I found the shrine three weeks after moving into my new house. It was a secret room, secluded in the rear quarters of the beautiful old colonial manse in upstate New York. I had purchased the house, along with the fifty acres of property on which it was situated, hoping to have some seclusion. I had decided to retire as a hermit after the company I founded was bankrupted by the pandemic and my girlfriend left me.

The building was what my real-estate agent called a “fixer-upper.” I don’t really have any home improvement skills. But I figured that watching YouTube videos and learning how to mount drywall and apply spackle would be a good distraction from my personal woes.

           I discovered the shrine by doing as one DIY video had recommended, tapping on interior walls to check for build-overs and cover-ups common in old houses. The YouTuber warned that a seemingly innocent wall could be covering an empty space infested with dry rot or mold. Any cavernously hollow sound was suspicious.

            Behind the fireplace of the rear parlor is a short corridor that leads to a staircase giving access to what had at one time been the servant’s room, but would now be my study. The wall along that corridor was solid, but a short section midway down let out a hollow note when banged upon, indicating that a door had been plastered over. A mixture of caution and curiosity drove me to procure a respirator, safety glasses, and a sledgehammer.

            The pierced doorway led into a room that was small but not claustrophobically so. Cozy would describe it, except that it was so sparsely furnished. The floor was carpeted in red velvet. A single kneeler was set opposite the wall to the right of the door, in front of a darkly varnished cherrywood altar covered with silver candlesticks, candelabras, and incense burners, all showing signs of frequent use. On the wall behind the altar was a life-size oil painting of a woman seated on a cushioned mahogany throne.

            A working light switch was mounted to the right of the door. I switched on the overhead light and walked into the shrine to examine it more closely. An eerie force I could not explain propelled me as I entered. Without thinking, I laid my sledgehammer aside, removed my respirator and safety glasses, and knelt on the cushioned kneeler in front of the altar.

            I was fascinated. At first my focus fixated on the story the room told. It had obviously been built and arranged by the previous owner of the house, George Klein. Whoever the woman in the portrait was, Klein had worshiped her with a fervor that was authentically religious, even fanatical. The dripping wax and copious ashes covering the candlesticks and incense burners arrayed on the altar testified that he had prayed in this shrine every day, on some days more than once.

            His rituals had not been confined to lighting candles and incense. Among the paraphernalia on the altar was a bottle of lubricant, a set of nipple clamps, and a short nine-tailed whip of the kind used for self-flagellation. Telltale stains on the rug and the front of the altar broadcast that prayer ceremonies had included frequent and effusive masturbation.

            As intriguing as this story was, however, there was little mystery to contemplate. George Klein had clearly worshiped in this shrine for many years. When he passed away and the house had been put up for sale someone, perhaps one of his children, had found the shrine, been embarrassed by what it implied, and decided to plaster over the evidence of the old man’s obsession.

When I had taken the scene in from George Klein’s perspective for a few minutes, my attention shifted from the general context of the shrine to the object of worship it housed. The painting would have been striking simply for its size and the skill of the artist. The posture and the manner of the subject were beautifully articulated. The color, lighting and composition were all classically flawless. The canvas was mounted in a heavy carved gilt frame that itself must have cost thousands of dollars, even if it had been purchased many years ago.

But what made the painting truly breathtaking was the subject herself. She had lush blond hair that cascaded around her shoulders in golden waves. Her eyes were a jade green hue so piercing they seemed to leap from the canvas. Her body was magnificent. Bountiful breasts. Exquisitely shapely legs. A heartbreakingly beautiful face set in an expression that was somehow both sternly regal and playfully inviting.

Everything about the woman in the painting was alluring. She was dressed in an aquamarine dress cut high along the curves of her gorgeous thighs and low along the deep cleft of her luscious breasts. Her posture conveyed supreme confidence and self-command. Sexual magnetism radiated from her that was palpable, even captured mutely in two dimensions. My pulse quickened as I let my eyes wander over the canvas. My difficulty in rising from the kneeler made me aware of how stiff my cock had become from gazing at the painting.

