The House of Plenty

The night was black as traitors' ink when Knight Baldrian staggered forth from the tavern door.

The son of the local Earl, he'd drunk himself nigh on senseless once again, all the while offending his company inexcusably along the way. 

His friends, their loyalty shredded, had no more patience for him. His hedonism appeared to know no bounds and his brazen behavior was beyond the pale of all decency and decorum, as the knight courted the evil errant.

But it was greed driving Baldrian on. Greed for living, for life, the need for everything whenever he wanted it.

 Like a dark imp flogging his back, greed was the black force powering his mind to ever bleaker earthly pleasures and greater depths of rank perversion.

A leering fiend: his spirit the crooked shadow of light cast by the incarnate.

He couldn't control it, the ancient malady commanded him: a strangling avarice, that deadliest of the seven sins, was his fell companion on the inescapable road to damnation.

And so he had disrespected his peers, alienated his stately parents, abused his scorned fiancee and aggrieved countless women with his wanton vigour and promiscuity, the cries of fatherless babies testimony to his indecency, no less than the Earl's personal cook's assistant, Greta. Her child, from Baldrian's own furtive seed, had perished in agony at birth, but he cared not and sent her packing beyond the castle walls with nothing but the bloodstained bedding and her dead son. She died in penury and grief that day.

Worse still, much worse, was the killing. 

A thousand blows he'd metered out on his best friend Karl, pulverised in the castle keep for his bag of gold, wholly decimated, the iron maiden completing Baldrian's grisly service and as the blood poured thickly from Karl's eyes, the baleful Earl's son watched him perish, his childhood companion and laughed.

He cupped the bag of gold in his palm.

"Feels heavy enough Karl. I won't bother counting it!"

He laughed too at Father Russ, the visiting Priest who had had the misfortune to cross paths with Baldrian on the portcullis, a sincere and instinctive cleric, who knew evil as soon as he met the knight and who would come to know evil personally in the dungeons as Baldrian tested his faith beyond the bounds of mortality and cruelly reduced the priest to a skinless figure and one who would die screaming for mercy, salted and shackled in the cellars.

Now, barely able to stand outside the tavern, the hateful son of Earl, Baldrian kicked the local and harmless beggar, Heinz the troubador, fully in the face for no reason at all other than to satisfy his sadistic bent. Further pleading brought the drunk to that awful plateau once again, where reason gives way to wildest murder and he plunged his black dirk deep inside the man. Taking Heinz's bloodied lute, Baldrian smiled and went on with his shuffling in the direction of his quarters on the edge of the village.

"Damn you all! Damn everyone to Hell I say! But first let me have what's yours!" 

He cursed all and sundry as the moon shone a wan light directly upon his twisting face, as if some loathsome theatre was about to start.

"I'll show you debauchery, I'll show you debasement! I'll be the yardstick for gluttony the world over, mark my words you pissant oafs!"

Baldrian raged at the vast night, as he staggered to his home, not noticing he'd left his own doorway far behind and was now entering the countryside.

Taking several erroneous turns, the inebriated noble shambled along a track encumbered with contorted oaks on either side. The night appeared to thicken like tar within that strange avenue and it was the absolute silence that made Baldrian stop momentarily.

He listened.  

Nothing. 

Not even an owl or a fox.

The dead of night but deader still, the fulcrum of oblivion.

The tallows of the village were now mere pricks of light in the far distance and even in his dilapidation he knew he was not where he ought to be.

Yet, not far from his situation, he glimpsed the faint twinkling of candle flames, no doubt within some comfortable inn he knew not about, but nevertheless would welcome him and proffer a further bottle of his beloved claret.

Upon reaching the twinkling glows, he felt an overwhelming sense of apprehension, which robbed him of his normal traction and he stood  motionless in front of a huge black door, upon which an enamelled plaque, in bright red lettering, read:

The House of Plenty

"What's this?"

"A House of Plenty! Well, I doubt they have enough for my multiple needs but we shall see! Forth Baldrian!"

The Earl's son pounded on the door, which appeared to directly open.

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

With no-one apparently at home, he entered into a vast and lengthy hall, lit by a hundred candelabra and hanging from such heights above that Baldrian could not see.

A huge stairway led upstairs but the knight errant glimpsed a sign to his left.

Feed.

Feeling the pangs of the evening's copious wine, he pushed open the door to face a veiled maid breast-feeding her newborn. She was stood next to a long dining table, upon which lay every conceivable food, sweetmeat and condiment the mind could imagine. It was a feast and such a feast! Baldrian sat and ravenously grizzled a ham hock, noisily gnawing it to the bone, the fat pouring from his chin. 

After supping goblet after goblet of sweet mead, Baldrian grunted and downed two pints of oysters, two whole roast chickens, a pigeon pie, a bowl of lambswool and a seed cake, upon which he belched and farted loudly.

