Julia in the Possessed Convent

The gravel road ended at a courtyard that still remembered processions, and I was standing in it with plaster dust on my sleeves when Julia Schmidt walked through the gate. I am Tomas Reiter, forty-four, a restorer who has lived in the cells of this deconsecrated convent in Brandenburg since the summer, and I already knew what she had come for because the thing the sisters bound had been riding my sleep for months. She was twenty-four, slender in a dark coat, strawberry blonde hair pulled back from a face that did not look afraid. The early winter light made the empty cloister look thinner than it was, and the boarded chapel at the far end held its silence like a closed mouth.

“You should turn around,” I said, and I meant every word of it. “There is something in this house that uses a man’s mouth. I have not been alone in my own voice since August.”

She looked at the chapel and then at me, and her green eyes did not flinch. “Elias sent a warning. I came with it anyway.” That was the only past she offered, one clean line, and then she opened her coat as if the cold were a minor inconvenience. I could see a pale seam along her throat, cold as porcelain, already longer than a scratch. She said she had been split between image and hunger and that walking away would leave me ridden and her unfinished. I told her the cells were damp and that I did not want to hurt her. She stood close enough that I could smell winter on her hair and she answered that hurt was not the same as being taken, and that she would tell me if she needed it to stop. I asked her to stay the night. We agreed, there in the courtyard, that if the occupation insisted it would finish through us, and that both of us were choosing the dark rather than the road back to the station.

Evening came down over the Brandenburg fields like a lid. I had given her the cell beside mine, a narrow room with a cot and a window that faced the cloister, and I was standing in the doorway with a lamp when my own voice left me. Heat moved up my spine and settled behind my teeth, and when I spoke again the words were mine in shape and not in will. Julia rose from the edge of the cot without asking whose request it was. She crossed the stone in three unhurried steps and put her hands on my chest, and I could feel her pulse through the wool of my shirt as if she were counting me.

The thing in me wanted her mouth first. I told her so in a voice that had lost its kindness, and she went to her knees as if she had been waiting for that instruction since the gate. I unfastened my trousers and she took my cock out with both hands, looking up once, green and steady, before she opened and let me push into the heat of her mouth. I held her hair. I fucked her mouth slowly at first, because I was still in there somewhere and I did not want to choke her, and then the presence leaned its weight through my hips and I went deeper. She made a sound around me that was not protest. Her eyes watered and she kept them open, and when I pulled back she followed, sucking, spit shining on her lower lip and running down to her chin.

I told her she was doing it properly. She pulled off long enough to say, “Then do not be gentle with the rest of it,” and took me again, farther, until I felt the back of her throat and her hands braced on my thighs. The cell was cold. Her mouth was not. I rocked into her until my legs shook, watching her throat work, watching the seam there darken as if something under the skin were listening. When I pulled out she was breathing hard, lips wet, and she stayed on her knees looking up as if the night had only started. I could have come then. The thing in me would not allow it. It wanted her cunt, and it wanted the chapel later, and I stood over her with my cock shining from her mouth and felt the first real fear of the evening, which was not of her but of how completely she had already agreed.

I lifted her onto the cot. The mattress was thin and the frame complained, and I got her coat off and then the rest, dress and stockings and the black of her underwear, until she was naked in the lamplight with that athletic line from shoulder to hip and her strawberry hair coming loose around her face. I put my mouth on her breast and then lower, because I wanted her wet before the thing in me stopped asking, and she opened her legs and let me taste her, salt and heat, her fingers in my hair with a pressure that was instruction rather than pleading. She was already slick. I told her so, because the words were still partly mine. She said, “Then stop describing it and put it in me.”

I did. I pushed my cock into her cunt in one long press that made her head fall back against the pillow, and I held there, buried, feeling her clench around me as if she could keep me inside by force of will. Then I fucked her. The cot knocked the wall in a rhythm the cloister would have heard if anyone else had been alive in the house. I took her wrists and pinned them above her head when she asked for it, when she said, “Hold me down, Tomas, I need it to be heavier than I am,” and I did, my weight on her arms, my hips driving, her breasts shaking with each thrust. She was tight and she was loud in a low way, not a performance, just sound forced out of her when I went deep enough to make her lose the elegant line of her sentences.

The presence liked her held. I could feel it enjoying the restraint the way a hand enjoys a latch. I kept her wrists and I put my other hand at her throat, not closing yet, just there, the seam under my palm, and she nodded, a small fierce motion, so I pressed until her breath shortened and her cunt gripped me harder. Her green eyes stayed on mine. When I let air back in she gasped and came around my cock in a long shaking that made her thighs lock against my sides, her whole body trying to rise into the pin of my hands. I almost followed her. The thing in me pulled back from the edge as if it were saving the finish for another room, and I hated it for that even as I kept moving inside her through the last of her climax, slower, watching her face as the pleasure turned into something rawer.

I eased the pressure at her throat. I kissed her mouth, which tasted of me, and I stayed inside her while she trembled through the after of it, her wrists still in my grip because she had not asked me to let go. “We are not done,” she said, unhurried, turning the last word as if it belonged to me now. “You know that.” I knew. The chapel was waiting, and so was whatever the sisters had bound, and Julia Schmidt on that cot looked like a woman who had already decided to be the door.

