Tongue of the Teller

For a long time, the old Mothers didn't even let us see the Teller. They sent us all out into the garden when they planned to consult it, and when they were finished, they called us back in and shared its prophecies. My Sisters and I often argued about what form it took: a scrying bowl? A spirit? Personally, I always imagined it as a hissing voice issued from a flame in the hearth, its tongue flickering.

Mother Credence told us that consulting the Teller was a sacred and serious task. It was only to be done during certain moon phases, and only for exceptionally important concerns. It was like bloodletting, she said. Done incorrectly or in excess, it could spell disaster.

So you can imagine our disappointment when Credence (I guess I don't have to call her Mother anymore, since all the old Mothers are long buried), during her last hours in her sickbed, revealed to us that the Teller was nothing more than a heavy leatherbound book hidden in a drawer in the Mothers' study. It was so anticlimactic, in fact, that nearly a month went by before we even went looking for it. It was Sister Elsie who spoke up, saying we should probably find out what it was all about. We agreed, but none of us moved from our places around the table. I continued chewing on a cherry pit, which Mother Fiona used to pull my hair for. Elsie huffed and went to find it herself.

Moments later, Sister Elsie called out to us from down the hall. A handful of us joined her in the study to find her standing an arm's length away from the open drawer, looking shaken. Sister Ivy reached inside and held the book up before us. It was bound in chestnut leather just as we'd been told, a red silken bookmark hanging down, but there was one crucial detail that the Mothers had not divulged: protruding from the cover, as if rising just slightly from the surface of a lake, was the lower face of a man. The lips were fixed in a stern line, the nose sharp and noble.

"That's the Teller?" asked Sister Nora.

Sister Piper said, "Tell us something, then."

Ivy sat the Teller down on the desk, propped upright, slightly open. There was a time when leaving one of our holy books like that would have earned us a lashing, but that time is gone. It died with Credence.

"What," asked the Teller, in a voice both soft and resonant, "is your question?"

I recall thinking he sounded professorial, almost priestly. He didn't seem to mind having been hidden away in a drawer for weeks. In fact, there was an unamused tone to his voice that made it seem as if he wished we hadn't found him at all.

"So where's your prick?" asked Ivy. "Chapter five?"

The Sisters burst into giggles and dispersed, already bored. They didn't give the Teller long to answer, though somehow I knew he wasn't planning to. I lingered in the room for a moment after the others had gone. I looked deeply into his face, even leaning close enough to see the shallow cracks in the leather that formed early wrinkles around his mouth, but he was silent and inscrutable.

Admittedly, we mostly forgot about the Teller for a while after we first discovered him. He stayed atop the desk in the increasingly dusty study while we prepared with great zest for our first Mother-less Saturnalia. With no one to wake us early and make us do our recitations before the fire, the festivities would be just that: festivities. We started making big jugs of mulled cider, sweet and floral, finishing them nearly as fast as we could make them. They were supposed to be for the celebration, but now that we had the run of the coven, every night was a celebration. Why not be merry?

It was on one of these nights in the den, our mouths rich with liquor and honey, that we remembered the Teller. Sister Piper brought him out before the hearth, where we had been sitting in a circle, trying to see who could knot a cherry stem with her mind the fastest. She placed him in the middle of the woven rug and he remained there, patient and stoic.

At first I thought it might just be the cider, but no -- he was handsome, or at least, his mouth was a handsome one. The hardness in his expression felt like a challenge. The firelight brought out the red tones in his leather.

"You look like you want to kiss him," said Sister Nora.

I didn't realize at first that she was talking to me.

"Why don't you?" grinned Sister Elsie, leaning heavily against my shoulder.

I turned and dove into her neck with a flurry of nibbles and pecks. She tipped over, limp with laughter.

"Ask him," Nora said. "Ask him about it."

"Alright," I said, scooting closer to the Teller's place on the rug.

I took a moment to let my swirling vision settle on him.

"Teller," I said, "I have a question."

"What is your question?" he asked, and the hum of his voice traveled up the length of my spine from the floor.

"May I give you a kiss?"

The Teller was silent for so long, Elsie and Ivy broke down in hysterics.

"He's stunned!" Ivy laughed.

Then, finally, the Teller spoke again.

"You may do as you wish."

I endured the raucous hooting and squealing of the other Sisters that followed. When they had quieted down, I took the book in both hands.

The Teller warmed my palms as I asked, "But will the Teller like it?"

"He may," came the deep-voiced reply from the mouth on the cover.

I rose to my feet, wavering a bit, and placed the Teller on the mantle over the hearth, where he would be at my eye level.

The other Sisters fell into a hush of held breaths as I leaned forward. I steadied myself on the edge of the mantle. Closing my eyes, I breathed in the musk of leather, then brushed my lips at last against the Teller's.

At first the face didn't seem to move at all, but after a moment I felt his lips part just slightly to permit me. I ignored the giddy noises from the Sisters behind me. I made sure to give no indication to my heckling Sisters, but I could feel the Teller deepening the kiss. His tongue found mine and, before I could get even drunker on the smoky taste of his mouth, I withdrew.

