Prologue
People tell lots of stories about the old Mystic View Hotel. The Victorian mansion stands alone at the end of the narrow road overlooking the bay. It's never open, it's never for sale, no one seems to live there. Rumored to be owned by a billionaire recluse, it only seems alive for occasional midnight parties, lights shining from its windows while ethereal music plays from somewhere inside.
The strange thing is, no one's ever been invited to these parties. Well, no one that ever remembers it, anyway.
The truth is that the Mystic View Hotel is occupied by a coven of witches, some of them perhaps centuries old. Having unlocked the supernatural secrets of life, time, and immortality, they are able to keep their bodies forever young, forever beautiful. And yes, when the whim takes them, very large as well.
Men are occasionally lured here from the city, tourists who don't know the town's creepy old legends. Lonely men are the witches' favorite "guests," men who may not be immediately missed should they suddenly disappear. Men without wives, girlfriends, or mistresses, men who might be more willing to freely give what these witches will take.
Once inside, it's not known exactly what happens to these men. Some are never seen again. Most, however, reappear safely a week later. Dazed, exhausted, and bewildered, their memories have been forever altered. They only recall a wild party where incredible, impossible revels are inflicted on them. Reduced to sobbing, screaming, babbling playthings, they are subjected to things that just ... can't happen, each torment more lurid and demented than the last. Only in their most fevered dreams (and twisted nightmares) does some whisper of the truth emerge. Do the women grow larger? Do the men get smaller? Both?
All these "survivors" know is that sooner or later, they are compelled to return to the Mystic View. Some hidden craving has been imbued beneath their subconscious forever. They'll quit jobs if they have to, abandon families, break off relationships, just to return to this eerie "empty" hotel when the voices start calling in their dreams again.
For the witches, the motive is plain enough. Desperation, lust, fear, desire, awe, abject terror ... this is all “manna,” energy that is siphoned and channeled to fuel their continuing supernatural crafts. A small but regular supply of "vessels" must therefore be taken into their hotel and ruthlessly "harvested," their cries of horror, worship, and joy fed into their dark rites.
Sometimes the men are squeezed too hard, their bodies broken, their sanity cracked. If they’re not too far gone, they are sometimes visited by a “mercy angel,” one of the giantess-witches specialized in gentler healing arts. Sometimes the mercy angel can save a damaged pet. Sometimes not, in which case the angel’s “mercy” takes on a decidedly darker hue.
For Jake, the “stories” of the Mystic View Hotel were no longer anything of the sort. Ever since he met Veronika at that coffee shop, the legend has taken on an impossible, horrific reality. God, had it really only been two days?
Never had he met a more alluring, hypnotic woman, sitting alone by the bookshelf of pretentious “classic” books. Tall, voluptuous, poised – a midnight sheet of gleaming black hair covered one eye, the other piercing with magnetic blue. From the snug blouse of burgundy silk to her sleek black skirt, all the way to those four-inch stilettos, Jake just hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off her.
For a lonely divorcee standing in line, just then wanting nothing more in life than a good cappuccino, this was the definition of “the wrong woman,” the kind Jake knew to avoid at all costs. Yet just half a passing smile of those plush lips was all it had taken.
Jake had found himself approaching her, as if she commanded his feet instead of him. Some desperate corner of his sanity screamed warnings in his mind, pleading with Jake to just walk away. Too late. Once he’d opened his mouth, once she’d smiled at him again, once he’d sat at her little wooden table, Jake had been lost.
He knows that now. That was the moment his life had probably ended. Has it really only been two days?
Memories become fuzzy after that. All Jake knew for sure was that Veronika soon invited him to “her place.” Jake didn’t even remember the pretense. Never had he been so thoroughly entranced, so hopelessly owned. Not that it mattered, because once inside the Mystic View Hotel ...
Jesus, some of the things Veronika had done to him. Leather straps tied him to this bed, of course, but Jake never struggled, never fought back. He couldn’t. Veronika was in his head, his heart, his sanity. In the murky half-dark, he swore her eyes glowed. And it wasn’t just the unending hours of thrillingly erotic, sadistically cruel torment. But, had Veronika been growing?
Ten feet tall, twelve feet, fifteen? How much could she weigh? No wonder this torture-bed had been anchor-built straight into the floor!
Even now, two nights later, still lashed to this bed and soaked in sweat, tears, and yes ... a little blood ... Jake still can’t believe what he’d been subjected to.
Finally Veronika had left him, still strapped down, bewildered, horrified, brutalized, helpless. Perhaps he’d passed out finally, perhaps this vicious giantess had simply grown bored. For hours now she’d been gone, leaving Jake to shiver, whimper, and yes ... cry just a little ... trying not to imagine what would happen when she came back and the nightmare resumed.
But now, the door at the end of the bedchamber opens.
Jake’s blood runs like ice water.
God help me.
She’s back.
Heather gingerly opened the door to Suite 3A, silently peeking inside. Yes, this was Veronika’s suite for the weekend, her victim all but weeping, weakly struggling in his bonds. Jesus, the bitch hadn’t even untied the poor bastard?
With a sigh she opened the door, slowly crossing the room toward the bed. “Please relax,” she all but whispered. “It’s not Veronika. My name is Heather. No one’s going to hurt you anymore.”
