Call of the Sea

Welcome again, friend, to the Scarlet Vault. Tonight, I’d like to show you one of our oldest artefacts. This conch shell once belonged to a sea snail – a big one, judging by the size. It’s now so unbelievably ancient that it’s virtually fossilised, yet it can still generate a musical note or two, if blown into at this end. Or so I’m informed. Don’t worry, I’m not going to. You may be wondering why this seemingly innocent relic of a bygone era would be placed in the Scarlet Vault for safekeeping. Well, I’ll tell you…

Call of the Sea

The smell of the sea air always made Graham Munro hungry. It conjured mental images of fish, chips, ice cream, and memories of happier times as a kid. Stress-free times.

He’d been looking forward to this holiday and had felt himself drawn to the place – some much-deserved time away from the city and his overbearing family. He had been signed off work by the doctor, due to suffering from stress. Some solitude and fishing was in order.  But first, he had to check into the bed and breakfast, and that was proving difficult, since no one was responding to his ringing of the bell. The reception area was deserted. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen a single person since he had returned to the seaside village of Glaucus Bay.

He gave the bell another ding and waited. Then, giving up on the bell, he knocked hard on the counter to try and get some attention. ‘Hullo?’ he called. ‘Anyone there? Customer here!’

He was replied to by nothing. Total silence.

Graham decided that he had waited long enough. Leaving his bags by the desk, he vaulted over the counter and walked tentatively into the small room behind it. Staff Only.  ‘Hullo?’ he tried again, quieter this time. Still no sign of anyone. A half-drunk cup of tea was evidence that someone had been here recently, but he touched the side and it felt stone cold. He looked around, wondering if he should go upstairs and bang on some doors there, when the trill sound of the telephone made him jump. He reached into his jacket pocket for his blood pressure pills. Swallowing one neat, he looked at the still ringing phone. It wasn’t his responsibility, of course, but he lifted the receiver and answered the call.

‘Is that the Beachside B&B?’ came the voice of an elderly woman. ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for an hour now!’

‘This is the Beachside B&B’ Graham replied. ‘But I’m a guest, not a member of staff. There’s nobody here, love.’ He suddenly felt a pang of fear which he brushed away with a joke. ‘Everyone seems to have gone on holiday!’

Suggesting the lady call back at another time, he replaced the handset. Forgetting his bags for the moment, he went up the stairs. Surely if the place was closed it would be locked? He wouldn’t just be able to walk around the place, would he? He came to the first guest room and banged on the door. Upon receiving no reply, he tried the handle, and the door opened to an occupied but occupier-less room. Their luggage had been unpacked, the bedsheets wrinkled and recently used. Someone had been there recently, certainly, but they were not there now.

He tried other rooms, always calling, always knocking first. Nothing.

Returning to the reception area, he picked up his bags and took them back to his car, pausing to look around the charming coastal village one last time before he slammed down the boot on his luggage. No one was in sight. Yet, it was a sunny day, just before lunchtime. Someone should be up and about, surely?

He’d travelled far to get there, and needed a drink. Perhaps the local pub would serve him. If there was anyone there. He found the Sailors’ Arms on the high street and went in, but the place was also empty of people. Like the B&B, there were signs of recent habitation – half-drunk pints of beer, full astrays on the outside seating – but no humans at all. The pub was eerily silent.

Graham had had enough of this now. Was this some sort of joke? Surely not. He tried to think of a reason for what was happening. He was vaguely aware that some Dorset villages were owned by the army, so in theory they could become restricted zones upon some order received from higher up, but he was sure that Glaucus Bay wasn’t one of those places.. Besides, there would have been roadblocks, surely, or at least some signage turning motorists away.

This was a mystery.

He went back to his car and sat inside and googled the village on his phone looking for possible explanations. There was nothing that could explain why Glaucus Bay was deserted, only pretty photos and trip advisor comments saying how lovely and welcoming the locals were.