"I want more mead!" He roared at the veiled maid.

"The mead is gone Sir. There is plenty of claret, your favourite!"

Sloshing the goblet, the knight, stuffed fat as a Christmas goose, waddled his way to the room entitled

 Dance.

A lithe and sinuous air tickled his hearing, one which enticed him further within to a passionate melody whispering of towering riches and bacchanalian feasts, laced with lustful dereliction and dark perversions known only to those who have surrendered to that which is fallen.

Baldrian cavorted in circles, rubbing his piece and was joined by the half-masked minstrel, smiling broadly, leaping all around him, his mandolin's tune turning the very atmosphere into frenzied visions of serried aureoli and manifold quims rodded and lanced by the knight's own excited and turgid fleshy ram. With whimsical mastery the minstrel brought his air to a blistering peak of depraved notes and loathsome trills; Baldrian unclothed and engorged, wailing with pain and rapture, seemingly lifted full-bodied by naked massaging and writhing satyrs to the pleasuring grounds of the carnal inferno. With a final crescendoed fit he was entirely spent, his steaming seed deep within the bowl of the smoking mandolin, the minstrel laughing loudly.

Nude, save his dangling codpiece, limp and drooling, Baldrian trudged in search of sleep and entered the room marked

Pray.

The listless knight crawled toward a stone alter at the far end and climbed on top, knocking over candelabra and the bible as he spread his limbs across it.

He reached out for the brimming golden chalice between his legs and guzzled the church wine, the purple liquid pooling at his shoulders. He grabbed the full bowl of unleavened bread and crammed his mouth with as many hosts as he could fit.

"Mmmm. Delicious! God is delicious!" He roared, laughing, dropping the empty bowl onto the floor.

A seated hooded minister stood and began to chant Gregorian canticles, which echoed and reverberated round the stone space like a tide of fresh creed breaking over Baldrian's black soul.

"I'll have Heaven! I'll have all it's pewling Masses!" He howled at the cross. 

The minister broke bread upon the knight's  bloated belly and drank wine from his codpiece, before dripping hot wax onto his nipples and lighting them like candles.

"Do you renounce Satan my child?"

"Renounce Satan! I denounce him you pious puke-pot! I'll have Hell as a bed-pan warming my cold arse as I fuck the devil himself!" He wailed at the cleric. 

"Ominous Blasphemer! Doomed defiler! You must be cleansed!"

At this the smiling minister, with two hands, took the largest of the thuribles, brim-full with red hot embers of frankincense and myrrh, and scattered the smouldering contents across Baldrian's bare form. The glowing litter began to burn into his body. It sizzled and cracked like a gammon and his hair set alight.

The knight screamed in pain as huge welts burst open and sheets of skin fell away, revealing crimson fascia, which never should be aired.

"Nought done here will equal my deeds!" Shrieked Baldrian as his lips withered, "I piss on your syphilitic book!"

The Minister poured hot melted candle wax over the knight's erection and lit the wicks poking through. His pubis was a flaming pyre, his lengthening ballsack loosening at the neck.

Laughing, the Minister left him melting.

Baldrian, now a contorted affront to the human physique, fell from the altar to the floor. His cooked limbs smoked thickly and his bubbling sac fell.

He crawled into a chamber marked

Count.

Lying face up on the floor he was aware of raucous laughter as three people stood around him.

He strained to focus on them, with one eyeball completely boiled away and flies clouding the other, but eventually, as they removed their veils and masks, he saw and recognized.

Maid Greta and child, Father Russ and Heinz the minstrel. They turned.

"Ah, my great compatriot Baldrian! How wunderbar to see you again. Tis I your closest friend!"

The crippled knight twisted his flaying neck to see none other than Karl, whom he knew he'd left to die in the iron maiden, the bleeding holes of his damnation still oozing out scarlet.

"You bubonic dog! What can you do to me you iron virgin! You, the maiden fucked runt!" Scoffed Baldrian.

"Tis not I who will do anything my old friend" replied Karl.

"I'll see you all in Hell!" 

Cursed the knight at his assembled dead.

"But you're already there my boy!"

Out of the flies, Lucifer hovered, his great wings unfolded and hung still like a giant blood bat.

Karl handed him Baldrian's charred scrotum.

"Feels heavy enough. I won't bother counting them!"

The devil winked.

"This is your personal Hell, dear Knight!

 This is your House of Plenty!

 ..... Yes, you will have the pleasure of visiting it every single day for the rest of eternity!"

Landing, with a final flourish, Lucifer rammed his fork's pitted shaft deep into Baldrian's crisped arse and pushed hard until it reappeared out of what once was a mouth.

"You've had your day Baldrian, 

son of Earl,

In Hell the nights are mine!"

Ha ha ha ha ha!