Who was this magnificent woman? I walked up to the painting to search for a clue to her identity. There was only one. On the bottom of the frame was a brass nameplate on which was engraved a single word: “Goddess.”

I turned off the light and exited the room, simultaneously intrigued and bemused. The afternoon was waning. I showered and changed out of my workclothes and made myself pasta for dinner. I ate alone in front of The Lady Eve, which was playing on TCM.

I didn’t give the shrine much more thought until I was lying in bed that night. As soon as I closed my eyes she was there, and my body reacted as it had in the shrine. My cock became rock hard. My pulse raced. My mouth watered the way it does when I am famished and smell the aroma of delicious food. It was like her image was a secret key that had unlocked all the portals in my body and psyche behind which my desire was stored, and that energy had come pouring out into my muscles and blood. I felt an irresistible surge of sexual need.

I stroked my cock, focusing intently on her image in my mind’s eye. I didn’t have much to latch onto, I couldn’t form a full-blooded fantasy from such an impressionistic glimpse. But the free-floating desire for the idea of her was so powerful, so implacable, that it drew me inexorably toward release.

When climax came I shuddered in ecstasy and screamed aloud. Few of the orgasms I had experienced with real-time lovers had been so deeply satisfying. I sighed blissfully and closed my eyes, feeling my muscles relax in cathartic ease and anticipating a comfortably drowsy descent into dreamland.

But as soon as my eyes closed she was there again, smiling at me with that intoxicating mixture of imperiousness and mischief. My mind’s eye could not stop moving over her breasts, her hips, her thighs, her calves. Within a minute my cock was painfully erect again, the need for her was just as urgent as it had been before I jacked off. I tossed in bed for half an hour, refusing to surrender to the impulse by which I had been captured. Finally my resistance broke, and I returned to stroking my cock. The second orgasm for her was even more explosive than the first.

After that I slept, but I woke with a hard-on that I knew was not merely morning wood. It was for her. I wanted her badly. So badly that I needed more of her. I went straight from the bedroom to the shrine.

I examined the painting for twenty minutes, looking for clues to her identity. All this did was to make my hard-on more sorely distended. Giving up on the painting, I turned to the altar. The frontpiece was decorated with intricate etched designs and carved pegs of a different shade of wood than the cherry of the main altar. A few minutes of squinting and fumbling revealed that one of the pegs was a secret latch. When pressed it caused a cleverly concealed drawer to pop out from the side of the altar. Inside that drawer was a pair of headphones and an old cassette player into which the headphones were jacked. Alongside these items the drawer contained two cassette tapes, one simply marked “Prayer,” the other marked “Hypnosis.”

It was easy to intuit how these were to be used. I knelt on the velvet cushion of the kneeler, placed the headphones on my ears, placed the cassette player on the ground in front of me, inserted the cassette marked “Hypnosis,” and hit “play.”

A voice so sexy it made my cock throb and weep pre-cum poured into my ears:

“Hello George. your request for a custom trance is very intriguing. you say you want a trance that will make you love and want Me more every time you listen to it. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha ….”

-writing can’t capture the sweet music of her laughter, it sent lightning through my body-

“…That seems superfluous- you love and want Me more every time W/we speak. Accelerating your captivity with trance is ‘gilding the lily.’ But you have been a good and loyal pet, and you gave Me a worthy tribute, so I will grant you this request. Listen to My Voice…”

I hit “stop” on the recorder. Every instinct told me that her self-confidence was not mere arrogance.  I had never been hypnotized before, and I had always been skeptical of its potential. But the magnetic charisma that beamed down at me from her portrait and pulsated in her voice made me sure that her claims were not empty. If I continued listening, I would be hypnotized, and conditioned to want her more than I already did.

I hesitated for five minutes, my hand frozen above the cassette player, trembling. I gazed deeply into the green eyes regarding me from the wall. I felt my heart pound and my cock pulsate. In the end it was a foregone conclusion. I had woken needing more of her. Here it was. I hit “play.”