We dressed only enough to cross the cloister. Early winter had put frost on the flagstones, and the boarded chapel took the lamp like a mouth taking a coin. I pried two boards and we went in. The nave was stripped, plaster repaired in patches I had made myself, and the floor was stone that held the cold of the fields. Julia walked to the place where an altar would have been and took off what she had put back on, coat and dress, until she stood bare in the wreck of consecration with the seam on her throat looking longer than it had in the cell, a porcelain line that had grown while I was inside her.

I was still ridden. My hands did not feel like mine when I set the lamp down. She looked at me, at it, and she stopped directing. The playfulness went out of her mouth without leaving her certainty. “Take me properly,” she said. “Hold me down and use me until it leaves you through me. I am asking. We are choosing this.” I heard myself agree. I heard the thing agree. The two agreements were not the same, and they landed in the same breath. I did not want to hurt her. I told her that again, in the last stretch of my own voice, and she came to me and put my hands on her wrists as if she were handing me a tool she trusted. “Then do not hurt me,” she said. “Do the rest.”

I put her on the stone. The floor was brutal with cold and she hissed when her back met it, and then I was over her, my trousers open, my cock still wet from the cell, and I pushed into her cunt again without preamble because she was still open from before. She cried out, not from pain, from the shock of being filled on that floor, and I caught her wrists and pinned them to the stone above her head, my fingers locked around the narrow bones. I fucked her hard from the first stroke. The chapel threw the sound back at us, skin and breath and the wet of her around me, and I watched her face because her pleasure was the only honest measure I had left.

I moved my right hand to her throat. I held her there, thumb and fingers along the sides, the seam under my palm like a second mouth, and I pressed until her face changed, until the wanting in her eyes went bright and frightened and still wanting. She could have tapped the floor. She had said she would. She did not. She lifted her hips into the thrusts as her air thinned, and I fucked her through that, watching her, counting in my head so I would let go before injury, and when I released her she dragged in a broken breath and said my name as if it were a rope she could still climb. “Again,” she whispered. “Do not stop.”

I did it again. Restraint and breath and the long filthy rhythm of my cock in her, the presence pouring down my spine into the place we were joined. She was crying by then, not from refusal, from the overflow of it, emotional distress written openly on her face while her legs stayed wrapped around me and her wrists stayed where I had put them. I told her she was beautiful like that. I told her I could feel it leaving me. She nodded against my hand and took the next press on her throat with her eyes open, green going dark, and her cunt fluttered and then seized, and she came on the chapel floor with my weight on her wrists and my palm on her neck, a climax that pulled a sound out of her I will not forget, raw and complete, her whole body lifting into mine as if she could drag the occupation out of me by coming hard enough.

I did not last past that. I drove in to the root and spent inside her, pulse after pulse, filling her cunt while the thing in me tore loose from the back of my skull and went down through my cock and into her. I felt it leave. I felt the sudden ordinary weight of my own body, forty-four years and plaster dust and fear, and I felt her take it, her back arching, the seam on her throat splitting its line down across her chest in a crack I could see even in the lamplight. I stayed in her through the last of my coming and through the first of her new occupancy, which showed in the way her eyes unfocused and then returned, greener, as if something had sat down behind them and found the furniture acceptable.

I let go of her throat and her wrists and I gathered her off the stone as much as I could, my coat under her shoulders, and she shook in my arms with my come leaking out of her onto the floor of a house that had once been holy. She was still coming down, still occupied in a way I no longer was, and she held my face and did not speak until her breathing found a human pace again. I kissed her hair and the new crack on her chest, which was cold as the porcelain of old dolls, and I told her I was myself. She said she could feel the convent in her now, not as a guest but as a seating, and she did not sound triumphant. She sounded like a woman who had gotten exactly what she came for and was already paying.

I carried her back to the cell. I washed her as well as the basin allowed, cloth and lukewarm water over the crack and over the bruises my hands had left on her wrists, none of them broken, all of them asked for. We slept in the narrow cot with her spine against my chest, and I did not dream, which was the first night in months that had belonged only to me. In the dark she reached back and found my hand and put it over the crack as if she wanted a witness, and I kept it there until sleep took us both.

Morning was grey and honest. Frost on the cloister, my head clear, Julia sitting on the edge of the cot with her coat around her shoulders and that crack visible where the coat fell open, a pale line from throat to sternum that had not been there at the gate. She was quiet in a way that was not peace. I made coffee on the little stove and we drank it without pretending the night had been only sex. The hunger in her had a house now, and the house was this one, and she could not get the convent out of her any more than I could put the thing back into my own mouth.

“I cannot get it out of me,” she said, vowels held a little longer than English likes, each consonant set down as if it might bruise. “The house is in the crack. That is the cost.”

I went to the cupboard I had not opened for her the day before and took out what the sisters had kept in linen, an adult portrait doll wrapped in cloth, the size of a grown woman’s torso and the face of a woman, the wrapping stained with old wax. I put it in her hands because it was no longer mine to keep, and because the thing that had ridden me had been bound to more than one object in this place. “They kept her in the sacristy,” I said. “I was told not to unwrap her. I am giving her to you anyway.”

Julia held the bundle against the crack on her chest. She did not unwrap it. She looked at me with those green eyes and she was still Julia Schmidt under the occupation, confident enough to accept a gift that was also a sentence, and she said, “Then it is mine.” I walked her to the gate in the early winter morning. She put the wrapped doll under her arm as if it were only luggage, and I knew, watching her go down the gravel, that the cloth would not be enough. The wrapped adult portrait doll will not stay an object once it is opened.