Snake Eyes

I wanted to see the expression on the demon’s face when I sliced off its most prized body part but that was going to be impossible. I couldn’t risk letting the head see what I was doing or it might warn its body and then I’d be the meat. I broke cover and crept out towards the ring of swaying women and their Hellish stud. I have to admit, it was distracting seeing all those females, gyrating in sheer erotic anticipation. Most of them were naked or half naked and they bounced and jiggled in a most engaging manner. True, many of them could not be considered great works of art and that might have explained their terrible yearning for the intimate attentions of a demon, but just as many were more than presentable and a few, Velvet among them, were delectable beauties I’d have been proud to bed in my younger days. Nowadays, I was beyond that sort of frivolity, of course, although the truncheon beneath my britches protested otherwise.

The deep stupor the women had entered seemed to make them oblivious to my approach, yet it was still a struggle finding a gap in the constantly moving circle and slipping through it without a dangerous amount of contact. A doughy breast slapped against my left ear and I had an eyeful of Mrs. Wiggery’s unkempt belly-hedge before I made it past the women and into the space where the demon lay.

Carefully, I moved the lanterns that were dangerously near the demon away from its wings and limbs. I tried to ignore Blini Rickett’s wife as she skewered herself on the demon’s rough-hewn mast. She was kneeling on its upper thighs. Her hands clutched at the coarse red hairs on its stomach, her nails making no impression at all on the leathery surface. It was impossible to tell, even to my experienced ears, whether her cries were of pain or pleasure. I was thankful that she was facing his upper body—I didn’t want her to see me approach his nether regions with a knife. The spell might break and then she and all her coconspirators might turn that very knife on me.

I crawled up behind her, between the legs of the demon and was there confronted by its huge, hessian rough scrotum. It resembled a travelling pouch with three skittle balls inside and it shook in time with Mrs. Rickett’s squats and thrusts and yells. The snag was that the tail was partially obscured by the demon’s triumvirate of testicles. I was going to have to lift them in order to access the root of the tail. I knelt as close to the conjunction of its legs as I could and was then in closer proximity to Mrs. Rickett’s behind than I would have ever have chosen to be. The handle of the knife was slick with sweat as I reached forward with my left hand to lift the demon’s bag of three giant marbles and expose his greatest weakness.

I hesitated before I took hold of its adversarial gonads. What if it realised my hand wasn’t one of the women touching it? But it couldn’t know that, could it? Without its head, the only sense it had left was that of physical feeling. Convincing myself that this was logical, and knowing that there was, in truth, nothing logical about demons, I took a gentle grip on the trio of overgrown oysters and lifted. The demon’s legs twitched and stiffened. Mrs. Rickett gasped and continued her knee dance. Apparently, the extra stimulation had caused the demon’s club to swell even further. Beneath those infernal bollocks, I saw what I wanted to see. The cleft of its foul buttocks and behind that, the tail. The smell was shocking. It smelled like a chicken coop with a hundred dead goats in it on a hot day. Around me, the sounds of the entranced women with all their moaning and rustling through the dry grass, receded.

There was just me. And the knife. And the tail.

I watched my right hand point the tip of the knife at the ground beside the tail. I didn’t know if I had the strength but I had to make one single swift movement and the job had to be done. There would be no time for a second slice. I decided that a downward stroke with the force across the tail was the best way. There was hair around the base of the tail and that stopped the demon feeling the keenness of the blade. For all it knew it might have been the finger of a maiden ready with more stimulations. I took a deep breath in and mustered all my power and focus. I thrust the knife downward and towards the tail with every fibre of my strength and every atom of my will. With the other I kept a gentle hold on the tail. That was when I discovered, to my probably eternal relief that demons don’t have bones in their tails. The blade went through it as if I was cutting roast bison and the tail came away in my hand. I was so delighted I knelt there looking at the thing and smiling when I ought to have been running away.