“Please,” the slave murmured. “God, p-p-please, no more
“Shh ...” Heather drew closer, the room’s magic swirling though her. Already she was at least seven feet tall, large enough so she had to slip off her bathrobe, stepping nude into the room’s moonlight. The room was enchanted, expanding her form with every step, an effect automatically imbued throughout certain chambers of the hotel for the witches of the Mystic View coven. Eight feet now, nine. The oak floorboards began to creak under her weight. Even with the vaulted cathedral ceilings, Heather had to duck beside the twelve-head chandelier.
Heather was one of the coven’s younger witches, not yet jaded by the grim necessities sometimes required to harvest manna. Also as one of the younger witches, she was sometimes tasked with “cleaning up the mess” of the senior sisters, messes like Veronika had made here.
How many times had Heather talked to Bianca, mistress of the coven, about Veronika’s behavior with the pets? Aphrodite’s ass, she’d friggin’ killed one last month. Heather only hoped she wasn’t too late this time.
At last beside the bed, Heather now loomed almost twelve feet tall, her soft waves of cinnamon hair longer than most women. With a wave of her fingers, she dissipated the strapsr holding the man down. Clumsily he rolled across the bed from her, eyes wide with terror at her size, yet riveted with lust at her impossible physique.
“My name is Heather,” she whispered, remembering to keep her voice low. “Veronika’s not coming back. She won’t hurt you anymore.”
“I ... I just want to go home,” the little man squeaked.
“And you will. If you let me help you. What’s your name?”
“J-j-jake.”
“Nice to meet you, Jake.” Heather smiled, extending a hand near the man. She didn’t touch him, but let him timidly reach toward her long, slender, nearly foot-long fingers. “First let’s get you cleaned up. Do you trust me?”
Jake didn’t answer at first. His eyes just kept washing over Heather’s face, her lips, her hair. She could feel him gaze at her chest, her hips, her legs, each taller than he was. I could vanish into just her hair, his eyes seemed to say. What kind of bed would that make?
“Yes,” he murmured finally.
Only then did Heather touch him, ever-so-gently. At nearly 1200 pounds, Heather was six times the man’s weight and so lifted him easily off the bed in a slow, tender cradle. She stood upright, carrying him across the bedchamber not quite like a baby, more like an injured child.
She took Jake to the bedchamber’s jacuzzi, already brimming with the enchanted healing water Veronika hadn’t bothered to use. Gently she lowered him in, conjuring just a touch of lathering body wash with a flourish of her witch’s fingers.
Almost instantly, she could feel Jake relax, the pain and fear washed from his body. Heather smiled. She always had that effect on men. Even those that she’d sadly had to “put to sleep” had gone with a peaceful smile on their face. Witch or no witch, it was just a knack she had, probably why the coven kept giving her these jobs. She didn’t mind.
“We have to heal you up,” Heather whispered, cupping a handful of water and pouring its gallons over Jake’s head and shoulders. “Mind, body, and soul.”
Jake was long past resisting, long past trying to squirm out from under Heather’s tender fingers. As gently as if coaxing a baby bird from an abandoned nest, she spread her enchanted touch over bruised skin and strained muscle, sealing cuts and mending a hairline fracture in the collarbone. More water, more lather, more fingertips – Jake melted in her hands, his eyes closing in comforted, contented exhaustion.
“Who are you people?” Jake asked at last.
“Please don’t worry about that.”
“But ... why do you do this?”
Heather sighed. Why not tell him? They were going to have to erase parts of his memory anyway.
“Promise not to laugh? It’ll sound crazy.”
“After these last two nights?”
Heather shrugged, kneeling beside the jacuzzi and leaning over her pet. “We’re witches, Jake. A coven of witches who need manna. Eh ... a kind of ‘energy’ harvested from other people. It manifests as awe, worship, the complete surrender of power from one person to another.”
“That’s why you grow so big?”
Heather nodded. “Now, we can take it through fear, terror, and slavery, A lot of us do, like Veronika. Or we can take it through adoration, entrancement, and desire.”
“Just so long as the surrender is complete,” Jake guessed.
“You got it.” Heather gives him a wink, just touching the tip of his nose with a finger.
Jake turned, staring up at her, reaching a hand into Heather’s waterfall of red hair.
“You’re going to take more from me now, aren’t you?”
Heather sighed. “I have to, Jake. Part of my job.”
With a sweet, playful grin curled to her lips, she touched Jake again, her fingertip drifting down beneath his waist.
“Now ... will you surrender to me, Jake? Which will it be? Terror, or love?”
Jake slowly stood out the jacuzzi, rapt in awe as Heather knelt before him. Reaching an arm along either side of him, she scooped up two handfuls of sudsy water and poured it over her neck. The cascade of shimmering lather rolled down over her massive breasts, her belly, and down between her legs.
Without hesitation Jake stepped to her, engulfing himself in what she had waiting for him ... hair, breasts, water, skin. Heather wrapped her arms around him, tenderly squeezing his first awestruck groan in her wet, slippery bosom.
“Love it is,” she whispered, smiling as she gently ran fingers through his hair.