Priapus in Obsidian

Eight years of fevered scholarship had delivered Professor Catherine Lee Russellhere, to the lip of a cenote deep in the Mexican wilderness. She tugged at the corded nylon rope around her waist, checking her carabiners one last time. Everything was as it should be. She smiled reassuringly at her retinue of native porters (and imported undergraduates), swung her toned legs over the edge, and began to descend.

None of the men she left on the surface was more than a year or two older than she, but her archeological genius had accelerated her through her schooling with unequaled speed; bestowing on her her doctorate--and tenure!--at the tender age of twenty-six. Her colleagues at the University often joked she was built like one of those white marble Cycladic figurines she studied at the start of her academic career; high perky breasts, narrow hips. If it weren't for her wireframes and ponytail, you'd think she'd come straight from the Aegean loam. She took it as a compliment. Most of them looked like ludicrously fertile Stone Age Junos--even the men.

A month in the field, hacking her way through viperous jungle, baking under the cruel yellow sun, had done little to alter her appearance. Save, that is, for darkening her skin a couple shades to a pleasing golden hue, such that she seemed almost to glitter in the light. Her disappearance into the depths of the sinkhole had the same effect on her party as a sunset. They shifted uneasily on the rim, nervous in the relative darkness.

The men's anxiety found its roots in half-remembered legendry which held the region was once home to a truly loathsome people rumored to prostrate themselves before innomiable gods infinitely more fearful than those of the Aztecs who, it was said, erazed the cities of this earlier race and shattered their terrible altars centuries before. Distant memories of the awful escatalogical rites practiced by these sorcerous brutes was enough to keep the extant Yucatecs away, even if they themselves could not put a name to their dread of the place. It was only the professor's presence that gave them the courage to come this far. But no further. She would go down alone.

Professor Russell first learned of this frightful cycle when she was simply Sophomore Cate, reading the journals of a now obscure Spanish missionary who'd evangelized to the four times great grandfathers and grandmothers of her own indigenous guides. Certain passages made vague, but nonetheless evocative, reference to the rituals alluded to above; violent orgies and erotic sacrifices meant to call down thunder and lightning that scandalized even the heathen sensibilities of his new flock. The story obsessed her.

She spent hours daydreaming about the endless flopping idiot hordes; naked bodies uniting and splitting, fucking and killing under the indifferent gaze of their earthy gods. Though she'd never admit it, not even to herself, Catherine wanted to join them more than she wanted anything else in the world.

There was no evidence for these people but for the missionary's secondhand account of their atrocities, but, as Professor Russell contended in dozens of articles over a span of several years, therewouldn't be. If the Aztecs were the Romans of the Americas, then this other civilization was its Carthage. And yet no one doubted that Carthage existed. Finally, she convinced the University to finance this very expedition. Should she reach the bottom of this pit and find nothing, she would be ruined--consigned to the loony-bin alongside von Däniken, Hancock, and Tsoukalos.

Thisis what frightened Professor Russell, not local superstition. And even this fear vanished the deeper she descended; for the walls which surrounded her were inscribed with countless pictograms. Thousand pronged stone cocks jammed into as many glistening rocky slits... Graven decapitated heads fellated laughing centipedes... Naked warlocks cavorted with even less describable things in the margins of the freakish tableau...

A healthier mind would have judged these images obscene in isolation and intolerable in conjunction with one another for their awful suggestion, but Catherine's studies had so warped her sensibilities she found them beautiful. Here was incontrovertible proof of her genius, her intuition. Her fantasy.

She hit bottom with acrunch.

Catherine pulled the flashlight from her belt, clicked it ON. She swept the beam around her. The floor of the pit was completely ossified. Here, a pile of femurs. There, a jumble of phalanges and even more obscure bones. All of them human, and altogether too many of them for them to be accidental. The air was heavy with an animal humidity.

She was euphoric. She'd discovered quite possibly the only temple to survive the Aztec's crusade! Casting her flashlight about she saw that the cenote, which she at first took as a natural formation, was actually the product of careful craftsmanship. Every line, every angle, had been meticulously and flawlessly carved into the earth; and every line, every angle compelled her gaze toward an alcove in the wall opposite her. Desperate to satisfy her curiosity, Catherine pointed her flashlight into the gloom. The bulb exploded, and she threw it to the ground with a yelp.

"Are you okay, Professor?" a voice called from above.

"I'm fine," she answered. "Something went wrong with the flashlight, that's all."

But whathadgone wrong with the flashlight? It was almost as though whatever was in the alcove had overloaded the battery. But how? Catherine looked around the cave for an answer, but could find none in the dimness. She needed some light.

"Do any of you have a lighter?" she called up.

"Sí."

"Toss it down, would you?"

A moment later, the Zippo clattered down next to her boots.

"¡Gracías!"

Catherine improvised a torch from a longbone and a strip of fabric from her shirt. She nearly laughed imagining how she must look, standing there like some adventure serial heroine--torn blouse, torch aloft against the mysteries of the past! But only nearly.

She continued toward the alcove, and sawit:

The obsidian god lay flat on his back atop the altar, eyes half closed as though in the throes of some ancient and exquisite agony. Looking into those heavy lidded eyes, she fancied that species of ecstasy must be well beyond any creature of the flesh.

And the idol was unquestionably male. The statue's manhood was--according to Catherine's professorial eye--nearly thirty centimeters long, even accounting for its upward curve. The length of it was ribbed with thick stylized veins which seemed to throb and pulse in the fickle light of her torch. Some strange property of the vantablack deity must have shorted out her flashlight. The atmosphere crackled with orgone.

Catherine's curiosity turned to longing. She glanced back at the entrance above, though she knew no one was brave enough to follow her down.

The professor was alone with her fetish.

Catherine laid her torch on the ground. She unfastened her belt, shimmied out of her short khaki shorts. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her panties and slid them off over her muddy boots too. Catherine's bush had grown wild and curly during her time in the jungle, a tangle of wiry black hair nearly obscuring her wet cunt.

Madly overcome, Catherine scrambled up the altar, naked from the waist down. She straddled the effigy, using the fingers of her left hand to part her sex, steadying herself by placing her right on the statue's chest. Even in her abandon, she expected the linga to be cold, but she was surprised to find it warm--if notwarmer--than any lover she'd known.

She brought herself up and down, up and down the shaft, rubbing her clit as she did; savoring the sensation of the literally rock hard cock skewering her pussy. Faster, now. Harder. She was getting close, tightening around the statue's girth... oh, god, yes! yes! yes! Her hips bucked hard as the orgasm overtook her. Release, at last. She brushed her mouth with the back of her hand. It came away bloody. She'd nearly bitten through her lip to keep from crying out.

"Everything alright down there?"

A pause.

"Professor?"

"Y-yes!" she answered, pulling her shorts up. She gathered her torch and made for the exit.

Something stirred behind her. Bones clattered. And that's when the lich rose up from the charnel, skin-clad and barbaric. Re-animated by the discharge of orgone energy, the wight resumed its ancient and abhorrent activity. At first glance, she thought the skin it draped over its skeletal frame was cow leather. Closer inspection revealed it as the intricately tattooed skin of some unlucky pre- or proto-Aztec brave. It advanced on Catherine with lurching steps, clutching an obsidian dagger honed to nuclear sharpness in its arthritic hand.

Catherine screamed.