Author : Martinus Guzman

My confused senses grasped at the world about me. Skin pulsed along with a faint rhythmic metal tick of a clockwork engine. Ozone, cinder and iron burst over my tongue, tasting a room filled with energy and power. Dank corners and oiled machinery echoed in deep tones. I inhaled cold metal and pain. Eyes drank of hazy images in dry brown, blood red and steel blue. I screamed, agony reverberating on my skin, synesthesia swirled my senses into a horrendous nightmare. The angelic voice of my love whispered a word of peace and I drifted to darkness, thankfully.

Madrid was the site of our meeting, a city under the spell of science and art at the eve of the new century. I lived a lavish life of a professional student paid from my inheritance. By day, my intellect drank in the lectures from the most progressive thinkers of our age. By night, my body consumed beauty from the women of blessed city. But alas, under legal advisement, I was forced to seek employment as a tutor to defray the cost of my delicious excesses.

My ward, the darling Adeline, was a slender girl of fair complexion with eighteen years of sunlight captured in her raven hair. On our first meeting, she sat bemused through my flirtatious preamble but shone brightly when I commenced my instruction. As the day progressed, she entered a state of rapture, body thrown back upon her chaise with climax upon her lips not unlike the Saint Theresa receiving the holy ghost.

Those intelligent amber eyes were never quenched and soon I was forced to bring my maestros along to feed her desire. With Qevando, she built delicate automatons. With Caja, she sowed various animals into small magical beasts. And yet this was not enough, for as i would part for my nightly roguery, she would hold vigil with spiritualists and alchemist, gorging on all knowledge with equal excess. Yet I remained her confidant, when nightly as I swayed on the edge of the chaise from drink, she press her head against my chest to discuss the progress of her studies.

Upon notification by my jackal lawyers of my diminishing inheritance, I asked for my siren’s hand. She accepted without hesitation with but one condition. My nightly excursions would be ignored but my presence would be required to feed her intellectual needs each night. So I would return, still smelling of wine and woman, to find her within the laboratory. She would lounge seductively upon my chest, now a woman of staggering beauty, to spend hours in shared scholarly passion.

One night, as I stumbled through the streets, recent from the arms of a deflowered maiden, I was confronted by no other than my prey’s father. I remember little of what followed save for the snap of my back upon the stoop and the smell of my skin as the lamp oil caught fire.

Three days later, the whisper of my angel awoke me, “don’t worry m’love.” My head shifted downward with the whorl of gyros to spy my patchwork body of flesh and metal. Agony burst from my lips powered by the bellows in my hollow chest. A simple word of silence uttered by my love, caused my mouth to snap shut. Upon her direction, whispered in tender tones of seduction, I moved to my customary spot upon the chaise to receive her buxom body pressed against my new frame. She recounted her advances which had finally turned me into her dutiful husband.