Whispers in Darkness
Lovecraftian Erotica
edited by J. Blackmore
Circlet Press, Inc.
Cambridge, MA
Whispers in Darkness edited by J. Blackmore
Copyright © 2011 by Circlet Press, Inc.
Cover Art Copyright © 2011 by Elisa Lazo de Valdez | www.visioluxus.com
All Rights Reserved
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Table of Contents
Koenigsberg's Model by Peter Tupper
A Reflection of Kindness by Kannan Feng
The Artist's Retreat by Annabeth Leong
The Dreams in the Laundromat by Elizabeth Reeve
The Flower of Innsmouth by Monique Poirier
When the Stars Come by Alex Picchetti
Introduction
This is the collection that we all suspected would fail, but desperately wanted to succeed. Since posting the call, we’ve been challenged, jeered at, and told, in a very friendly manner, that the idea of Lovecraftian erotica was preposterous. I always want to read erotica that takes place in the literary landscapes I love to visit. I thought, perhaps, I might have asked too much this time, challenging writers to eroticize the bleak and fathomless world of Lovecraft. How fortunate that I was wrong. In the end, I had more stories than I knew what to do with, and I had to make some tough calls. Whatever Lovecraft might have felt about sex, his fans certainly seem fine with it. What you have in your hands is a collection that pays respect to Lovecraft himself, by expanding and deepening his universe. Even during this lifetime, long before fan fiction, he encouraged his writer friends to write stories within his "mythos," and writers have never stopped.
Being a literary pornographer means I’ve always wanted to see what goes on behind closed doors. I wanted Whispers in Darkness to exist because I needed to know how sex would play out in Lovecraft's dark and alienated world. Would the knowledge we are nothing drive people to antisocial manipulation? Or would the certainty that the universe simply does not care about us push us together and cause us to care even more about each other? The answer, it seems, is yes.
One of Lovecraft's most valuable skills as a writer was his ability to combine the banal and mundane with the ominous and profane. In Bernie Mojzes' "Ink," we meet Sam, an amorphous Eldritch Horror, squeezed into a pinstripe suit. Sam spends nights at bars, drinking disgusting cocktails and selling experiences in sexy and harrowing ways. Harry Levinson is the worn out P.I. who comes to Sam for answers and loses himself in the process. This piece by Mojzes was one of the earlier ones I received, and it definitely had a hand in shaping what this collection was to become. It’s a good warm-up for some of the more difficult themes that we, as readers, will need to wade through here. For example...
Probably Lovecraft's most notorious trait, in his writing and in his life, was his racism. Racism was rampant in his time, but he went a step further, imbuing his writings with animosity, uneasiness, and fear of those who were not like him. This is the most unfortunate part of his legacy, but it's something that can't be ignored when examining his work. Lovecraft wrote about the Other, whether that Other was from another country or another dimension. This doesn't excuse anything, but it might go a long way to explaining why his discomfort with other peoples is threaded all through his work. Peter Tupper, who has dealt with these themes before, decided to take this tendency of Lovecraft and turn it on its head. In "Koenigberg's Model" he deals with the flip side of racial hatred, racial fetishizing, and brings it powerfully to heel with what amounts to true power: a lust and abundance which is beyond the petty desires of the average man.
The intrusion of the Other into one's life doesn't always have to be so overwhelming, however. Sometimes all that is alien can wear the face of your lover, or yourself. In Kannan Feng's hypnotic "A Reflection of Kindness," a young bride is married off to a boorish nobleman, only to find in him, or someone very much like him, everything that she could wish for. The question is, is this man really her husband, and will her happiness come at too great a cost down the line?
That's the problem with obsession: you can feed everything you have into it, and it will just demand more. When Edie goes to visit her childhood friend Olivia in a ramshackle New England town, she discovers a woman burning from within, being eaten by her art and what inspires it. "The Artist's Retreat" by Annabeth Leong is a chilling, mercilessly sexy examination of what drives lust, what happens when it rules everything, and how insignificant we are in the scope of the wider world. That's a lot to deal with in one story, so, I promise, there're tentacles in there too.
Following that thought (really, you’ll see), when you think about it, university is weird enough without Elder Gods, and interdimensional traveling. However, as long as there's been a Lovecraft mythos there's been a Miskatonic University, and that university has to have students--hapless young students who have to deal with local oddity on top of hormones, term papers, and heavy drinking. It shouldn't surprise anyone that, in Elizabeth Reeve's "The Dreams in the Laundromat," the undergrads at Miskatonic U are shown navigating hallucination, dimensional kidnapping, and mutation with humor and libidos that are only barely distracted by mortal peril. As the female lead in this story notes, "I fucking love pheromones."
Sometimes lust doesn’t center around a person, or even a “type.” Lust can just as easily come from a location, or a memory of one; something that has become essential on an unconscious level. Always a master of time and place, Angela Caperton takes us to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood in the twenties in "Sheik." This is the cleverly crafted story of Alice, an up-and-coming starlet who has become almost unnaturally smitten with her new co-star, a dashingly handsome man who goes by the stage name Nyarlathotep the Great. After meeting him, in the dreamy bar known as The Casbah, her dreams take on a startlingly erotic quality that could be dismissed as simple lust, if the man himself didn't have so many secrets.
