1976 06-128 Channah & Rivqah show their cards… and their claws
1978 06-128 …and I bet he can take it all the way up to HERE
Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-128X The Chamber of Torment II at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman
PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials who were supervising their torture of a Venetian prisoner in the Room of Torment of the Doge’s Palace. Now one of Venice’s 3 Capos—who rotate responsibility for day-to-day management of Venice—awakens to find himself bound and hanging by his wrists, which are tied behind his back, with his knee shattered, learning that his captors know him already. NOW:
“Finally. You find yourself in the place you most deserve, Gasparo Orseolo.”
The capo couldn’t conceal the uneasy alarm in his voice. “How—how do you recognize me?!”
The women laughed. “We don’t ‘recognize’ you,” Rivqah assured him.
And Channah explained: “We came for you. We picked a night when you would be on duty here. Because we want to know what you know. Well…” she exchanged an amused glance with Rivqah. “That’s half the truth. They say if you want a thing done right, you should do it yourself. But that’s why I keep charge of training my operatives: to make sure every one of them is trained right. If all I wanted from you was information, I could have sent any one of them here for you tonight. Instead of honoring you—and indeed, all of Venice—with my esteemed presence, and that of my Duchesses, in this little backwater.”
“Backwater?! Duchess—” the Capo looked genuinely incredulous and confused, as well he might. Venice was one of the brightest lights in Latin Christendom, and (in his relatively seasoned and well-informed experience) Duchesses were ladies rather than thieves and assassins. “But—what could you possibly want from me?!”
“24 Sha’ban, 921.”
“What?”
Channah made a circular motion with her hand. “Ahhh…” looking mildly frustrated, she shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter to us.”
“What you would call, um… Wednesday, October 3rd, anno Domini 1515,” Rivqah clarified, with exaggerated formality.
“Thank you, my dear.”
Orseolo looked discomfited, nervous, and uncertain. “October… October two years ago….” His thoughts were slow, even stuck.
Channah let him fumble around for a moment, her eyes flat and hard. “This one, for your sake, I hope you can remember: Anzola Ipato.”
Orseolo gasped. “You—you are what, her sisters? I promise you—I swear to you in the Lord’s name, the Anzola Ipato I knew, she was not your sister!”
“Oh, yes she was!”
“No, I swear it—your poor sister had departed before I ever met her. The Devil had already taken her! Her body was a vessel for him when she was brought to me. I swear it! Three patricians swore it to me and I confirmed it.”
Both women were incensed, stepping forward, faces contorting with rage. “Liar! She was no devil!”
The Capo’s voice rose several octaves, as if they’d already castrated him: “I swear it! The Archibishop himself confirmed it! Her flesh was scarred by Holy Water—it evaporated on he—”
“You threw holy water on her?!” Channah’s hand shot out to seize his jaw and pinch it, hard, impossibly hard for what Orseolo imagined to be a frail woman.
He was baffled and scared; their reactions completely inappropriate, indeed illogical. “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m telling you—we tried to save her! We did everything we could to expel the demon from her!”
“You did expel the demon from her, exorcist! And with it, extinguished her ability to live and move in this world!”
“What–?!” No one had ever been more baffled than Gasparo Orseol was in that moment. “Praise be to the Holy Mother Church!”
“Fuck and damn the Holy Mother Church!”
“Who are you?!” He wailed.
And with a sly glance at one another, for his reward, they showed him.
It took him a moment to wrap his mind around what he was seeing, the horns rising from their foreheads, their teeth and fingernails sharpening and lengthening, their skin taking on a ruddy hue under the olive one, and even—though he didn’t spot them until later—their tails extending under their skirts to swirl and brush the floor. But as soon as he did begin to try and make sense of the insensible, to the succubae’s delight, Orseolo started quaking and blithering Catholic incantations: “Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art th—”
“You honor the mother of your lord by urinating?!” the demonesses laughed.
“Wh—what?” Orseolo looked down and sobbed to see the evidence of his own shame on the platform below him. Then he noticed a second puddle, much larger, and of a much darker and stickier liquid, on the same surface but much nearer to his head than his groin. What attracted his attention was movement, of another dark red drop plummeting past him to land in the puddle. Gasping with shock, before even thinking how much sudden motion would hurt him, he craned his neck to look up, his screech of pain turning into a prolonged scream of terror at the sight of his Lord of the Night hanging half a dozen feet above him by the very same rope.
The two demonesses chuckled and shook their heads. “We haven’t even started to torture him properly yet!” Rivqah clucked her disappointment.
The demonesses simply enjoyed his horror and shock, drinking it in and appraising it with experienced eyes for perhaps 2 or 3 minutes, until he came back to them, and to the room around him, well enough to start thinking and calculating and—this was the sweetest to them—hoping and praying as desperately as he was fearing and dreading, all at once plunged into a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.
As his eyes came back into focus on Channah’s, Channah asked him conversationally: “You’re an experienced torturer. What are the advantages of the strappado?”
“Wh—what?”
“Over, say… the Judas seat. Or…” she raised her hand, holding an exquisitely-detailed and -inlaid dagger with a radically curved blade. “a simple blade?”
“I don’t—I—I—”
“Oh, I am disappointed,” Channah professed, shaking her head and frowning. “First question, and a simple one. And not even a state secret, by any stretch of the imagination. And you can’t answer it. It’s so easy: Longevity. Specifically, yours.” She shrugged. “Relatively speaking, of course. You know you’re going to die where you hang, don’t you?”
“What?” he barked hoarsely, like a small dog kicked in the stomach.
“You’re never going to leave that rope,” she explained slowly, as if speaking to a small child. “Not inside your body, anyway. Never going to know another second free of pain.” She tut-tutted, as if there were something about the situation she regretted, rather than relished. “Never going to be happy again.”
“Hallelujah, I will when I join my Lord—”
And here both of them laughed, a sharp, mocking cackle with a supreme confidence that rattled the Capo. “Oh, is that where you think you’re headed?” Channah could barely contain her mirth.
Literature Section “06-128[X] The Chamber of Torment II “—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 128 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1087 words::Explicit 1200 words—Accompanying Images: 1976-1979—Published 2025-06-30—©2025 The Remainderman. This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions. It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.