A noise wakes him. He opens his eyes and sees his mother throw something into the stagnant water. She looks around but does not see him, and makes her way back toward the small hut. He walks over to the pond. His mother had told him numerous times to stay away from it, that it is dangerous but he is bested by curiosity. He stands at the edge of the moonlit waters, gazing into its murky depths. They were alive with a teeming horde of swimming shapes, the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated. He hears a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction when, suddenly, a creature breaks the surface from below like a crab with pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man’s head should be, and wraps its tentacles around the boy's neck. He is half-dragged, half-sucked down into the unnamable abyss of the squalid, stagnant black mire.
The next thing that he remembers is his mother screaming at him as she slaps him across the face, "I told you to stay away from the water!”
He pulls away from her.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she breathes, “Come to Mommy.”
He walks timidly towards her and she pulls him to her breast, stroking his wet, slimy head.
He feels comforted by the words, the warm embrace, and her womanly scent.
“You know I love you the most,” she croons. She puts her hands to the sides of his head and tilts his face upwards. Looking into his eyes she says “I love you” once more.
“What’s this?” she asks as she notices that he is becoming erect.
Embarrassed, he tries to pull away from her embrace.
“It’s okay, honey,” she breathes in his ear, “Totally natural. My boy is becoming a man.” She says this almost as if with pride. Then a cloud glazes her eyes. He knows the look, has seen it many time in the eyes of the older boys before one of the ‘games’.
“Come,” she urges. She grasps his hand and drags him toward her bedroom.
Later that night, he tries to make sense of everything as he cries himself to sleep.
The man wakes with the dream bringing a question to his mind.
"Who are you really?" he asks aloud.
An image flashes in his mind. Two fetuses entwined head-to-toe within each other’s embrace. A pink sea surrounds them as they suckle on each other’s penises.
I Am the Thing of the Idols. I Am the green, sticky spawn of the stars, the voice returns, We...are one!
The image changes as one of the twins begins to devour the other, the pink sea quickly turning red.
I am ravenous, my brother!
The man is stunned but knows the revelation to be true.
He had eaten his own brother! Even in utero, he had been a cannibal.
From this point on, he tries to ignore the fiendish buzzing, the incessant whispering of the hateful and unhuman voice as it continuously assaults him.
He languishes in the fleshy hell - the lonely, dark cell, so lonely that it could destroy the strongest of minds; the voice has infected his mind like a parasite, the only thing keeping him company. He knows that no one will ever understand what has brought him to this point. The voice is stronger and more pervasive then ever, and like his twin, the man is ravenous.
To sustain himself, he begins to gnaw on the walls of his prison. For the next few weeks - weeks that feel to him more like years - he eats, sleeps, and goes mad.
Chapter II
Wake up! It is time.
As his eyes open, he feels his body being jerked to and fro. He is slammed into the wall of his cabin, and then thrown out of his cot and onto the hard, planked floor.
Soon. Soon! The voice whispers luridly in his mind. He will be here in moments.
Realizing that a storm is raging, the man pushes himself into a sitting position, then stands and makes his way the few feet to the small portal above the table. It is being pelted with rain and hail. He opens it.
Beyond the portal, the squall has grown in strength and transformed into a tempest-a force that knew the secrets of a man's heart and could tear his soul to shreds. The rage of the storm mirrors that which twists and writhes like a hungry worm in his mind.
There is a knock on his door.
Dinner has arrived.
"Please go away," the man begs of the voice. "Leave me alone. Please!"
Do not be a coward! Open the door and let him in, it is time.
He opens the door, and there stands the beautiful young man, a plate of steaming food in one hand, a small clay jar in the other and a wicked grin on his face.
He enters the cabin, and walks over to the small table. The man closes the door behind the boy and turns to watch as he sets the two items down, and then turns, and without a uttering a word, drops his tunic to the floor.
A gift from the violent onslaught, the boy is like a beautiful, grotesque cherub.
His naked skin glows in the light of the oil lamp, his sandy blond hair tousled, his chest, muscular for his age with brown, coin-shaped nipples, his uncircumcised penis already half-hard and pointing right at him, his scrotum soft and smooth, making a mockery of the man's own deformed testicles.
