Free Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades by Jeffrey Thomas

the animals, with its phallic eyeless head and jaws overflowing with fangs, would try to nose its way through the mesh of the cages to get at the succulent meat within, but the openings were too small.
    "Would anybody get mad if I shot these Damned right through the cages?" Rule whispered to their guide.
    "Please be patient, sir. The wind current is approaching." He pointed a free hand up at the blades of the windmill, which had begun to spin…lazily, then more quickly, until bursts of breeze made the metal pinwheel blur.
    They were near enough now that Petty could see the three Damned souls were nude young women. He leaned against the rail, gripping it more firmly.
    Suddenly, like a freight train, the wind arrived. Petty was glad he had a firm grip on the rusty rail. His hood blew off. The calm surface of the Red Sea was whipped up into a pink foam, suds of it spattering him and the deck. The intermittent blurring of the windmill blades became steady, until they were invisible. At the base of the machine, there was a screech and grinding, as gears started to turn, greasy chains to move like tendons.
    The three cages began to rise, uncovering their delectable contents. The women squirmed, twisted their lithe white bodies, but their wrists were still bound above their heads. A sound rose above the gusting wind, the noises of machinery. They were wailing. Sobbing. It was an unearthly sound, like sirens calling to Ulysses and his men…to drive them mad with lust…to lure them to their death among the rocks.
    Then, the eels darted in. One coordinated movement, like a shoal of fish abruptly changing direction. And not only that, but other eels seemed to appear out of nowhere. Out of the sea? Out of hiding places in the windmill’s skeleton? Had they come up from behind the boat in a swarm? Wherever they had materialized from, the dozen had turned to a hundred…and they converged on the three screaming women in a dense flock.
    "Like clockwork," Captain Eridan noted proudly, as if the torture device were of his own design.
    Rule had stiffened at his gun, was obviously ready to launch a spear into one of the three newly exposed women, but the spectacle of the eels swooping in on them made him lift his head from the scope and mutter, "My God."
    "Yes,"  Eridan said, with a crescent grin.
    At last, like the hand of a clock, the boat had come around to the front of the tiny island, and Eridan cut the motor so they could watch the feeding frenzy clearly.
    Petty was reminded of paintings of St. Sebastian, his arms lashed above or behind him, his bare chest pierced by arrows. Except that these were females, and the arrows whipped their tails, alive, their heads buried in smooth white flesh. For whatever reason, however, whether by natural inclination or training, the beasts obviously preferred the flesh and muscle of the face. Only a few chewed at the bodies below; the rest had covered the faces of the trio, muffling and choking off their cries.
    Rule spun to the side of the boat and vomited violently over the rail. That made Petty smirk a little. So much for the great white hunter.
    Blood did not stream down those nude bodies from the savaged faces—the hovering eels drank it up before it could trickle far. Despite the living nightmares completely enveloping their heads—or because of the heightened contrast—their bodies still struck Petty as immensely beautiful. Like the Venus de Milo without her arms, making her torso all the lovelier. Their succulent flesh was like the white stone of that statue, a marred purity. Petty couldn’t blame the eels for their passion; he almost wanted to consume the flesh himself.
    He moved to the abandoned harpoon gun to press his eye to the scope, not caring what Eridan or his men or Rule might think of his blatant voyeurism.
    Oh yes, that unalloyed beauty, stripped of clothes, of pretense, of society (and soon, of faces, leaving only the graceful figures without the rejecting sneer of lips, the