This is an intro to a novella I’ve been working on. It gets pretty dark (which I like, but places like Amazon really, really don’t!)
Comments, suggestions etc all very welcome!
THE CASTLE OF ROSES
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There’s no such thing as an empty building. The things that have been done there always fill it, and they find a way of coming back. The Castle of Roses is like that. It’s never going to be content to lie quiet. Too many bad things have happened inside its walls.
The castle has bedrooms where the owners indulged decadent appetites for centuries. Silk, chains, pleasure and pain, love and rape. These were times when the aristocracy had the power of life and death over its servants. They were not slow to use it, either. Maids and footmen did what their masters told them or they didn’t keep their jobs for long. The castle stands way up in the Bavarian Alps and for weeks it’s shrouded by blizzards. Being thrown out with no money and just your summer clothing was a death sentence. But the servants should not be pitied too much. The place always attracted a certain type of employee.
It was another matter for prisoners. When your lord also controls the law, you have no access to any higher justice. You are arrested and tortured until you confess, and there the matter ends.
Beside the rose garden there is a tower. That tower has a basement. Open the door and explore, if you are brave enough. You will need a torch these days.
Yes, it does have a peculiar smell. Fear, death, lust.
Go down the sixty three steps to what may have been a wine cellar, but is now two levels of cells and dark rooms. Not a single window. Look closely at the walls and you will see metal rings. There are some in the ceiling. They are tarnished now but they will take your weight. There are chimneys for fire, there are faucets to supply large amounts of water quickly. Useful for drowning people, if that is what your tastes run to.
There are other machines here, too. Most of them were collected by the Twelfth Baroness during the Enlightenment. Most nobles were getting rid of their ancestral torture devices at that stage. They had become a bit of an embarrassment now that Voltaire was all the rage. Many ended on scrap heaps; some were broken up or melted down. The Baroness was travelling around Europe at just the right time. She bought them for pennies and gave them a new home. The iron maiden. The rack. The boot. The steel horse. They are all there, tended, maintained, and ready for use.
The Baroness was a stickler for etiquette and small points of law. It is true that this part of Bavaria was very quiet during her reign. But it was noted that most of the criminals seemed to be beautiful women and handsome young men. They would be tortured extensively, their screams echoing upwards through the tower, sometimes for days.
The Baroness would sit and watch, stroking their foreheads, encouraging them to resist just a little longer. To prove their innocence by enduring just a little more agony. Then she would instruct the torturers to apply another method, perhaps the Shin Cracker that she had brought back from France, or the Iron Chair for which Edinburgh Castle had no further use. When the victims grew faint she would dip a silk handkerchief in attar of roses and wipe their cheeks, telling them they were doing well, pleading with them to do more. Her beauty was angelic, but her cruelty satanic. And sometimes worse.
She would kiss them, stroke their faces and smile at them. Sometimes she would fondle a man’s cock and allow him to spend himself on her fingers, before telling him sadly: ‘they say that this fine instrument must come off. Such a waste’.
With women she could be more cruel. She had a special pair of silver clippers which were used to ‘trim’ a prisoner’s labia, removing the clitoris snip by snip. Sometimes they would be strapped to a chair with their legs held apart, and a spiked wheel would be cranked up to speed. At the touch of a handle, this would inch forwards and shred their pubic mound like torn silk. The Baroness would watch with fascination, even as blood spray freckled her milky skin.
Even for her own time, the Baroness was cruel beyond words. She maintained composure and a sad expression in her brown eyes during the whole ordeal. And when the prisoner had finally confessed and was of no further interest, she would step out of the cells and spend a few minutes contemplating life in her beautiful rose garden. It was fed on all the blood that was swilled from the cells below.
With regards to her own death – well, the stories are confused. Either she was carried off to hell by the devil driving a coach and four. Or her ghost haunts the rose garden of the castle. Or she lived a happy life but died when she was still young and beautiful.
In either case, the Castle of Roses was shaped by her. Cruelty and sex etched themselves on its walls.
It was only a matter of time before it attracted the right kind of people.
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And now the promotion bit -if you’ve enjoyed this part I will be posting more. But I also post free fiction here:
https://filthy.media/authors/james-missaglia
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/8ax8kz/the_castle_of_roses_prologue_an_essay_in_sadism