Sa'Adam in Gomorrah

With the peacock following behind her, zigzagging along after her, attempting first one way and then another in back of her, Chastity made her way warily through the harem.  In torn net stockings, formal-length gloves, and a cutaway bustier that purposely exposed her fully developed breasts, she continued to drag the counterweight of her misdeeds at the end of her chain.  To avoid the charnel smell which was more thought than she could bear to think, she drew only the shallowest inhalations.  As she herself searched for the Kea invader, for Rambabwa who would reclaim his property and defeat her by the overwhelming weight of that single-minded intention, she bit on her lower lip and reminded herself to stay aware, to be aware of everything around her.  Though there was some light from the dying fires where mounds of clothing and other combustible material were still smoking with some luminescence, she had yet to recognize where she was and, much less, know where she was going.

As she made her way further into the dark, she had the sensation of eyes awakening to her, of having found a nether audience in some surreal drama that was more nightmare than a night to remember.  As the feeling of being watched grew more pronounced, with somnolently etheric voices suddenly entering her consciousness, she finally allowed herself to know that there were actual people all around her, allowed herself to grasp that they were dying; and, at that moment of their impending deaths, she realized that the pervading stench in the harem was that of intestines slit wide open, that it was shit run cold she smelled.  With her mind blossoming to epiphany as familiar voices demanded to be recognized, demanded acknowledgment of themselves as human beings, she began to see what she had denied, to witness finally in morbid detail the death and devastation that had been visited upon those around her, seeing them now massed for clinical examination around every fire glow, around every point of light, knowing finally that she was certainly not alone, that there were hundreds of women and young girls all around her, hundreds more aware of her.  With a visible shake that rattled her chains and bobbed her impossibly firm breasts, she tried to regain her composure while yet unable to shake off her terror of the wounded, of the dying.  As their cries grew loud and tortured, rising in an eerie crescendo, she deafened herself with her hands on her ears and blinded herself by screwing her eyes shut.  And she felt her consciousness cave in, feeling the momentary attraction of that small cave in her mind before she ripped herself back to the moment, to the sights and sounds that were sure to be less horrid than what waited within.

As she made her way further into the nightmarish depths of the baths...with the peacock still in her wake, reluctant to follow but unable to give up the direction she provided...she tried to distract herself from the horrified faces, from the terror in their eyes, by guessing that the massive boiler in the cellar below had exploded up into the harem, killing and maiming the scantily clad women and serving girls who had tended her, who had advised her, who had helped her.  As she realized that that remembrance had led her back to the unbearable weight of a still surviving compassion, she found her imagination rendering up wholesale slaughter and indiscriminate butchery on the dark slate of her Pointe Blanche home...at the last, seeing her own bleeding toddler crying up to strangers who, no better nor worse than she was now, simply moved along.  She gasped at her own insensitivity and shook her head, while seeing too clearly in the glow of the existing fires how the blast had decapitated or dismembered or eviscerated those within--with innumerable bodies strewn about, many of them still moving, begging for help, some floating face down in the baths.