“…you feel yourself relaxing. you cannot resist the power of My voice, because My Will is stronger than your will…”

I fell deeply into trance. It was like nothing I had experienced before. My mind melted into a puddle of blissful delight, the tension eased from every muscle in my body. I lost track of what she was saying, but I could feel her within me and all throughout me. I remained aware, but my will was displaced by hers. I became a spectator in the chambers of my own mind, watching her reposition and reshape the constituents of my consciousness an interior decorator might rearrange the furnishings of a house. I knew she was changing me, and that I should perhaps be frightened that a stranger had such power over me. But I could feel nothing but welcome pleasure at her psychic touch.

I awoke to the greatest orgasm of my life. At some point in the trance she had commanded me to stroke my cock, and I had obeyed. In a later moment she had commanded me to cum, and I had obeyed again, spraying jets of semen over the carpet and the frontpiece of the altar, as George Klein had obviously done many times in the past. The sheer force of the climax brought me out of trance.

“you feel refreshed and relaxed now, pet,” the seductive siren cooed into my ears. “you will have no memory of what was said in this trance, but you will notice that your love and desire for Me has grown more intense. Call Me when you need Me to listen to you sob about how much you adore Me. Bye-bye for now! Mwah!”

Despite how violently I had just orgasmed, the sound of her kiss made my cock twitch erect again. I hit “stop” on the recorder and removed the earphones. I felt wonderful. I was as relaxed as if I had just received a two-hour massage. A warm glow of well-being permeated my mind and body. I felt so good after that first trance that I did not anticipate that anything could possibly be amiss.

I jacked off again to Goddess in order to sleep that night, but the experience was sublime. I now had a full-blooded picture of her, not just her irresistibly sexy image but her mesmerizing voice, her bewitching spirit and personality. I had a true fantasy of her that night, simple but three-dimensional. I knelt before her throne and pleaded with her to be allowed to kiss her gorgeous feet. She teased and tormented me, forcing me to confess how much I wanted her, how exquisite I found ever aspect of her, and how desperate I was to adore her. When she finally allowed me to kiss her foot I exploded in an atomic fireball of cum.

This was not a problem, except that I woke the next morning needing more of her. I spent most of the next day in the shrine. The tape marked “Prayer” was a different recording of her. In it she led George through a ritual in which he donned nipple clamps and stroked his cock while gazing at her image and chanting a mantra: “Goddess is Beauty…Goddess is Life…Goddess is Everything.” In my desperate need for more contact with her I listened to the tape and followed its instructions obediently. The pain in my nipples was excruciating, but the experience of suffering for her was too thrilling to resist. She laughed and teased on the tape, taunting:

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. It doesn’t matter how many times you do it, it still hurts like hell, doesn’t it shitstain? Good! you can’t help yourself, because you know that your pain turns Me on, and turning Me on drives you wild like nothing else in this world. Suffer, fool! Suffer for your Goddess! Give Me your pain! Be My pathetic pleasure-puppet! My servile fuck-toy! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha….”

I felt the truth, the beauty of every word she uttered in my blood and marrow. I became unhinged with desire. When she finally allowed me to cum my body spasmed so violently that I fell off the kneeler and into the fetal position on the floor, where I quivered in ecstasy for a full five minutes before I could finally obey the Goddess’s final command to remove the clamps and massage blood back into my sore nipples.

A slow spiral into ever more desperate need began. Most of my days were spent in the shrine, either submitting to trance or performing the rite of self-torture. At night I jacked myself off until I fell into deep sleeps suffused with dreams of Goddess. Each day my desire for her grew more intense. Each orgasm I had was less satisfying even as it was more cataclysmically intense. I needed more. More. MORE OF HER.

I tried desperately to discover who she was. George obviously knew her intimately, because on the tapes she only ever referred to herself as “your Goddess” or “your Mistress.” I trawled the internet trying to find her, but when you have only the word “Goddess” to work with, you face an impossibly vast sea of phonies and impostors. One of the few feelings that broke through my haze of lust was the nausea I felt from so many inferior women who called themselves “Goddess” when that sobriquet so obviously belonged to her and HER ALONE.

