"Happy eighteenth birthday, Paul."
Paul wished those words came from a girlfriend. Or a even a friend. Or virtually everyone, but not his mother.
He looked up at her. Leah didn't look her thirty-nine years: she was slim, busty, and today she was dressed in almost provocative way: a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that bared her midriff and emphasized her feminine features. She had blond hair that fell to her shoulders in shiny freckles.
"Thanks", he said without much enthusiasm. Paul didn't have much to look forward to. Ever since his father left them Paul felt achingly alone. Aloof, unable to make any friend and approach any girls, he felt he was destined for loneliness.
"If you don't mind, I'll be seeing Mrs. Pradesh this evening."
Great, thought Paul, another evening spent alone in front of a TV. He didn't trust this Pradesh woman at all. She was roughly the age of his mother and she was... dark. Dark in every imaginable way: swarthy, like people of India, and there was a disturbing air about her. Paul heard rumors, disturbing rumors about Mrs. Pradesh: a bunch of local kids said they saw light ("unnatural light, like, you know, in the movies") coming out of her window at midnight. Once in a while a word was dropped in relation to Mrs. Pradesh: "Kamadora". An ancient Goddess, worshiped with rites so cruel, alien and perverse that one had to be really twisted to be exiled from the cult and its distant homeland.
The rumors of the cult spread across the States, but few heeded them. It was just another urban legend. There was, almost always, a sexual component to the stories, which is why they were so often whispered, with sneer, among high-school students. Paul didn't believe the rumors. There was no hidden cult. And Mrs. Pradesh was probably just another naturalized foreigner. So there was nothing to worry about, right?
"How do I look?"
Paul cast another look at his mother. She was certainly looking provocative - she even wore lipstick. Was she really going to see another woman? Perhaps she found a replacement for dad? Or perhaps (a thought Paul found exciting) she was seducing Mrs. Pradesh, or was being seduced by her?
"You look okay", he said.
"Okay?", she echoed him, seemingly disappointed.
"Have a good time with Mrs. Pradesh."
Paul wondered if she saw the irony in his statement.
"See you later, honey", she said, simply, and left.
Paul was alone. And, as always when he realized he was not under anyone's control, when nobody was looking, he gave himself to reverie. He walked to the bathroom and looked himself in the mirror. He wasn't bad looking either: relatively slim, not entirely without muscles ( no, he wasn't bodybuilding, but forced himself to do push-ups every morning ), and even the glasses he was wearing gave him an appearance of a hunky geek. Why was he still without girlfriend? Paul wasn't sure, but he was sure of one thing: in the Internet he could have had them all, and in all the erotic situations he desired.
Paul was secretly attracted to all things related to bondage and erotic distress. He was excited by the combination of nudity and peril: a naked woman, bound, perhaps being whipped, perhaps about to be eaten alive and sacrificed to a monster. Internet was a gold mine of such pictures. As he looked at them, he found himself drawn to even more perverse fantasy: his mother, his beautiful mother, taking place of all these women: being stripped, tormented, made into a sexual object. At first he shied away from these thoughts, but the more he was trying to suppress them, the stronger they became. And lately they grew even more intense, threatening to break through.
After sitting for two hours in front of TV, and then spending another two looking at the online bondage erotica (which he could now do without sense of guilt; he was, after all, a grown man from this day on, or so he thought), Paul realized it was eleven o'clock and his mother was not yet back. She was usually back at ten PM, not being a social type, at least no more after her husband left her. He cast a gaze through his window, and towards the opposite side of the street where Mrs. Pradesh house stood, another cookie-cutter house in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. Was it true what they said about her? "A worshiper of Kamadora".
Kamadora.
He googled the name.
"Kamadora", said the entry in a popular wiki, "A fictional being, supposed 'Goddess of Lust' inhabiting the island in the middle of the Indian Ocean... "
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"The urban legend was started", the entry said, "by an ultra-conservative Catholic priest, Slawomir Dziemianski. Dziemianski's theories were heavily inspired by Fundamentalist Christianity and fit into the same mold as stories of Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien abduction. In short, the story had it that all the religions of the East are false front of the cult of ancient Indian Goddess Kamadora, who Dziemianski theorized might be an incarnation of biblical Lilith. Kamadora would draw innocent folk from Christianity by tempting them with all manners of carnal pleasures, not excluding incest, sadism and other extreme perversions. With time Dziemianski's ideas were disproved by scholars, but by the time it did, the legend of Kamadora assumed a life of its own.
