I have only a short time, so I will tell my story briefly. Her name was Claire - but I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is…, well Mark will do. I don't want to embarrass people who know me, so my name is a pseudonym. Does it matter? It all started with a play.
This play was a variation on a Hollywood film - a standard, apparently. A version of the Devil offers someone three wishes, and the protagonist wangles his way out of selling his soul. Anyway, the play isn't really important, it's what we planned to do in the play that matters. Oh yes, that's what really started it all off.
The girl chosen to play the devil was Claire - I knew her from afar, but she had that something that I thought would give the character some spark. It wasn't her looks, though she was pretty; it wasn't her acting, although it was more than adequate; it wasn't her appearance, although 5ft 10ins was a good start for a devil woman; and it wasn't her voice, but she could sound really nasty on demand. It was a combination of all these things, carefully shaken together and before our eyes - in jeans and T-shirt - we had our devil.
A lot of the budget was to be spent on making Claire a believable devil. She loved this part of the production - maybe, in hindsight, a little too much. I'll start from the top down.
Head. She was a natural blonde, with shoulder-length straight hair that rarely seemed to need attention. This framed her slightly angular face, with brown eyes and a straight, medium-sized nose and gently pouting lips, with a raised centre to her upper lip. Her whole face was as if she had had her chin pulled downwards, creating a slight V-impression to the outline of her cheeks. She smiled a lot, but this hid the seriousness of her nature. This was no Bimbo, but a bright, perceptive woman with lots of insights and intelligence to offer.
Body. She wasn't one of those skinny models that look as if they could do with a good feed, but a normal - but not bulky or even fat - body with small to medium breasts and a slight natural hourglass to her figure. Evidence of muscles, but not a bodybuilder. Feminine but not overpowering. Medium-wide hips, again not over-the-top but properly proportioned. I can't describe exactly what she looked like here, because I don't have the vocabulary. However, she didn't wear much fancy clothing, preferring practical day-to-day clothing; jumpers, T-shirts, etc.
Legs. When shown, these were well shaped. The muscles giving her a almost perfect legs without needing tights or fish-net stockings - although when in these garments her legs - she knew they were her best feature - could win awards. These powerful legs also gave her the poise of a catwalk model, but without any effort. It was just the way she walked.
Claire liked trainers, which didn't add to her height too much. However, she could walk - and walk well - in heels, giving her a total height of over six feet in the right shoes. She was classically statuesque at these times, and if you didn't know her she was intimidating.
All this was saved by her nature. She was a gentle, softly-spoken woman. Oh, she was 27, by the way. Old enough for her features to have settled into full adulthood, without the softness of adolescence/early 20s and the wear and tear of middle age. This wasn't to say she was hard looking - that wasn't Claire - the impression was of marble, not granite. To say she was a sweet girl would be going too far - she was human, not some fantasy woman. Her face betrayed evidence of thinking too much at times about the world - when in neutral there was a slight frown, almost a scowl. Again, not a fluffy-bunny cotton wool woman, but a realist. When she smiled - genuinely smiled, for her fake I'll-just-go-along-with-this smile wasn't convincing - she was lovely. Her looks and beauty smouldered, rather than glowed. She knew this, and once said that she had the radiance of a film noir movie. Not a menace, rather an intelligence. I know that doesn't make much sense, but I can't describe it any other way.