My mind deteriorated. My memory lapsed. I began to hallucinate. I would hear her laughter coming from another part of the house, and run to see her winking at me as she disappeared around a corner. As I turned the corner only to find empty air I would break down weeping, and slink off to the shrine to sobbingly stroke my cock for her.

While my faculties still worked I sent out letters. Several to George Klein’s children, one to the lawyer who had served as executor of Klein’s estate and overseen my purchase of his house. I tried to word the letter as tactfully as I could, describing the Goddess (without revealing that Klein had called her by that name), explaining that she might have left something in the house that she would want to reclaim, and requesting any information they might have about her identity or how to contact her. Whether because they did not understand my request, understood it all too well and were offended by it, or were simply rich assholes who could not be bothered to respond to any request from a relative stranger, I received no answers.

My hygiene suffered. My health declined. I lost my appetite for food, and increasingly had trouble sleeping. Finally, one morning, I reached the figurative end of my rope. I knelt in the shrine and resolved that I would not rise again. I would pray and stroke and descend into trance and do nothing else until I finally expired.

It occurred to me in that moment that my death might look a great deal like George Klein’s. Given how frequently he was in the shrine, it was more likely than not that this is where they found him, lying in a puddle of his own spunk. This thought made me envy him. He had not died in lonely torment and need, but while adoring this magnificent woman, whose mere image and recorded a voice could drive a man insane with desire, and whom he had been able to talk to and serve in real time. How he must have loved her! How sweet it must have been to tell her so! How wonderful it must have been to feel her channel his desire and harness the energy of his devotion, so that it did not eat his mind the way it was devouring mine.

As that thought passed through my mind, my doorbell rang for the first time since I had moved in to the house. Disoriented, I rose from the kneeler and stumbled toward the front entrance, unmindful of my matted hair; filthy, stubbly face; and reeking clothes. When I opened the door my heart stopped.

“Is this the former residence of George Klein?” said a voice I had come to know better than my own.

It was her. Goddess. I knew it was really her and not a hallucination, because her hair was shorter than in the painting, and she wore a tan sun dress and white leather sandals. She smelled heavenly. She was much more beautiful in person.

I passed out.

She woke me with a damp washcloth, which she dabbed on my face while seated in a chair pulled next to the couch on which she had lain me.

“i love You Goddess,” i whispered, struggling to find the strength to say everything i was feeling.

“Shhhh…I know pet. I know,” She soothed. “Goddess will make everything better now- you just rest…”

i knew that i was a complete stranger to Her, but it did not surprise me that She could read the signs of love-sickness in me. “How did you find me?” i asked.

“I was invited to the reading of george’s will,” She explained. “There was a clause directing his children to give Me something they would find in this house. george was very cryptic…he wrote only that they would know what it was when they saw it. His children denied that such a thing existed. I was given a vague promise that they would search the grounds before the house was sold, but after pestering them with emails and phone calls I got a letter effectively telling Me to piss off. I was fond of george, I don’t like the idea that his intentions weren’t honored. So I came to see for Myself.”

i made to rise from the couch. She pressed a gentle hand on my chest.

“you are very dehydrated and malnourished,” She said. “W/we need to get you to a hospital. But first tell Me how you fell so completely under My spell.”

In reply i gently took hold of Her hand. As i kissed it reverently She did not protest. “The answer to that question is the same as to the riddle of george’s will,” i explained. “Please help me rise, and i will show You.”

Goddess was pleased by Her first sight of the shrine. george had obviously wanted Her to have the portrait, and i was happy to give it to Her. i knew as i watched Her examine it that i would not need it any more. i would sell the house and move to be near Goddess, so that i could serve Her in whatever way She would allow me to.

i have bought a townhouse in Florida to be near Goddess. As i was packing the contents of the New York house i consulted Her about the portrait. She decided that there was a better way to honor george’s memory than moving the portrait to Her home. At Her orders i sealed up the shrine in the same condition in which i had found it. i made only one change, and it will make things easier on the next man who discovers the shrine. The nameplate on the portrait now reads “Goddess Marquesa.”

The End