From there we move from sequins to homespun. What begins as a simple country courtship takes a clearly pear-shaped turn in Monique Poirier's gently and erotically funny "The Flower of Innsmouth." By all normal standards, the artistic hero, courting his country flower, should have expected family visits, dinner parties, and an eventual family wedding, all within the respectable New England mode. However, he hadn't reckoned with the complications of courting a Marsh, one of the oldest families in Innsmouth, with a murky past and a history all their own.
I saved Alex Picchetti's "When the Stars Come" for last because it seems to distill the essence of what these stories seem to mean. Picchetti gives a voice and a will to Lavinia, the unfortunate wizard's daughter from "The Dunwich Horror," destined to give birth to twin monstrosities. But that happens almost as an afterthought here; what this story is really about is Lavinia's journey through obsession toward her god, Yog-Sothoth, and everything she is willing to do to win her place as a god's vessel. Anyone who has ever read the original story will be surprised by the depth and heroic bent this Lavinia has and will find themselves cheering her on, if a bit unwillingly.
But then, how often are obsession, and the desire for annihilation, completely a matter of will?
J. Blackmore
August 2011
Ink
Bernie Mojzes
The Eldritch Horror sat quietly at the end of the bar, smoking and staring at the olive in an otherwise empty martini glass. One supple pseudopod held a Virginia Slim menthol to one set of lips. Another mouth drew on a Camel unfiltered, held in a withered claw of a hand. A third, hand-rolled (for want of a better term), smelled of cloves. With each exhale, smoke seeped from various orifices scattered around its amorphous body, both out of and under the cheap suit it had stuffed itself into.
A pencil-thin tongue snaked out of one mouth and twisted sensuously around the olive at the bottom of the glass. The tip prodded the pimento out of the olive, then curled the olive up into its mouth.
I wondered if it really disliked pimentos, or if this was the Eldritch Horror version of peeling labels off beer bottles.
The barstool next to it remained empty, even though it was a Friday night and the college kids were out in force. I made my way through the sea of earnest, drunken faces. The fragments of conversation I caught were less about sports and relationships, and more about contextual framing of meaning, and Hegelian dialectic, and one particularly ill-advised comparison of Umberto Eco with Dan Brown. Not even English and Philosophy majors wanted anything to do with the Eldritch Horror.
Or so it seemed.
Still, it was a public place, and it seemed safe enough. I settled in next to the Horror and waved for the barkeeper.
"I'll have one of what he's having," I said. I glanced at the Horror. "Or she. Or it. But with a twist. And his next round's on me, too."
Three of the Horror's eyes wandered over to regard me. "Thanks," it said, the word burbling through its body like a Paleolithic tar pit. Even so, it managed to evince a sense of suspicion.
"No problem." I tipped my hat--a battered and rain-stained fedora, but all I could afford--and then stuck out my hand. "Name's Harry. Harry Levinson."
It extruded a soft, smooth, feminine hand with manicured fingernails. They were coated with black polish; the ring finger's nail was slightly chipped, and it had been long enough since the polish had been applied that the nail was exposed near the cuticle. One of the eyes stared hard at me, bobbing to catch my attention. It blinked, and when I looked down, the feminine hand was gone, and a strongly muscled and tattooed man's hand was squeezing mine. I was surprised how real it felt.
"We are pleased to make your acquaintance, Harry Levinson," it said. A disharmony of voices, raked over hot coals in unison. "You can call us Sam."
"Sam?" It seemed incongruously normal.
"It's as good a name as any, and better than some. And sometimes we play piano." It waved a protuberance toward the back wall where, through the sea of college kids, I could see a dilapidated upright piano. Plastic cups and empty beer bottles littered the top.
"Are you any good?"
"Ssssometimes." The word hissed like steam from a ruptured pipe.
The bartender returned with martini glasses and a large shaker. He dropped an olive in one glass, rubbed a twist of lemon rind along the rim of the other, and divided the contents of the shaker between them. The viscous liquid resembled bloody ink. I caught the bartender's eye.
"Vodka, cranberry juice, and black sambuca," he said. "Weird, but safe enough. That'll be sixteen fifty."
I handed him a twenty.
It was revolting. Sam chuckled through a dozen mouths, not all human.
"Just like mothers' milk," it said. "Tell us, Mr. Levinson, what is it you want?"
It had been too much to hope that I could just blend in with a crowd like this, that I could pass as just coming in for a drink after a long week. Men like me have our own bars, where we sit alone and try to find absolution for our sins in endless shots of bourbon. But there's no absolution for some sins, either in a bottle or anywhere else, and the best we can do is try to remember to shave at least once a week.
This was a bar for kids with all their hopes and dreams ahead of them. I'd buried mine many years ago.