It was when her laptop broke that I became involved with her. I was the technician responsible for sound in the play - I worked the tape recorder - and happened to know a bit about computers. Being handy with a soldering iron, I managed to fix the connecting cable, inside her just-out-of-guarantee computer, between her keyboard and the main motherboard, without wrecking it. She had been pounding the keyboard when typing, and it had fractured - a dry joint probably. Anyway, we hit it off and became mates, then friends, then lovers - all in the space of a few days. I seemed to compliment her, so she said, but in what ways I wasn't - and still am not - sure. I started to understand her - I could empathise with her, in a way, and she with me. We worked in the a similar way, with regards to the world and it foibles, and became a team. Later on we found we had the same tastes and opinions concerning her outfit for the play, so she could rely on my observations from the tenth row back from the stage, and any suggestions I made seemed to coincide with her intuition concerning her appearance up on stage. We rarely disagreed. We even would work on perfecting the outfit at home, with creative ideas bouncing back and forth between us; at times, almost manically. We seemed driven. I'm going to concentrate on her outfit in detail, because it's important to me, and also because we put a lot of work into it and I want that credited. Anyway, the first idea we came up with was for Claire to have hooves. These came from some normal - but platformed - shoes padded out with papier mâché to give a rounded appearance, then wrapped in material that gave a hoof appearance when all painted black. This was attached to the bottom of some very hairy socks which had the foot cut off, and painted the same red as Claire would be painted when in costume. This was to give the impression of proper hooves, and as the heel on the shoe was built up more and more, the foot became more vertical and the hoof became more rounded - eventually it was pretty accurate. Some extra false hair was added to the sock - especially at the back - to give a proper horse lower leg appearance. With judicious padding in the correct place the shape of the lower leg was altered to give the impression of that funny-looking extra joint at the bottom of a horse's rear leg - which when paraded up and down by Claire was jarringly effective. Showing her film of her movement, and watching horses on video tape, enabled her to fine tune the walk and a sort of strutting, prancing walk was achieved. Claire's legs were shapely enough for the rest of the leg - painted red, cloth didn't look right - and some (very) tight-fitting shorts, suitably modified as to blend seamlessly into her legs, created the lower part of the devil.
Next came the tail. This had to come out of the bottom of her spine at the correct angle, otherwise it just looked like a stuck-on tail. Using make-up glue - I forget the proper term - the flat top of the tail was carefully positioned over the base of her spine and through a very craftily placed hole in the shorts. To stop it sticking out like a branch, the tail had a carefully selected piece of wire running along it's length, up the centre. This was so that the weight of the tail would slowly bend the tail down over a period of about a few minutes - enough for Claire to do a scene, then get off and have it re-set by hand into the next position needed. Set up with care, this could look like - along with the occasional swing of the hips - that it was actually alive. It took about half-an-hour of fiddling to get the right weight of coiled solder wire in the flat triangular tail to balance this effect properly.
Claire's torso - with a black bra, aggressively enhanced - was enough, although some more glued hair down her spine gave a slightly animal look. This ran all the way up her neck, although in moderation above the start of her rib cage. We didn't want her to look Neanderthal. Naturally she wore false fingernails - not too long, or it would look silly - and careful makeup on her fingers to give them a more spindly look.
Then we applied what Claire thought up at a late stage in the design - her extra breasts. She noticed, from a Polaroid taken showing her side on - that her lower ribs could, with a little padding and a false nipple, become another pair of breasts. She became quite excited and animated about this, and eventually convinced the rest of us that a devil would have extra breasts - for torment and the pain in sexual excitement, she said. So into the mix they went, and she looked convincing and very alluring. Head. She wore fangs, of course, but not big bite-the-neck-off-a-bull type. These were about a quarter of an inch longer than her normal teeth, so that a) she could close her mouth, b) so she could talk, and c) so she could eat and drink on-stage without too much chance of them being knocked off by the cup she was using or the food she was eating - she learned to bite with her centre teeth to help avoid this. We tried various contact lenses, but none seemed as effective as her own brown with the makeup we used.
The final bit was her horns. These were about three inches long, and carefully moulded with little ridges of skin at the base, so that when they were glued in place they looked as if the horns had grown out of her skull, not just been stuck on. Symmetrical and twisting outwards slightly, they were more effective than bigger horns, which also had weight problems and Claire had to move too gently lest they fall off. Her three inch horns were big enough for effect, but small enough not to impede her movement. Claire added the final touch by visiting the hairdressers one afternoon and having some hair extensions fitted, which gave her some flowing lock down her back. Couple all this with her vocal talents - a roar that could curdle milk - and our devil was complete.