With a sigh of disappointment, Graham realised his holiday plans would have to be forgotten. He would have to call the police and tell them… what, exactly? That a whole village of people seemed to have disappeared? He’d be laughed at. And besides, this wasn’t his problem. He was on holiday, after all. And he certainly didn’t need the extra stress. No, not his problem. He would just leave and -

A face appeared at the passenger door window. A long face with haunted eyes. Graham jumped in his seat.

‘Didn’t you hear it?’ the stranger asked, trembling with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. ‘Didn’t you hear the sound?’

Graham recovered from the shock of this sudden arrival and leant over and wound down the window so they could hear each other better. He wasn’t quite comfortable enough to get out of the car with that lunatic out there. ‘Hear what, mate? I’ve only just got here.’

The man stared at his mouth as he spoke, and seemed to take a second to understand his words. ‘That explains it,’ he said finally. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

‘That’s what I said. Look, where is everyone? What’s going on here?’

‘You’ll have to talk slower, or look at me while talking or I can’t understand you.’

Graham huffed and rolled his eyes. ‘Where… is … everyone?’

‘Gone.’

‘I can see that!’

‘They’re all gone. At one with the sea now. I warned him not to blow into the shell horn. I warned him.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Graham stepped out of the car and walked around to face the man, noting for the first time that he was carrying a large coral shell in his shaking hands. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘The instrument of mass suicide.’

Which was not the answer he was expecting.

‘I’ll try to explain. If you’ll listen? But first, I need to get rid of this… thing. Come with me to the cliff top, I’m going to throw the awful thing back into the sea. Where it belongs. We should never have brought it ashore.’

Graham found himself chasing after the strange man, needing to understand what was happening. This was against his desire for rest and relaxation, but he couldn’t resist the mystery. He was led up a footpath which took them up the hillside.

‘I’m Professor Sebastian Jarred, a marine paleobotanist ’ the man seemed pleased to have someone to talk to and he strode purposefully onwards, ‘I’ve been one of team studying the shoreline here for ancient fossils. We found some interesting items, I’ll leave it at that. One of them was this conch shell.’

‘I didn’t think we had shells like that in this country,’

‘You don’t, and this one is nearly 300,000 years old. I knew that it was evil the moment I saw it. But Dr Adams – the leader of our group – ignored my warnings and treated the thing as a toy. He blew into it, producing a sound that resulted in…’

‘Resulted in what?’

‘It was a clarion call. A call recalling human beings to where they began. The sea!’

‘That’s nonsense,’ Graham nearly tripped over a rock. ‘You’re not making any sense. Even if this were true, how could you know all this?’

‘It came to me in a dream. I’ve been troubled by weird dreams ever since arriving in this village. Race memories, I think they are called – images, snapshots, sensations of man’s distant past. About our ancient masters.  I tried to warn them. I tried!’

They came to a halt at the cliff edge, the churning sea below them. ‘I’ve tried stamping on this damn thing, I even tried burning it, but it’s indestructible. It’s not of this earth! It’s a tool of the ancient Gods!  It must never be used again!’

Graham stopped the Professor from tossing the shell over the edge. The man was off his head on drugs or something, surely.  ‘Just hang on a minute. These things are valuable! Are you really saying blowing in this makes people throw themselves in the sea like lemmings?’

‘Everyone who heard that sound responded to the call. Even Dr Adams. It triggers parts of our brain that have lain dormant for thousands of years.’

‘But it didn’t affect you because…’

‘I’m partially deaf.’

That explained the strange manner in which the Professor stared at him whenever he spoke. ‘Okay, right, well I think we need to get you some help,’ he tried to take the shell from the strange man, but he held on to it firmly. ‘Give that to me,’ Graham commanded, snatching it from the older man’s grip. He turned it in his hands. It felt cold, ancient, but surely it was quite harmless. A pretty thing, really.

‘Don’t be tempted to…’

It would be great fun to blow in to it, to hear if it could make a sound.

‘Don’t do it!’

Graham put the smooth rim to his lips and blew inside.

…

The sound stirs something inside him, triggering a set of commands buried deep. He finds his feet are moving. He is walking closer to the cliff edge. He is not in control.

