Free The Witch of Cologne by Tobsha Learner Page B

crossing his legs, was thankful for the long weighty cassock concealing his stiffening organ.
    He had not slept for a week after that, haunted each night by impossible temptations. To cleanse himself he took to fasting and making endless supplications to Saint Dominic, Saint Anthony and, for good measure, Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate situations. Only after much prayer and several stuttering confessions did the young friar finally convince himself that the rightful action, should his pupil show her affections one more time, would be to declare his love.
    The music tutor had arrived at their next lesson trembling with anticipation. Giggling wildly, the twelve year old, her lush hair fighting to be released from its demure cowl, presented the blushing friar with a love letter she had written and asked him if he could examine it for grammar. Carlos’s heart leapt when she explained that her secret love was a literary man and she wished to make no error.
    ‘It is an affection that dares not declare itself,’ she told him, her eyes wide and serious.
    Abandoning all protocol, convinced now of their mutual adoration, he had flung his arms around her and kissed her passionately. ‘ Mi corazón, mi tesoro, me llenas el alma. I knew you would come to me.’
    Horrified, the girl pushed him away violently then slapped him. The stinging blow shocked Carlos to his very core. Deeply mortified he clutched his reddened cheek while, furious, the young girl stormed up and down in front of him.
    ‘I shall not betray your actions to my father only because you are a great teacher and a great musician, but if you place another finger on me I shall tell of your terrible impudence. What kind of a man of God are you to assume such a thing?’
    ‘Firstly, I am a man, despite these robes. Secondly, I had thought that—’
    ‘What? That I should love you? You are a peasant, señor, a peasant wrapped in a cassock. Do not forget your place.’
    Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.
    That night Carlos felt his abasement clawing his back like some hideous hag he could not shake off. Profoundly shamed, he twisted from side to side on the hay pallet in his small cell. When the talons of mortification finally lifted and sleep mercifully descended, a woman visited his dreams. A beautiful creature, seven feet tall, her black hair streaming behind her, her sex a pulsating scented bush that drew his eyes and fingers, her heavy breasts taunting pillows crowned with huge buttonlike nipples that seemed to dance before him as she rode him like a wild bucking mare. The young friar woke in the morning embarrassed to find his thighs stained with his own seed. A demon has visited me, he thought, crossing himself in an attempt to purify what had been made impure. She has stolen my seed and she will steal my sanity.
    The next night he had one of the priests bind his wrists together to prevent him inadvertently touching himself during sleep. But the fiend came to him anyway, laughing derisively at the leather bindings, touching his sex with her mouth and hands until the struggling friar surrendered himself to the shuddering pleasures she brought.
    After a week of hallucinations, Carlos, now hollow-eyed and thin, borrowed one of the friary donkeys and rode for three hours to visit the seminary at Villanueva de Gállego, famous for its library containing the largest collection of writings on witchcraft in Christendom.
    As he turned the pages of an illustrated manuscript in the huge Gothic athenaeum, the vaulted arches above writhing with carved granite forests and imaginary monsters of Satanic proportions, Carlos finally recognised the evil spirit which had been possessing him. Lilith. First wife of Adam, Lilith the seducer, the murderess of newborn children, Lilith who used the nocturnal emissions of innocent men to beget her demon children. Lilith the grandmother of Satan. The discovery sent him running out into the sun-scorched grounds where, trembling, he