"You're outrageous!" Nora said. "Next, I think I'll make you kiss the maypole."

I gave her hair a yank. That's about as much as I remember; I curtsied with the hem of my nightgown, someone handed me a congratulatory glass of cider, and the rest is little more than the Teller looming over us for the remainder of the night.

About a week later, I find myself roaming the house after dark, unable to sleep. By the light of one candle I rediscover the Teller, still propped on the mantle.

"Teller," I whisper, "are you asleep?"

"The Teller --"

"Shh!" I hiss, covering his mouth. "Quiet. You'll wake the Sisters."

I remove him from the mantle. Avoiding the squeaky old floorboards, I make my way back to my bedroom with the Teller beneath my arm.

Once I've pulled my door quietly shut, I take a seat on my bed in front of the Teller. It's nice to have a private moment to appreciate his binding, his reassuring weight. When I flip through his pages, I see nothing but arcane symbols in rich black ink. I understand a few of them. They're about what I expected.

I close the cover again and whisper, as clearly as I can without waking Piper next door, "I have a question."

"What is your question?" The Teller asks.

I didn't expect the sound of a man's voice inside my bedroom to stir such exhilaration in me. I almost feel silly.

"Did the Teller like it?"

With the pad of my thumb, I trace the Teller's lower lip. He seems to draw a breath in, just softly. I can practically hear Mother Credence's voice from beyond the veil, chiding me, cautioning me. I'm not fit to wield the Teller, she sneers. I'm still too inexperienced to comprehend its power. I'm not worthy.

"He did," comes the sighing reply.

I light a second candle and shrug out of my loose nightgown as if preparing for a ceremony. Bare now from head to toe, my hair unpinned and loose around my shoulders, I hold the Teller in my hands. I listen for movement in the halls beyond my bedroom. Hearing nothing, I bring the book to my face and place my lips once more against the Teller's.

This time, he reciprocates much more quickly. His mouth moves in a hungry way, hastening, his velvety tongue probing past my lips. I yield to the force of it and end up on my back, looking -- from afar -- like I'm using an old spellbook to practice kissing. My idle hand goes seeking the heat between my legs and finds it, and before long, I'm humming my moans into the Teller's mouth.

When I finally draw him away from my face, I hear him make a low, protesting vocalization. But quickly I reposition him at my breast, where the Teller begins to greedily lick and suck at my skin. He draws my nipple into his mouth and releases it with an obscene pop before seizing it again.

As the Teller's lips on my breast thread pleasure across my body, I begin to feel my desire outpacing my fingers. My mind is so clouded and my movement so hurried, I'm not even quite aware of what I've done until I'm kneeling on my bed to straddle the book, hovering just a few inches from the Teller's face.

For a moment, I consider the possibility that I've gone too far. But Credence's voice is far from my mind now, replaced by the Teller's wordless gasp from between my legs as his tongue searches and reaches desperately for what he knows is there. I let the rest of my weight fall. I'm met with the muffled sounds of a grateful man as the Teller begins to devour my cunt.

He groans into my flesh. I feel him stiffening his tongue to spear inside me, and I fuck it as if it were his manhood, spreading myself open on its girth. When he laps at my slit instead, I grind down against the flat of his drooling tongue.

The dripping, hot press of his mouth makes me dizzy -- it's not unlike the feeling of Sister Ivy's wetness on my thigh when we relieve each other. I can see the mess I've made on his leather, shining in the candlelight. I'm surprised by the pace and cadence of the noises coming from the Teller's busy mouth; they sound almost like the hitching grunts and moans of a man nearing climax.

By chance, I glance up to see my door ajar. Sister Nora is watching, leaned against the doorframe, the front of her nightgown bunched around the hand that she's using to sate herself. I'm not all that surprised -- I stopped trying to swallow my cries a while ago -- and she doesn't seem to mind my seeing her. A surge of pleasure makes me sob, my mouth agape, and Nora's opens just the same at the sight of my condition. I can see the breath quickening in her chest.

When I feel the Teller start to suck my swollen clit, I hold his leather cover at both sides and let him drink my orgasm right out of me, my thighs spasming against the hard corners of the book. Even through the divine ringing in my ears, I can hear the profanities slipping from his smothered mouth. Nora's knees buckle and I watch her struggle to hold herself up as she comes, trembling, on her own fingers.

The current finishes coursing through me and I collapse back onto my pillows with numb legs. I can hear the debauched Teller panting, spent but satisfied.

After a moment I remember Nora, but when I look to her, I find more faces than just hers in the shadows. Piper, Elsie, and Ivy are peeking in as well. There's a drunken glaze to Piper's eyes, though I know she hasn't had any cider. Elsie's biting her lip, and Ivy has already taken her nightgown off.

"If it's alright," says Piper, "we'd like to ask some questions."