Professor Jarred is saying something, screaming and shouting, but he does not hear. It is not important. All that is important is to respond to the summons.

The land beneath his feet disappears and a new existence rushes forth.

He is falling now, headfirst into the turbulence of the sea. The waves are getting closer, closer, and then with a loud splash – again, inaudible to him, his body strikes the top layer of the water and he plunges down into the cold depths. He feels nothing. A mercy.

He is sinking now into the murk. The surface of the bottom of the sea is getting closer, closer, and then with a thud that snaps his spinal cord his body strikes the seabed. He is surrounded by other bodies, all of them planted face-first in the gravel, legs swaying in the undercurrent. Men, women and children. The missing villagers. Still he feels nothing.

Then the hypnotic numbness installed by the calling begins to subside. The pain registers. Suddenly he is utterly conscious of where he is, that he cannot breathe, that he can barely see. He screams and his lungs fill with dirty water. He panics but can’t move.

Then the fish come. He recognizes a few, even looking at them upside down in the darkness. A roundfish. Two flat fish. An eel. Dozens of tiny sea urchins. They are tentative at first, but after recognizing he can put up no defence, they swarm around him, taking exploratory bites and nibbles that he is sure will grow to become sustained attacks.

He is no longer a human being. He is sustenance. Food. There are no more worries, no more stress. He feels strangely at home, oddly fulfilled. This is where he is meant to be.

…

Over fifty villagers from the coastal village of Glaucus Bay ‘disappeared’ because of this shell. I hasten to call them dead, perhaps ‘transformed’ is a better description. But how and why should such an event come to be triggered? Is the terrible effect of the sound generated by this shell deliberate, or simply a quirk of nature? Professor Jarred certainly believes that the conch was a tool of the ancient sea gods, perhaps a method of culling the numbers of we unruly apes. If so, what slimy amphibian lips have pressed against this shell? How often was it used to control and transform early man? I don’t have the answers to these questions and to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to know… Enjoy your nightmares.

The XXXperiment

Tonight’s item is this confiscated batch of vials of a strange black fluid. If I told you that blood, sweat and tears went into the creation of this unholy chemical concoction, it would be an understatement. These vials contain the essence of life itself, a borderline supernatural energy, which was not given entirely willingly. In the annals of human experience, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. I rather suspect we can’t have one without the other, and together they define and extend our very existence. That was certainly the discovery of one Dr Blackburn. Be careful this story doesn’t blow your mind…

The XXXperiment by Anna Duvall

The naked girl tied to the table took a few deep breaths to try to stop herself from panicking.

‘Dr Blackburn?’ she called out. ‘Are you still there?’

She could see nothing outside the blindfold that earlier she had been happy to wear. ‘Hello...? Is that it? Is the experiment over?’

No answer, only the constant bleeping of the monitoring devices hooked up to her goose pimpled flesh. She strained against her restraints, but they held fast. She was stuck there.

Felicity shuddered, suddenly feeling very cold and vulnerable. Had she done something wrong? Had she just made a fool of herself? Had she been abandoned?

‘Dr Blackburn?’

…

It was just a job. That was what Felicity had kept telling herself.

The summer had stretched out before her like a blank sheet of paper and the enormity of it terrified her. Some classmates were heading off to the South of France, others back home to work summer jobs waiting for them. The best in her class were doing research with the great and the good of the physiology department and with one more year of study to go, she knew she had to get something more concrete on her CV than measuring kids’ feet for back-to-school shoes. Not to mention living in London wasn’t exactly cheap, and there was no way she was working in hospitality! She desperately needed a job.

Of course she had heard of Dr Eleanor Blackburn, she’d been lectured by her. Fast, precise, and unrelenting, Blackburn would have no admittance after the lecture started, no questions until the end of her lectures, and certainly no phones. Despite her fearsome reputation, the module was popular because everyone wanted to say they had attended the Sex Doctor’s class.