There was a photograph in my jacket pocket. A girl with fierce determination in her eyes, holding a lacrosse stick like she might take your head off with it. It had been almost six months since she'd gone missing, just before midterms. I laid it on the table.
"Have you seen this girl?"
Several of the Eldritch Horror's eyes studied me, moving around to examine my face from all angles. "You are not with the police."
"They've given up looking. I'm a PI. I've been hired to find her."
"Who--" The voice cut off, and noises burbled under the thing's skin. I got the feeling it was conferring with itself. A tendril extruded from its flesh and tapped the picture. "We have seen this woman. She came to this bar on occasion. She sat and spoke with us." The tendril lifted the photograph gently, as eyes clustered to examine it. Abruptly, it crumpled the paper and dropped it in my lap.
"You will not find her, if she does not wish to be found."
"Her name is Angela." It sometimes helped humanize the victim if you used a name. Not that I was sure that any amount of humanizing would have an effect on a creature like this. "She--"
"We know her name." There was something akin to anger in its voice, and I waited for more, but it just turned its eyestalks away from me.
I took another sip from my drink. It was still awful.
In the sea of students, a murmur grew slowly into an encouraging cheer. There was a swirl of movement in the press of bodies, and a young woman, blushing and nervous, spilled out of it. She took a hesitant step toward the Eldritch Horror.
"You'll excuse us," it said. Eyebrows distinct from eyes hinted its intention, and I slid off the stool and stepped back, against the wall next to the Horror.
"Of course."
It patted the barstool next to it with a human hand and took the cash that she held out to it. Using its bulky body to shield this from her view, it quickly rifled through the stack of bills with the full attention of one eye, while other parts of it exchanged meaningless pleasantries. Her name (Meghan), her major (education, with a concentration in literature), her favorite band (Radiohead), her favorite hentai artist (she didn't really like that stuff).
And then it handed the money back to her. "We are very sorry. You are one hundred and fifteen dollars short."
The news passed like a wave through the crowd, and soon, fives and tens and even twenties changed hands and were stacked on the bar in front of the Horror. It re-counted the money and handed Meghan three twenties change.
"Are you ready?" it said.
"I think so."
"You should be sure," it said in perfect dissonance. "You must desire this for yourself. Not for them."
She managed a small smile. "Yes. Yes, I'm ready."
The Eldritch Horror gestured toward a door, next to the piano. The crowd opened a path to it. I reclaimed my seat.
"Go on, then. Remove any clothing you wish to remain undamaged, and then turn off the light. We'll be with you soon."
The Horror watched her until she closed the door behind her, then waved some of the cash at the bartender. "Does this cover our tab?"
"Yes, and then some."
"Good," it said, rising from its seat. "Mr. Levinson's next drink is on us."
"Thanks, Sam." The bartender turned to me. "Another inktini?"
I could feel my taste buds recoil. "Uh, maybe later. Whiskey'll do me just fine. Jameson, if you got it." I heard the door click shut behind me, and the bar erupted in a cheer. "Better make it a double."
* * * *
"You're gonna want to stick around for this," the bartender had said, what felt like an eternity ago. He wouldn't say why. The jukebox and the chatter of the patrons drowned out most of the noises from the other side of the door. Other than the occasional squeal that pierced the air, it was as if nothing unusual was happening at all.
And it remained that way for over an hour.
When the door opened again, and Meghan stood wet and naked in the doorway, the patrons stood back and made way for her. She staggered on wobbly legs to Sam's piece of the bar, which had remained empty the entire time.
She sighed onto the bar stool and leaned back, arching her back until her head and shoulders lay on the bar. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, even breaths.
The viscous fluids that covered her were pearly white, and clear, and deep sea fluorescent blue, and swirls of the blackest black. They pooled in the hollow of her throat, between her breasts, in her navel. They seeped down her legs, dripped from her toes and her limp fingers, and slicked her hair.
The patrons in the bar gathered around, pressed close. One sucked fluids from Meghan's toes. Another knelt between Meghan's legs and delved deep with her tongue to receive what remained within. They licked her belly, her breasts, they tasted her lips, squeezed pearly rivulets from her hair. One woman perched on my lap and raised the limp fingers to her lips.
"What's so special about this?" I asked. "What does it do?"
"Hallucinogenic," she said, catching a drop on her tongue. She wore a t-shirt cut to expose her midriff. It had the word Yale stretched tight enough across her breasts to show her piercings.
Another of the patrons had climbed onto the bar and crawled over to clean Meghan's forehead. His thin face was accentuated by a wispy goatee, looking for all the world like an escapee from the Mystery Bus, but for the horn-rimmed glasses and the wide-lapelled polyester shirt.
"Not hallucinations, man," he said. "Visions. It's like being touched by a god."
"Whatever," Yale said. "It's better than acid and less of a commitment."
She scooped some of the stuff that had pooled over one of Meghan's clavicles and brought it to my lips.
"Less of a commitment?" I asked.
"Half hour. Hour, tops."
When she slipped her sticky fingers into my mouth, I did not resist.
* * * *
Visions.