Then the local priest saw her, in rehearsals and in full makeup, and put a spanner in the works. He was a priest of the old school, a very nice man but strict in his opinions, and in his opinion she was too realistic. She didn't look like a human in makeup, she looked like a devil. We took this as a compliment until he told us that he thought this was risky. He didn't object to the play - it was a morality tale in which the devil is beaten, after all - but her appearance upset and frightened him. He bought along some friends. They too were shocked by Claire in full flight. This was hazardous, they all said. It was playing this too close to the knuckle. It was dangerous, they claimed.
We didn't laugh - that would have been insulting - but we stuck our ground and said that we'd put a lot of work in to getting Claire's appearance right, and if it was having that effect it was working well. Yes, they said, but where did we think the inspiration had come from? What route had it taken into our minds and how had we achieved this? Claire was an erotic devil moving on the stage with a slinkiness and grace that was immensely attractive and sensual. This might give out the wrong signals to the audience, suggesting that evil and the devil are to be desired. Because most of Claire's body - although painted red - was visible, it gave more an impression of reality than a one-piece red leather outfit. The hooves were also a bad move - they made her legs immensely shapely, and something like that with hooves was perilous. Basically, this was inviting trouble.
Our attitude was that this was the start of the 21st Century, not the 16th, and those fears and superstitions were no longer a part of the average man and woman's lives. The devil still lived in the 21st, we were told. Just because he wasn't believed in by the majority didn't make him not real. It was a case of immovable object blocking an irresistible force, as Claire put it one day after some particularly heated discussions. Eventually the priest and his expert friends said they would picket the outside of the theatre when we put the play on if nothing was done to downgrade Claire's appearance - we were glad of the extra publicity.
All this naturally attracted a few nuts, and it was one of them that somehow fixed the car that Claire was driving me to a restaurant out in the country for a pre-opening night meal. Lack of brake fluid - the inquest said the lines had been carefully slit to allow the seepage of fluid gently, rather than immediately giving away the game - and a large brick wall conspired to kill both of us, despite average seat belts and no air bags in Claire's old banger.
So this is where I am. We should have listened to the priest and his friends. They were right. For sacrilegious crimes, promotion of the evil, and general stupidity in not listening to our potential savours, I am in Hell.
My time is up. One hour in twenty-four I am allowed to rest and recuperate, although I think it's a more subtle type of horror - thinking about my mistakes and dwelling on them, writing them up and being able to do nothing about it. I am to be tortured by a special person. For her superb impersonation of a devil Claire has been made into one, an exact duplicate of her outfit (but it is now really her body), and she is my tormentor. She is also made to enjoy it with a massive relish, although I think I sometimes see - very rarely, or is it just my imagination and/or hope? - in her eyes the pain and suffering she is going through in what she does to me. She is totally naked, and her nakedness is highly erotic to me, but she has real hooves, and a real tail, and real fangs, and real horns, and real breasts, and a sadistic side that I didn't know was there - it's vicious. That's part of the pain, being hurt by the one you really love - and I'm not allowed to ever fall out of love for her, or lose my extreme desire for her, just as she's not ever allowed to feel full compassion for me. The pleasure of pain, or the pain of pleasure, I'm not sure. I want her so bad, but all she wants to do is hurt me - and she is creative. This is her expression of her love, a twisted misrepresentation of extreme love, and it is real. She occasionally says something, and from this disconnected statements she thinks she is pleasing me - doing what I want, and being rewarded in return. She thinks her pain is worth it, and she inflicts, maybe to absolve herself? Am I reading too much into the situation, and all she is a torturing and sadistic devil, laughing as the trident - she's a traditionalist - enters my thigh.
I'm becoming delirious again. The pain is about to start, and I'm trying desperately to find reason and method in this madness. The pain, however, is real.
For both of us? Whether this is true or not, it is for ever.
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