It wasn’t as simple as that of course as Felicity would keenly remind her friends when she got the position as Dr Blackburn’s summer lab assistant. There were scales of measurement across science yet a complete absence of a scale for measuring pleasure in its purist form. Sexual pleasure. She knew the work would be outside her comfort zone and she had been right, attaching probes to naked test subjects day in and day out before watching them from behind a glass window into the lab as they were brought to orgasm. Felicity was appalled to find herself aroused by the seizing muscles, the sweat, and the screams.

What she hadn’t expected was quite how charming Dr Blackburn would be. Only an inch taller than Felicity, Blackburn was busty, and her long white, blonde hair gave her an almost pixie like quality were it not for her eyes which burnt like hot coals. She looked ageless, smelt utterly delightful and her clothing was always exquisitely put together. She never called Felicity by her name, instead calling her darling, and quite apart from being aroused at work Felicity found herself dreaming of her boss. What it would be like to be touched by her, kissed by her, used by her. As the summer wore on Felicity woke up more and more in hot, longing, sweats.

Until Dr Blackburn invited her for dinner.

‘Yes.’ Said Felicity, far too quickly.

‘You haven’t even checked your diary.’

‘I don’t need to,’ Felicity was flustered. ‘I mean, I’ve got nothing going on, everyone’s gone home for the summer. Or at least anyone I’d want to spend time with.’

‘You’re a shy girl, aren’t you?’

The lack of a reply spoke for itself.

‘Well, it’s settled, shall we say my place, tonight, at seven?’

All Felicity could do was nod.

She had spent so long trying to choose the perfect outfit that she nearly ran out of time to get an Uber. Finally, she settled on a white off-the-shoulder dress.

She arrived at Dr Blackburn’s house at five minutes to seven, a huge imposing Victorian terrace in the right part of the city. The great black door almost seemed to open itself before she’d even begun to knock.

‘Darling, is that you? I’m in the kitchen.’ Blackburn called. As Felicity walked into the great sparsely lit open plan cooking space, she had the same feeling she got watching some of the Dr’s experiments. Blackburn wore a loose satin night dress that finished just over her thighs, her hair in complete contrast done up in a messy bun. 

‘Here darling, have a drink,’ she said, uncorking a bottle of red wine. ‘Oh, but wait, you don’t drink, do you? How silly of me, I’m so sorry. What can I get you?’

‘No’ Felicity shook her head doubtfully. ‘I’d like to try some.’

Dr Blackburn’s face lit up with a smile that doubled Felicity’s heart rate.

‘Oh excellent,’ she said pouring a large glass. ‘You’ll really like it, it’s an excellent vintage.’

Suddenly it was ten O’clock, though Felicity wasn’t sure how, and they hadn’t eaten though the wine was nearly finished. Felicity couldn’t take her eyes off Eleanor Blackburn, and to her surprise, her gaze was met with the same lustful intensity.

‘Do you enjoy working with me, Felicity?’

‘Yes, very much.’

‘I did wonder if you were cut out for it.’

‘So did I.’

‘You’ve come through wonderfully.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How are you finding it?’

There was a pause.

‘It’s been an eye-opening experience’ Felicity giggled.

‘Sex is nothing to be embarrassed about.’

‘I know.’

‘And neither is sexual pleasure, especially in women. Did you know only 64% of women said they always or almost always orgasm during sex compared to 91% of men.’

‘Oh really?’ Felicity’s voice seemed small inside her own mouth.

‘That’s 36% of women who don’t orgasm during sex.’ Blackburn gave a sigh with a hundred meanings. ‘I make myself orgasm at least once a day. Twice if there’s time.’

Felicity didn’t know what to say. Her thoughts were too much for her to articulate.

‘When was the last time you orgasmed, darling?’ The coals in Blackburn’s eyes burnt furiously.

‘Never.’

‘Never? Do you mean to tell me you’ve been working for me all summer and you’ve never had an orgasm yourself?’

‘Well… no.’ Felicity looked down at the floor in shame.

Gently Blackburn raised her chin.

‘Would you like too?’

The kiss was firm and intense and everything Felicity had wanted for months. They broke apart and she nodded her head.