I floated in a warm sea. Around me, strange creatures. Jelly fish. Bony fish with blocky, armored heads. Shelled things with tentacles that swam with bursts of water forced through soft bodies. Some of them I caught in translucent tendrils and brought into my center to be crushed and stored until they had decomposed enough to be consumed. Attracted by the blood of my victims, something huge and razor-toothed approached quickly, and then veered away suddenly, disappearing into the darkness of the depths.
The road wavered like moonlight filtering through the waves. Yellow lines to the horizon, and it would be an hour to the next stop. I shook my head and blinked my eyes until the lines straightened. Three days until I was home. The hands on the steering wheel in front of me were big. Strong hands with broken nails and rough calluses. I reached for my thermos. The coffee was cold, but I drank it anyway.
My face burned. Terrifyingly large, the hand swung again. Tears stung my eyes. She loomed over me, her face twisted in rage, the omnipresent cigarette dangling from her lip.
"I'm sorry, Mom," I said. "I didn't mean to...." I was crying so hard the words wouldn't come, and then spilled out in a tangled rush.
But there was no reasoning with her. And it didn't matter that I hadn't meant to be bad. It didn't matter, because I was bad, and I deserved anything I got. Still, I struggled, kicked and slapped and tried to bite as she pulled up my dress and yanked down my panties, and the cigarette's touch was worse than I'd remembered.
* * * *
Something soft pillowed my head. Soft and sticky and warm, and moving under me like a placid sea.
I peeled my face from the tacky skin of Meghan's breast and sat up. People were strewn around the room, either face down on the bar itself, or on one of the few tables, or sitting on the floor, leaning back against a wall. Some lay on the floor with their heads in someone else's lap.
"Twenty-five minutes," the bartender said. "That might be a record. You must not have taken a lot."
"You didn't..."
"I'm working. And besides, someone's got to babysit. I lock the door and make sure nobody's taken advantage of."
"Makes sense," I said. "I should go. Can you let me out?"
"Sure. You find what you were looking for?"
"Could be," I said. "Could very well be."
* * * *
I knew what had happened to Angela. At least in a vague sense. The question was, how to prove it? And could she be saved?
Only the Eldritch Horror could answer those questions for me, but it wasn't at the bar the next evening, or the evening after.
"Takes him a while to recover," the bartender said. "He's not as young as he once was."
I thought about the drug-induced vision I'd had, floating in ancient seas. Some of the creatures I'd seen had pre-dated the dinosaurs. I'd looked them up. Ammonites. Trilobites. I hadn't found anything in my admittedly superficial review of the fossil record that resembled Sam. But that didn't necessarily mean anything.
Sam didn't show the following night either, and nobody knew where it went when it wasn't at the bar. Maybe it had a house, a normal suburban house with vinyl siding and a manicured lawn, or maybe it lived in the river. It didn't matter. There were no other leads, so I just kept coming back.
The week went by, and, when I fought a driving rain and flooded creeks to reach the bar on Saturday night, I found it almost as packed as it had been the night I had first met the Eldritch Horror. Sam was there, perched on its high stool at the bar, sipping a bloody-black martini.
I settled in next to it, and the bartender met me there with my whiskey.
"Good day, Mr. Levinson," Sam said. "We trust you are well?"
I shook the rain out of my hat. "Just a bit damp."
"Yes, it has been a long time since we've had weather this good. The humidity does wonders for our complexion, don't you think?"
We chatted about the weather, about global warming, and the recent elections. It was surreal, discussing politics with an amorphous creature that was unimaginably old. We pretended that I wasn't there to find Angela and that it didn't have the answers I wanted.
In the end, I almost lost my nerve, but I fished in my jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. There was a thousand dollars in there, the amount that Meghan had given it the week before. It was an advance on expenses, courtesy of Angela's mother.
"Why?" it asked.
"Because there's things you aren't telling me, and I need to know. It's the only way I know to get closer."
"For whom?" A pseudopod took the envelope from my hand and slipped it back into my pocket. "We must decline."
"Is it that I'm a man?"
It studied me. "That is of no concern. It is more often women, but that is their choice, not ours. Men are more restricted in their actions than women, in some ways, especially in front of their peers."
"Maybe it's just that the tentacle thing has a more direct appeal to women."
"Perhaps," it said.
Something slid across my foot and up my pants leg. It was cool and dry, like a silken snake, and its touch was so sinuous that I found myself getting aroused, even before it got past my knee. I almost pressed my hand against the lengthening molehill of my pants to stop it, but I'd offered to buy this, and I couldn't see trust growing if I didn't follow through.
It slid across my balls and down the length of my cock. And then, it opened. It took the head of my cock into it, first just the tip, and then a little more, until it closed on the shaft. I felt it stretch, like a snake swallowing an egg. Tough ridges of tissue gripped my skin, and the muscles rippled around my flesh, working me deeper and deeper inside, until it pressed against my pubic bone. Part of it began to stretch, then, across my scrotum. It began on the left, gradually encompassing my left testicle, and then...
