Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio’s wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable.He had feared, at first, as they stripped him, bound his wrists, and began to hoist him into the air thereby on a three-roped pulley, that they meant to torture him with the strappado, that agonizing dropping and jolting that cripples mind and body for life; but no, he was raised no more than his own height when the ropes were tied to stanchions and they shackled his ankles to rings in the floor, oping his thighs that his membrum virile and testicles hung lax and accessible above a grille in the four-sloped floor. Whereat he sweated harder at thought of worse tortures than the strappado: heated needles, salted blades, iron-jawed crushers; but again his fears were groundless, at least for the nonce. Having hoisted and chained him, the priestesses began to attach discs of some leaf or parchment to his body, pressing a moistened smaller in place ere a larger was pasted thereover, patterning his flesh therewith. One such was attached to his forehead, one to each temple, one over each nipple, each knee, one over his umbilicus, more for his buttocks, back, shoulders and nucha. He smelt some pungent herb on the breaths of some of the pasters, as though they had chewed it for the ritual.Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1794).
But the ritual not over with the discs: three priestesses swarmed up the ropes wherewith they had hoisted him, taut now on their stanchions; flipped up their skirts; and began to piss on him simul, directing their warm and pungent streams to every patch of his skin, that it was thoroughly soaked thereby, save for the disc-spots. And now he knew the reason for the slopes and grille in the floor, wheredown and wherethrough the piss trickled. Piss-soaking complete, the priestesses dropped lightly to the floor and departed the cell with their fellows, lamps carried out with them that he was left to darkness and his imaginings, which were spurred on by the prickle of drying piss on his skin. Mayhap starvation was their aim; freezing; desiccation; or they would return in an hour or day and commence the strappado or torment of his genitals.
Yet into none of these could he fit the double discs and drying piss, whereof the former were unintended for aught save temporary attachment, it seemed, for they were flaking and falling ere an hour had passed, exposing unpissed patches of his skin to the air. Another hour passed and he heard the lisp of a hem, the slut-slut of discalced feet on the polished stone of the corridor, a faint humming as of a goddess’s hymn, but the solitary priestess who returned brought no lamp her-with and seemed to have no need thereof, slipping with assurance through the door of his cell and laying somewhat on the floor before him with a faint clunk. Would lightlessness be a refinement of her torture? Was it a box before him of instruments this sacerdos solitaria would unlid and operate by touch merely? He moaned a little, therefore, as he heard a lid come off and laid to the floor beside that larger depositum; but a third time his fears were groundless: the priestess departed the cell and dwindled from him, hem fading first into silence, then feet, then humming. But what was this? Another humming was in his ears, a multiplex, braided and re-braided, rising and hovering from the unlidded box — mosquitoes, a dozen mosquitoes or more!
His mind flashed to exsanguination as his defenseless skin prickled and writhed, dreading the first touch of feather-light feet, the stab of a greedy proboscis. There, it came! And three more in the instant after, and more immediately after: they were settling to him, finding the unpissed patches of his skin, ready to penetrate him, commence the sucking of his blood. He cried out as the first bit, unable to restrain his disgust, sensing the insect begin to bloat on his blood. Yet the exsanguination would be slow with so few ab initio. Mayhap he was being infected rather with some fever, some racking cacoethes, to die thereby worse than by a human torture. Already the first of the mosquitoes was lifting away — he caught the altered hum of its wings, lifting a heavier load, carrying a blood-filled belly away for digestion on the high wall or ceiling of his cell. Another followed it, and another and another. His blood was easily tapped, heated and accelerated by his fears, as no doubt the priestesses intended it should be, or else his mind was racing, compressing minutes to seconds. Now he had fewer mosquitoes sucking than had lifted away, he thought, and already he seemed to feel the itch of abandoned bites in his skin, rising and swelling in its smoothness.
But ’twas no seeming: the swelling was tactible in sooth everywhere a mosquito had bitten. His flesh was throbbing on the pulse of his blood, sprouting outward in soft and lengthening horns. That horn sprouting from his forehead turned the key in his amazement, as it hung and lengthened, brushing down over his face: ’twas a cock, an extra cock magicked from the bite of a mosquito, one of a dozen extra he had been given by the priestesses. He struggled in his bounds as the cocks grew, feeling them flop obscenely to his movements, then calmed himself with an effort as light filtered again down the corridor and he knew the priestesses were returning. ’Twas two thereof now: one carrying the lamp and a box identical in shape to, but larger than, that sitting unlidded on the floor, t’other carrying a basin and feather, wherewith she first laved his true cock clean of piss, then began to tickle it after such wise that, against his will, it engorged and began to rise, raising by sympathy all his new cocks also. Hereat, the girl carrying the box laid it to the floor and unlidded it, wherefrom further mosquitoes flew, thirsty for the blood in his thirteen jutting members.
He shook his head and struggled, closing his eyes against the ruby wall-dots where the first-fed mosquitoes rested, but it availed him naught: he felt mosquitoes settling to his cocks and biting. The priestesses departed and he cursed them as they went, making the walls ring with his rage and despair. And it succeeded as before: mosquitoes sucked and swelled, then, full-fed, lifted and flew, leaving their bites to itch and swell on his cocks, that the flesh lifted therefrom in further and smaller cocks, as if they were cock-twigs on the cock-branches on the cock-trunk of his body. Cocks on cocks on a cock! He raved the thought aloud, quieting not when he saw light again of returning priestesses. This time there were five, four of whom carried filled buckets wherewith they drenched and cleansed his body of its piss-crust, ere the fifth knelt before him and took the head of his true cock into her mouth, licking thereat to engorge it and the others by sympathy, ere, most skilful, moist-mouthed, and warm-fleshed of the priestesses, she began the final fellatio wherein, from the heads of a hundred-and-eighty-two cocks, large and small, he would know the ejaculatio ad mortem.