‘Well come with me, I have a lab downstairs in the basement. I can’t experiment on myself as its non-ethical, but we can certainly experiment on a willing subject like you darling.’ Blackburn explained, leading Felicity by the hand down the stairs.

The walls were bare brick and wet, glowing with the light from the dim energy saving lightbulbs set in great intervals in the ceiling. Water dripped somewhere from the street above. A wooden table stood in the centre of the cavernous space that lay under the Victorian house.  Felicity recognized the table immediately, recognized the restraints. This was a homespun version of the laboratory conditions. Dr Blackburn took her work home with her, it seemed. She felt a flutter in herself. Her dress loosened from the back, and she realized that Blackburn was unzipping her, caressing her neck as she did. With a steady hand Blackburn helped Felicity onto the padded table where she knelt on all fours. Her wrists and ankles were restrained with padlocked leather straps. Felicity could feel her arousal, feel herself leaking down her thigh as the sensors and probes were placed all over. The needle, taking her blood to measure hormone levels, penetrated her skin.

Then, the blindfold was put in place, a black silk band tied behind her head.

She could hear the machine being wheeled over, into position.

‘You know what’s coming, don’t you?’

Felicity nodded. She’d seen similar experiments conducted in the lab. Now it was her turn.

She gave a brief gasp as she felt the machine probing, searching for a way in, then she half screamed instinctively as the mechanical member inched inside her. It filled her up, her face contorting as it drove into her before exiting, only to strike out again. Then came the sound of the electric buzz and Felicity could hardly breathe for ecstasy. The vibrations were unrelenting and unforgiving, constantly holding her pleasure level whilst the mechanism rhythmically filled her.

The heart rate monitor by now was squealing at a blistering pace.

She could hear herself. Hear her body responding.

Her hands clenched as she bucked uncontrollably.

‘I can’t…’ Felicity managed. ‘It’s so much. Oh god!’

The mechanism increased its speed.

‘Keep going!’ Blackburn called. ‘You’re doing so well.’

There was nothing to do but keep going. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She just had to keep going.

‘F**k, oh f**k…’ Felicity cried out.

‘Do you want me to stop?’

‘No, god, no, please, no.’

Felicity could feel a trembling in her core, trying to break out, the relentless stimulation, the unrelenting brutality of the mechanism. Her thighs began to shake, then her legs and arms.

‘Oh god, I’m gonna…’ She didn’t finish the sentence. The shaking became total full-body spasms and were it not for the restraints Felicity would have collapsed as the most guttural animal sounds escaped from her lips. The heart rate monitor was screaming.

‘That was excellent, darling, most excellent’ said Dr Blackburn as she walked over to Felicity’s still trembling body. ‘We’ve collected some really good data there, well done.’

The scrape of metal wheels on cobbled paving indicated the machine was being moved away. Felicity waited for more words of praise, or instruction on what was going to happen next, but nothing came. Minutes passed. She’s left me, she thought. Left me like this.

…

Felicity’s pulse began to quicken, and her heart thundered. What if the doctor had suffered an accident? Or simply abandoned her? Had she made a mistake in trusting her?

She tried repeatedly to escape her bonds, but the straps had been buckled by expert hands. Oh God, she thought, how many others have gone through this? What have I done?

She thought about screaming, but would anyone hear? And if they did, did she want a complete stranger seeing her like this – naked, ashamed, afraid?

‘Sorry to keep you, darling,’

Felicity almost wept. ‘Oh, thank God – I thought you’d left me!’

Dr Blackburn tore away the blindfold and patted her gently on the shoulder.  She did not release her from her bonds, however. ‘Just preparing for part two of the experiment, darling.’

‘Part two?’

‘Oh, you don’t think I was only interested in pleasure, do you? I am now going to put you through unimaginable pain, all the while reading your responses. I am so very close to a scale for pain and pleasure, the Blackburn Scale if you will.’

‘Unimaginable pain? What the hell do you mean?’