And then it was gone, the thin tendril snaking down my leg, and I groaned out loud.
"If you'll excuse us," the Eldritch Horror said, and it took everything I had to bring myself back to enough awareness to realize a young woman stood with us, holding a wad of cash.
It was Yale, though today she was wearing a slinky black dress and stiletto heels.
"Of course," I said, standing to make room. My arm brushed hers as we passed, and I could feel her shiver of anticipation, and not a little fear. I understood perfectly. "Have fun."
I watched them disappear into the back room, feeling... What? Jealousy? Rebuke? Anger? The weight of forty-six years of bad choices?
The Eldritch Horror had chosen, and deemed me unworthy.
I pushed my way through the crowd, trying not to let my erection brush up against anyone.
Outside, it was still raining, and I stood in the middle of the parking lot, letting the wind gust waves of water across my body and watching the lightning.
And then I turned around and walked back to the bar, and waited for Yale's return.
* * * *
The next day, I paid a visit to my client, Claire Cassidy. Angela's mother. She sat rigid on her sofa, in a deceptively bright and inviting living room, inhaling a Marlboro Light. She didn't ask me to sit.
I turned the easy chair around to face her instead of the television, and perched on the arm.
"So?" She set her cigarette in a recently cleaned and overflowing ashtray. Her voice was as tense as she was. "What have you found out about my daughter's whereabouts?"
What should I say? She's gone. She's--not dead, exactly, but gone forever, where you can never follow.
Instead, "Can you think of any reason why Angela might want to run away?"
"She wouldn't dare." Claire tapped a cigarette out with trembling fingers, pressed it to her lips, and drew the lighter's flame toward the tip with an unconscious inhalation.
I waited for her to put the pack back in her purse. "You've already got one burning," I said.
Claire flung the cigarette at my face. It fell short and landed on the carpet. "She... wouldn't... dare!"
I let the cigarette smolder. "Here's what I know. She wanted to change majors. She hated marketing. She wanted to do what she wanted with her life, not what you wanted. And you? You stopped paying her tuition. You sabotaged her financial aid applications. You canceled the lease on her apartment. The last time anyone talked to her, she was headed down to the river. She said she was going somewhere where you could never hurt her again."
"Is she..."
"Dead?" I shrugged. "I can't really answer that. All I can say is that in the three weeks I've been investigating her disappearance, I've learned a good deal about her, a good deal that you don't deserve to know. She was tough and resourceful and determined and, if she's alive, you'll never find her. And if she's dead, you'll never find her body. Nobody will."
Claire Cassidy stared at me. She fished another cigarette out of her purse, breaking it in the process. She lit it anyway. "You're fired," she said, her voice tight with rage. "Get out of my house."
Later, she would sue me for a refund. I wasn't worried. My standard contract is pretty air-tight. I went back to my office and typed up my expense report.
* * * *
It was almost a month before I ventured back to the bar. That's how long it took me to scrape together the money after someone poured sugar in my gas tank, and my poor old Honda needed some extensive repairs.
The jukebox was off, and over the hubbub of bar talk, I heard the piano. It was pretty good. A Scott Joplin ragtime piece, I couldn't recall which one. When the song ended, I stepped out of the crowd and raised my glass.
"Play it again, Sam."
"Mr. Levinson. Still on the case, we see."
"Nah. Got fired before I could quit."
Many eyes swiveled to face me. "Then why are you here?"
I tried to give a casual grin, but my face refused to comply. Just a twitch of the lips. "There's something I need to know. Not as part of the case. Not for anyone else. Just for me."
"Something?"
I placed the envelope with the money on the soundboard. "Several things."
The Eldritch Horror regarded me silently, then passed the envelope back to me. I felt a moment of despair, and then it extended a pseudopod to the door knob of the back door. The door swung open.
"Remove any clothing that you don't want damaged," it said, "and then turn out the light. We will be with you shortly."
* * * *
It wasn't what I expected. Well, I don't really know what I expected. Maybe a bed? The room was empty, except for a wardrobe, in which I hung my clothes and placed my shoes. There were mirrors on one wall, and a barre, like in a dance studio. Maybe at one time it had served that function, though that seemed odd for the back room behind a pub. The floor was linoleum tile, yellow and avocado. Very seventies.
There was a rusted drain set into the floor in one corner. I tried not to think about that.
Instead, I looked at myself in the mirror. No, not wise. It sucks getting old. There is little as unappealing as a middle-aged man. It was worse under industrial fluorescent lights. I'd left my drink half-finished on the piano. Maybe ten feet away, and impossibly distant.
I hit the light switch, and waited.
The light from the bar blinded me for a second, and then the door closed, and I was alone in the room with the Eldritch Horror. I heard it slither across the floor, felt something like snakes spreading around the room, encircling me.
It was too late to run.
Don't touch me. Oh god, don't let it touch me.
"Can I change my mind?" I asked. I heard my voice quaver.
The voices came from all around me. "Of course. Would you like to stop?"
Yes. "No."
Tendrils ran up my legs, and I shivered. Or shuddered. I'm not sure which.