Very much like Slenderman, who gained a significant online following, Kamadora became the protagonist (or sometimes antagonist) of erotic online fiction, mostly focusing on mother-son incest. There was also a number of supposedly "true" stories of Kamadoran worshipers conducting their rituals in quiet American suburbs. A few people actually came forth and said they have visited the island that is the home of the cult. Their narrative is almost a complete subversion of the original, Christian conspiracy theory: the island of Kamadora, they said, is a thriving place, one where all comforts of modernity meet the extreme sexual freedom instituted and upheld by the ancient cult. The stories, available at dedicated page, are actually immature sexual fantasies, and many of them contain both incest and BDSM themes. However, a fairly coherent mythology emerges from the stories, disjointed as they are: the religious life of the island concentrates in its hedonistic capital of Thali, which is a seat of one of the two splinter groups of the religion, the Lightsiders, who, while following their carnal instincts to their fullest, still try to preserve a semblance of decency. The forests in the northern parts of the island are inhabited by Darksiders, the 'bad guys and gals' of the setting. The conflict between the two factions is what drives most of the stories.
With time on the Internet there appeared even more stories related to the Goddess of Lust, some of the fantasy-themed, other set in the imaginary Easern Europe country of..."
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Paul looked up from the computer, and towards the quiet house that belonged to Mrs. Pradesh. Light was still on. They're probably sitting there and sipping tea. Unless, of course, the perverted, dark-skinned priestess had his mother stripped naked and bound to the blasphemous altar for...
No.
There is no cult, Paul reminded himself, and these thoughts are just wrong. They are wrong.
He looked at the clock. Half past eleven pm. So good it was Friday.
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The "decicated page" link brought Paul to a cheap website called "Kamadora is Real!". An image of many-handed, Indian-looking Goddess in a meditative posture was placed on top of the page, obviously a creation of a skilled artist. Several links were presented to visitor just below the introduction, which echoed what Paul already read on the wiki. The first was "Kamadoran Glossary". Intrigued, he clicked on it.
"To Kamadora all kinds of erotic dalliance are sacred, which finds its reflection in the language of those people. Inhabitants of Kamadora believe that the transition between emotional bond and a sexual bond is a natural one: if there's an affection between mother and son, for instance, it will find its expression in sex, sooner or later. Below are the terms which Kamadorans use to indicate various kinds of relationships:
Yaramai - a 'normal', heterosexual relationship
Apkamai - a relationship between mother and son
Kalamai - a lesbian relationship between mother and daughter
Kainian - a relationship involving two people who are related by blood, and another one not of kin..."
Bored with the linguistics, Paul navigated back to the principal page. The next link was - "Mother as damsel in distress in Kamadoran culture".
The boy found himself covered in sweat. These were just his private fantasies. Nobody else - no one else... This was wrong. This was sick. His mind was sick, and he knew it. He shouldn't choose this link. Never ever...
Click.
"Apkamai, or the emotional and sexual bond between mother and son is an important aspect of Kamadoran culture. To Kamadorans it's natural for a boy to look at his mother as [gulp!] sexual object. This makes her even more precious in the eyes of the son, as she often becomes his first lover. This is why in many stories focused on Apkamai the boy's mother and lover is abducted by the antagonist. In those stories the antagonist is almost always female, and the hapless mother is stripped naked and subjected to bondage and erotic torture - whipping, the so-called 'spanish horse' etc. The theme also features prominently in the modern TV shows aired on Kamadora: when on the Island I was shocked to see a show, aired in the late afternoon, which focused on a mother and her late-teenage son. The duo was fighting the minions of Darkside. The first thing that shocked me was that the erotic nature of the relationship between the two was so openly shown; the other shock came when, almost matter-of-factedly, the mother was captured by the main female antagonist, stripped naked and bound to the altar. Then her nude photo was sent to the son to coerce him to come over to antagonists' place..."
Paul closed his eyes. No. This was too much. Of course he knew it was all fiction, but what if.. What if...
The boy realized he's still sweating, and although the summer night was really warm, it must have had to do with other things.
He looked at the clock. It was almost midnight. The light at Pradesh place was still on, but it changed - it became reddish and dim. What the hell was going on there?...