Blackburn ignored her. She pressed a button on the monitoring system and suddenly the sensor pads across Felicity’s body ignited with a painful electric charge. She screamed violently. To her horror she watched as her discomfort manifested itself as a black liquid drawn from the needle in her skin into a the first of several empty vials waiting to be filled.

‘The essence of pain my darling. Stress hormones, mixed with Oxytocin and dopamine. I’ve been working so hard to get the ratio correct. I give you pleasure, and I take your pain. I feed on your pain. It sustains me. Would you believe, darling, that I’m nearly a hundred years old? This secretion could provide me with eternal youth. Thank you so much for your assistance in my refining the recipe. Thank you also for your physical contribution.’

Electric shocks of ever-growing proportion burnt through Felicity’s body like a bristling fever. She cried out, but the tears only made it worse. All the while the essence of her pain poured from her and was collected for Dr Blackburn. More tortures followed, the pain subsiding only for it to strike again.

‘You can’t do this!’ Felicity screamed, her muscles seizing, her body pouring with sweat. ‘Please stop! You can’t do this, you’re evil!’

‘I’ve heard it all before, darling.’ Blackburn flicked some switches and powered down the device. ‘That’s it. Experiment’s over.’

That was it? ‘I’ll tell everyone about this,’ she stated, trying again to break free of the restraints. It wasn't an empty threat. ‘I’ll warn everyone who’ll listen about you.’

Blackburn smiled cruelly. ‘No, I don't think you will, darling, not if you want me to keep private the video of you… enjoying yourself…’ she indicated a hidden camera in the ceiling. ‘Recorded purely for scientific purposes, of course.’

Felicity flushed with anger, and not just for her own mistreatment. ‘How many others have you blackmailed like this? Answer me. How many others have you done this to?’

‘A few,’ Blackburn admitted. ‘But you were the best, darling.’

Felicity thought for a moment before saying, ‘I'm not ashamed of what I've just done. But I am ashamed of being taken in by you, and I won't let you blackmail me into silence.’ She eyed the vials. ‘What you're doing is wrong, very wrong, and when I get off this table I’m going to expose you.’

She waited for a reaction, for the first time in her life strangely proud of herself. Confident.

‘Oh dear,’ Blackburn sighed. ‘I’d hoped you were going to be more malleable. But still, I have a contingency for every scenario. Why don’t you look up?’ The smile was maniacal now.

Straining from her awkward position on all fours, Felicity tried to look up as indicated. Her eyes doubled in size as terror seized her body. Above her shone the blade of a guillotine.

“It’s okay, you’ve got such a pretty head, I won’t waste it.” Doctor Blackburn said, opening the doors of a large cupboard behind her. It did not contain lab equipment. Large jars lined the shelves.

Felicity nearly passed out in fear at their contents. Severed heads. They each contained severed heads. The severed heads of several of the test subjects she’d seen over the long hot summer.

Felicity gasped - was this really happening? -  she tried so hard not to scream, not to give the evil doctor any further satisfaction.

‘They always like to say that the moment of death is painless, that you wouldn’t feel it, but do you know something, darling? My research has found that in the last split millisecond, everything goes off the scale.’ Dr Blackburn finished ominously before adding. ‘Oh, I should ask… any last words?’

‘You’ll go to hell for this,’ spat Felicity.

‘I know, darling. And my appointment is well overdue.’ 

The blade fell swiftly. Felicity’s head followed.

…

An anonymous telephone call alerted the authorities to the depraved experiments conducted by Dr Blackburn. I am pleased to say that Felicity was her last victim. The evil doctor is now the oldest resident of Bronzefield’s Women’s Prison, and judging by the latest photos she’s now starting to look her age…

We took possession of the fruits of Blackburn’s research. The life energy contained in these vials – more than just bodily fluids, it is anima itself - is too sacred to waste on mere vanity.

We were not able to clamp down on the doctor’s terrible research, however. Dr Blackburn’s work was published from prison with Felicity given a posthumous credit. The Beauty Industry is said to be very interested in her work…

Stay young and beautiful and enjoy your nightmares!