"Are you sure?"
I reached down to touch the tendrils, which had reached my waist. They were soft, and twined between my fingers like cats at dinner time. "I was not. But now I am. Thank you."
I felt lips on my neck. Teeth grazing my ears. A soft touch on my back, circling me. Something running through my hair. A mouth pressed to mine, opening, the tongue probing my mouth.
My cock ached. The Eldri... No. Sam. Sam touched my face, my chest, my back. Wrapped my legs in what seemed like a hundred hungry mouths. Touched me almost everywhere. Everywhere but my penis.
The dark was absolute.
"What can I do?" I asked.
"Nothing." The voices surrounded me. "This is for you."
And then there was light.
Just a pinpoint of blue light, dangling at the end of a pseudopod, hanging in front of my face. Like an angler fish.
I pushed that image out of my mind. Better a Lovecraftian tentacle monster from the abyss than those teeth.
The light dropped, lowering until it hovered directly in front of my cock. It reached forward, touching the tip. My cock jumped; the glowing tendril followed it, a cobra's dance. Another touch.
And it slipped inside.
A hundred tendrils lifted me from the floor and bore me to the mirror as more dangling, bioluminescent lures appeared, allowing me to see myself in the mirror. The one that had pushed into my urethra intensified, until it glowed through the skin. I felt my cock swell as the blue glow slid down the length of it, disappearing under my balls. I watched, held motionless, as it slid in and out of me, very slowly at first, and then faster.
The tendril that penetrated me flowered, extending glowing petals that curled around the head of my cock, and then, as it had done before, slowly engulfed the entire organ, crawling down the shaft with pulsing ripples as it continued to slide in and out of me. The feeling was indescribable.
A chorus of voices by my ear: "We think you are ready now. Are we correct?"
I nodded. I was lifted, and lain down on my back on a bed that slid and slithered under me, that wrapped around my waist and pinned my arms at my sides. Things I could not see slid across my body and wrapped around my legs, pulling my knees up to my chest.
Something wet explored between my legs, pushing gently. I gasped and tensed.
"Relax." A dozen voices. A hundred. More.
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Ok."
And it flowed into me. More than I could imagine. I felt myself stretching, not just my sphincter, but my belly. In the dark, I imagined things sliding under my skin.
"How deep can you go?" That was the last I said. Something slippery pushed past my lips and began to pump into my mouth. Tiny suckers caught at my tongue, pulled at my cheeks from the inside.
"We are infinite," it said, "but human bodies are fragile things."
Something pressed hard against my prostate. Something else took my balls into it and rolled them with what I hoped was a tongue. I felt the orgasm building, not in my balls, but between my shoulder blades. My body arched, involuntarily, and I groaned against the thing in my mouth. The thin tendril slid out of my urethra, just in time, and I spent myself into--what? Into a softly pulsing tendril.
Which detached itself from me. Miles of tendrils slid from between my legs, leaving me feeling stretched and empty. The tentacle in my mouth pulled away, and everything that held me in place loosened. I sat up on my bed of snakes.
"Wow."
Something whispered in my ear. "Now that you are warmed up, let us begin."
* * * *
I wasn't sure how much more I could take. It was almost comforting when it wasn't a tentacle or tendril or pseudopod or strange glowy thing that touched me next, but human hands. No, not almost comforting. It was. And even when those hands brought my mouth down onto a very human cock, something I had never done before, I grasped at it like it was the most familiar thing in the world, pumping it with one hand as I sucked, until it swelled and emptied in my mouth. I held on to it until it softened and shrank, pulled back into itself, and warm lips pressed against my face.
I ran my tongue between them, from the clit down to the soft, wet opening and back. I sucked the lips into my mouth, flicked my tongue across the clit. Sam sighed and wrapped fingers into my hair, dug fingernails into my back. I slid two fingers inside her... it. Something tugged on my cock, warm and wet. Fingers cupped my balls, probed me where only tentacles had gone before.
I licked her until the fingers tightened in my hair and she clenched, clenched and moaned, and released. She? It. A thousand voices echoed, an almost infinitesimal delay.
I was hard again. In the dim blue light, I could see a clear pseudopod pulsing around my cock. Hands stroked my legs, massaged my shoulders, spread me open and fingered me. Women's hands, and men's also. Young and old, different colors. Some had hard calluses and thick nails, and dark, matted hair. Cro Magnon? Neanderthal? Older?
There were probably other things in there, in the multitude that called itself Sam, because it was as good a name as any. Tigers, and bears, and even prehistoric creatures like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. I put that thought next to the angler fish. Best not to think of these things. Best not to give it ideas.
I took a deep breath and risked the question I'd come to ask. "Is Angela here?"
A thousand voices. A hundred languages. One answer: "Why?"
I took that as a yes. "May I speak to her?"
The hands pulled away, the bed of tendrils slipping from under me until I knelt on the bare linoleum. Only the one transparent tendril, wrapped around my cock, connected me to Sam.
