his claws dug into the tough paw pads. "I did it all for you ..."
_And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Forget my name while you collect your claim
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
See the light that's right before my eyes_
Joshua took off his shades to expose the endless void of blueish black light in his empty eyes. As the twinkling, dead lights reached out from an infinite dimension of pain and desire, the white wolf stepped back in horror, falling backwards on the stair with a bark of terror. Raymond landed on his back, the ribs of a bloody skeleton snapping as they broke his short fall. The panicked lupine yelped in pain and tumbled around in the gruesome, jumbled puzzle, sharp ends of broken bones slicing up his rented, black tux, smearing blood on his pristine white fur.
His clutching paw grabbed hold of a femur, and he yanked it up trying to pull himself off the floor. The running back stopped dead on his tracks when he spied the metal pins near one end, and thought about Jessica's nasty spill during cheer leading practice last year. A pair of black furred paws tore the feminine canid skull laying next to him from the attached spine, and white wolf's fear frozen eyes looked up to to the black fox.
A strange, halfway disassembled puzzle cube now spun in the air next to Joshua, glinting in the what little light existed in the hallway. Raymond thought he heard it chime like a music box, the chirping of mechanical birds echoing softy off the lockers around him. A sudden gale howled just outside the entranceway's windows, the force of the wind shattering the glass. The sudden thunderous, maelstrom outside brought the music inside the nearby gymnasium to a sudden screeching stop, before the shrieks of terrified teenagers dancers replaced it.
"I ... loved you ... more ... longer than she ever did," Joshua growled, his pent up emotion, rage rolling like lava, overtaking his flesh. He cradled the coyote's skull between his scarred paws, his lungs hitching with rejection. "And this ... is how you ... repay me?"
"Please ... Joshua ..." Ray bawled, tears sliding down his muzzle at the thought of what the sable, insane vulpine had done. "Oh God please no .... not Jessica." Joshua's muzzle lips curled in a cruel snarl, before his paws crushed the skull between them like an eggshell with a gut wrenching crunch.
"If you love her so much, then join her!" The dejected vulpine leapt on the wolf, his muzzle snapping, his claws slashing at the very flesh and fur that his black heart had coveted for for so long. As his sharp fangs and razor claws sliced through tux and fur alike, Joshua tried to savor what little gratification he could evoke from the shrieking, howling wolf pinned underneath him.
What little his paws could not touch, his lips tasted. What little his lips could not taste, his muzzle and throat swallowed.
Lost in a haze of rejection, betrayal, and lust, the fox couldn't remember distinctly when the last shreds of offending clothing had been slashed away, the only barrier now between should have been his, but he was fairly certain the wolf's howls of pain had died off long before that. Instead, as he scooped up the shredded, bloody mess underneath him, positioned himself to breed with the thing that one had been a popular, and good looking wolf, he looked deep into those blue eyes.
The pupils, now dilated as the Ray's essence drained from them, tried to focus on Joshua's vibrant jade ones. Now, as the last flicker of life ebbed out of Ray, Joshua tried to apologize, curse, all the things in between, but ragged gasps of arousal and wrath had stole any words from out of his muzzle. Instead, the fox gave a sudden, grief filled sob as the spark within the wolf's eyes sputtered out.
The fox gave a howl of regret, denial as he drove himself into the empty husk. Hot, wet crimson matted down his shaggy fur as his needful vulpine form bucked again and again into the corpse. An eternity? A few seconds? Somewhere in between Joshua's knot tied them together, his broken mind unable to fully appreciate, experience, what it yearned for, had waiting on for centuries.
The fox filled the dead wolf with his hot life, but his last gift could not mend what his claws and fangs had already rent.
His orgasm over before he had even had to chance to realize it, the lonesome black fox suddenly broke down, his cries of anguish and emptiness rocking both their canid bodies. Without so much as as a chime, the Lament Configuration reshaped itself, its cubic form regained, before clattering unceremoniously to the tiled floor. Joshua's desire now extinguished, snuffed out like the light behind Raymond's eyes, the Gates of Hell, once so close to opening forever, slammed shut once more.
Despite waiting for nearly a thousand years, the Engineer clicked its claws together in impatience, eager to set the final, calculated steps in motion. Lord Leviathan still slumbered, and before the sun rose again, the Lord of Hell would reign on Earth once again.
As the back knight's arms, his tears, enveloped his deceased white prince, the sobbing vulpine's mad grief echoed throughout the empty hallways of their high school ...
To everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal ...
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance ...
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to lose and a time to seek;
a time to rend and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
* * * * *
Joshua waited patiently in line for the next ticket agent. This late at night, not many booths were open, but no one seemed to give the queer black fox a second glance. He didn't even glance at the other furs milling about the airport terminal, the few stragglers who had been unlucky enough to get stranded when their connecting flights out were canceled due to a sudden freak storm. Besides grounding a few international flights, the bizarre tempest had also leveled a local high school, killing all the attendees at a homecoming dance.
Quite tragic.
Joshua paw's fumbled in his leather trench for his father's passports, and a few hundred dollars worth of Franc's he had found buried deep in his uncle's attic closet with some old explorer's trinkets and cartographer's maps. For a moment, the fox wondered if it was simple circumstance or fate that he would find his father's puzzle cube after an entire decade of lying in dust, darkness, and sullen, incestuous secrets.
Now that Joshua had nothing left here, in this place he once called home, he decided to go back to the one place he had felt safe: Brazil. There he would find the only one who he had ever loved, and who had loved him in return ...
Phillipe ...
~ Fin Part VI ~
The final chapter awaits. Are you ready for it, Sprocket? Do you chew your claws to the quick? Do you chew too far? Does the taste of blood only sate your dark desire for a short while? We are beyond pain and pleasure, you and I. Do not cry for poor Joshua and Raymond. Remember what I said about tears.
The End is Nigh. Are you ready to follow this demented Coyote and his Muse into the Maw of Hell?