The blue light increased. The tendril which stroked me darkened and thickened, became lips, a mouth, a face, a head. It extruded a body, arms, legs. She wrapped warm fingers around the base of my cock and pulled her lips away to gaze up at me.
"I needed to be sure," I said.
She brought her face up to mine. She even breathed like a human. "Sure of what?" The suspicion was back, and the hand that had stroked my cock now gripped it like it might want to rip it off.
"Sure that you were safe."
She smiled. "I am." She pressed against me until I lay back on the cold floor, and then crawled over me. She reached behind her and grasped my cock, pressing the head against her pussy, sliding it back and forth until it was positioned right, and then sank down.
She kissed me, then, with soft, eager lips. "Thank you," she said.
"For?"
"For caring enough."
"Was it worth it?" I asked. "All this?"
She pressed herself against me. "Oh, yes."
She rode me until I spent myself inside her, and then she curled against my chest.
"Would you do something else for me?" she asked. "When I used to... used to come to Sam, there was something I used to do that took them somewhere beyond ecstasy."
"Them?"
"Sam. Them. Us." I felt her lips smile against my cheek. "It's something that nobody has done since I merged. I think we would trust you enough."
"We?" The smile again. "Yes, for you. And... and all of you."
"Thank you," she said, and, before she slipped away into the chaos, she told me how they liked it.
* * * *
The fucking began in earnest, then. Tentacles and cocks and cunts and mouths, breasts covered in sensitive nubs that rolled under my palms. I asked for more light. I wanted to see what I was doing, and what was being done to me.
The human body is not infinitely malleable, like some things, but can learn to accommodate far more than seems reasonable in the light of day. More than one thing penetrated my ass at one time. Things filled my mouth--male, female, and other. Tiny cocks fucked my nostrils and ears with rabbit-like speed. Things sucked my toes, rubbed against my thighs, rode my fingers like animate gloves.
Around me, bodies formed, fucked, melted into other things, into other configurations.
I pressed through the chaos, the madness that probed and fucked and sucked me, swam labial seas and climbed mountains of cock. And found, at the heart of the confederation that was Sam, a nub.
I touched it with my thumb, and a shiver ran through the room, through them all. I kissed it and licked it and sucked on it, and it swelled in response. I pulled at it with my teeth, biting gently.
"Harder." A voice. "Harder." Another, echoing, and then others, dozens. "Harder, harder, harder." And one voice, a voice I now knew. "Yes. Now."
I bit hard, and pulled. Something tore. Bitter, black ink spilled into my mouth, spread across Sam's surface, on my hands. Around me, the chaos of bodies convulsed. Hot liquid spilled on my back, across my face. It was in my hair and in my ass.
I bit again, even harder. I chewed the nub, tearing pieces of it off, swallowing them. More ink. More cum.
They washed through me, the collective memories of thousands, tens of thousands, of souls.
It was too much. Far, far too much.
* * * *
When I woke, it was in a cradle of Sam's flesh. We lay that way for some time, me too shell-shocked to do anything, and Sam waiting on me. After a time, they spoke.
"You wish to join us," they said.
"You wouldn't want me," I said. "I'm damaged goods. More bad memories than good."
"We have tasted you," they said, and the dissonant chorus no longer tore at me. No longer felt wrong. "You are not ready yet to be us, but when you are, we will welcome you."
I nodded, trying not to let my disappointment show, and then stumbled to my feet. A tangle of snakes slid across the slick floor to make a path, and I stumbled naked out of the room on wobbly legs and into a sea of eager faces.
It was time to share the gift.
Koenigsberg's Model
Peter Tupper
Rick climbed the stairs, walked down the hallway to the door marked "Galloway's Rarities," and pressed the doorbell. Something large and dark moved on the other side of the dirty, pebbled glass door. The lock clicked, and the door creaked open just enough for him to see an almond-shaped brown eye, a high cheekbone, and half of a full-lipped mouth in a dark brown, almost literally black, face.
After an uncomfortable moment, Rick said, "I'm here to see Mr. Galloway."
"He is dead," said the woman, in a rich voice resonant with an accent Rick couldn't identify. "I run the shop now."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Rick said, feeling even more awkward. "I guess it was sudden."
The woman showed no sign of speaking any further, so Rick continued. "I'm from Miskatonic. Last week, he sent me a letter saying he had a box of books for me to look through. It's for my thesis."
The woman's eye looked back at him for so long that Rick wondered if she understood him. Then the door shut, a chain rattled on the other side, and the door creaked open. "Come in."
He stepped inside and inhaled the dry, old-book smell. Under the worn beige carpet, mushy floorboards creaked with every step he took. The high, closely spaced shelves were filled with books, most from before the age of bar codes and ISBNs. Galloway's Rarities was a holdover from another time, a walk-up shop on the second floor of a brownstone in a block being converted into coffee shop chains and hipster boutiques. Somehow it had survived decades of Boston's rent increases and urban development, but, if the jackhammers and cement mixers on the street outside were any indication, it wouldn't last long. Fitting, then, that Galloway had died; Rick couldn't imagine the man in any other occupation.
In the diffuse light that came in through the venetian blinds over the front window, he got a better look at the tall, full-figured woman who had answered the door. She wore a loose, multi-layered robe of some black fabric that draped over her entire body, including her hands and feet, leaving only a small opening for her face. Some kind of Muslim thing? he thought.
She looked back at him. "This way," she said, and walked with a kind of gliding, swaying shuffle.
He followed her through the narrow stacks of book shelves. If the woman's garment was supposed to cover her up, it wasn't doing a very good job of it. Just walking made the black silk, or cotton or whatever it was, shift and flow around her. He had fleeting glimpses of the shape of the body underneath: an hourglass waist that flared out to broad, shapely hips and high buttocks that swung with every step. This must have been the effect mid-nineteenth century women struggled to achieve with bustles. He was from a generation of young men raised on easy access to images of female nudity in every conceivable sexual activity. Why did a woman covered in a black bag make him harder than he had been since he was a teenager?
To save himself from embarrassment, he scanned the shelves. The books seemed to be less tightly packed than they were when he visited last month. He guessed the woman was selling off the inventory before she liquidated the shop.
He followed her through a doorway made particularly narrow by two shelves filled with golden National Geographic spines.
They entered the back room, Galloway's office, where the late owner kept a massive oak desk that was almost completely lost under piles of yet more books. The exceptions being a Bakelite phone, a mechanical typewriter, and a lot of ledgers for bookkeeping and inventory--nothing resembling a computer and scarcely anything that had been made before 1980. More wan light filtered through the dirty skylight. Rick glanced at the titles piled on the desk, with scribbled yellow notes between the pages, like a research project: Green Mansions. She. The White People. The Great God Pan. The Beetle. The Black Czarina.
"There." The woman raised one black-draped arm and indicated the old cardboard box on the desk, full of an assortment of books.
Rick waited for further explanation. Galloway had loved to talk about the histories and owners of his wares, though rarely their actual content, but the woman said nothing. "Thanks. I'll take a look."
The woman turned and glided back through the gold-edged doorway. Rick had to force himself not to stare at her swaying, shrouded figure.
Idly wondering what the woman's story was, Rick pulled on the pair of white cotton gloves he kept in his messenger bag and sorted through the box, waving puffs of dust away from his face. The box contained what was known in the book trade as "curiosa" or "exotica" or "something warmer," a holdover from the days when print was worth censoring. He carefully searched through the box, hoping for a find but prepared for disappointment. Late sixties reprints of the Kama Sutra, not even the Burton translation, as well as Fanny Hill and other public domain works; the Grove Press abridgement of My Secret Life; a stripped copy of a reprint of Man with a Maid. Nothing special. Galloway's last letter had told Rick of a rare Victorian English translation of Therese Philosophe, an eighteenth-century French novel which mixed political philosophy with flagellant pornography, but there was no sign of it.
The rationalization of the erotica collectables market had resulted in the concentration of all the important material in the hands of the wealthy collectors. Rick had hoped that there would be something special left in a tiny, obscure shop like Galloway's, but apparently the pickings were slim here too.
Except... what he thought was the bottom of the cardboard box was actually another book, one of those large black-and-white speckled notebooks popular in the 1940s. Curious, he managed to wedge his fingers between the notebook and the side of the box and lever it out.
He wrinkled his nose at the notebook's scent of old cigar smoke. The cover showed decades of wear, almost solid scratches, nicks, and stains of unknown substances. He opened it with a creak and paged through. The first few pages held an assortment of character studies in pencil of WWII soldiers, drawn with a clean, dynamic style. There were a few studies of dark-skinned women and girls in desert settings. A soldier's visual diary, he guessed, and imagined a GI carrying his sketchbook with him on deployment and drawing to pass the time.
About twenty pages in, there was an abrupt shift in subject matter. Gradually, the drawings became more horrific, though still drawn in the same realistic style. Instead of a grinning soldier, this page showed a soldier on his knees, hands clutched to his head, literally trying to hold his face onto his skull. A soldier lay on an Army cot, maggots the size of anacondas crawling out of his wounds. These were mixed in with more portraits of African women.
About two thirds of the way through the book, there was another change. Now it was abstract shapes, amorphous masses in jagged caverns or on barren wastes. One page showed the corner of an ordinary room, except in the darkness there lurked a pair of cold, staring eyes.
The last page of the book was actually a separate, folded sheet. It was a landscape, with a ruined city, inhabited by all manner of crawling creatures, as if an entire civilization had fallen and been reclaimed by animal life. At the center of the landscape, surrounded by the myriad horrors, was a woman, dressed in some kind of barbarian queen outfit, walking confidently towards the viewer, the ruler of her realm of nightmares. The woman's features were unmistakeably African, and her dark skin was indicated with subtle shading, while a wild mane of waist-length braids trailed behind her. Her eyes looked out of the page at him, and her mouth was in a sly, knowing smile that promised much and revealed nothing. The effect was uncanny, like the Mona Lisa turned monster-hunter.