No one deserves to be so beautiful, the voice taunts, make him pay. You know how.
He thinks of all that his suffering has caused him to lose - his innocence, his home, his sanity. All that remains is the voice and its determination to destroy him.
He grabs handfuls of the boy's fair hair, and pulls the ethereal face towards his own waiting mouth. His engorged tongue parts the boy's lips without resistance; it snakes into the pliant mouth, brushing across the smooth teeth, seeking out the warm pink tongue within. He then slowly retracts his own swollen tongue, enticing the smaller one of the boy to venture into his waiting maw. His teeth settle lightly, teasingly around the small pink muscle. His third arm slithers from beneath his robe.
The boy, his eyes shut, moans with desire and starts to gyrate against the hand, which wraps itself around his erect member and begins to stroke. As he gets more involved in the kiss, he reaches up and puts his small smooth hands over the older man's rough ones, which are still entangled in his hair. A moment goes by before he realizes that something is off. He lowers one of his hands to investigate what is going on at his crotch. He raises the hand again to explore the other two hands, which writhe and twist in his hair. He drops both hands and wedges them, palms out, against the man's chest. He tries to push away from the man. The teeth tighten on his tongue. The speed and urgency of the strokes increase and become rough. He realizes the he is trapped in the sinister embrace.
Do it! The voice urges, Make him pay like all the others!
He tries to drown it out, but it is of no use; the blood has abandoned his brain to collect in his erect tongue.
As the boy begins to ejaculate, the man simultaneously rips the tongue from his pubescent mouth, swallowing it, and tears his spurting member from its scrotum. The boy convulses; then goes slack in his strong grip. He gently lays the beautiful body, now spurting blood and oozing ichor, onto the hard wooden planks and climbs atop him. He begins to feed.
After gorging himself, he falls asleep.
When a sailor later finds the mutilated body of the cabin boy with the bloodied man snoring beside him, hot bile erupts from his churning gut leaving a burning trail up the pathways of his chest and throat. The acrid vomit explodes from his mouth, splattering his own sandaled-feet as well as the mutilated body of the dead cabin boy; melting and mingling with the pool of tacky, already congealing blood. The sound of his retching causes the man to roll over in his sleep, exposing his third arm, which flops down and lands in a pile of offal in the center of the carnage. Its clenched fist still grips a globule that looks suspiciously like a boy's penis. This new revelation invokes fresh vomiting from the sailor before he turns and runs from the cabin.
Several minutes later, he returns with a dozen men. The madman is sitting on the floor with his back propped against his cot.
His third arm is feeding him the boy's cock.
They drag him to the outer deck and in a few moments one of them returns with Ol’ Cap’n Obed.
Even in his crazed state, the man sees that something is off about the captain. He is naked except for a strange diadem on his narrow head. The surface of his body appears as if its peeling from some cutaneous disease. His watery blue eyes bulge; never to blink. Through long fat lips, he begins to mumble an incantation without nouns, but only verbs and pronouns. As he continues, the sailors strip off their clothing and join the chant.
Ol’ Cap’n Obed’s rambling voice scrapes and whispers on:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
Then, with large heavily veined hands, he brings a flute to his thick drooping lips and begins to play demonic music.
As he plays, the naked sailors encircle him, becoming a flopping horde; mindless amorphous dancers. They lift the maniacal cannibal and throw him overboard into the mighty eddying and foaming of the brine.
Chapter I
He expected it would be a perilous journey yet still he heads for Tarshish refusing the order. By rebelling against the voice, he is desperately trying to hold on to the last shreds of his sanity.
As he boards the Philistine cargo boat, the gray wood planks - brittle under his sandaled feet - look like the skeletal remains of a beached whale. He notices the intricate hieroglyphics carved into the hull of the Alert - aquatic symbols such as fish, eels, octopi, crustations, mollusks, whales and the like; and certain sort of men, damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy bulging eyes - and other features less tasteful. He recognizes the depiction of Dagon, the Philistine fish god.
Burly men load freight onto the ship and pay him no notice. He does catch the eye of an epicene cabin boy who smiles and walks toward him.
"You look lost," he says, "Do you need help?"
"I'm not sure where I am supposed to go from here, where my cabin is." He shows the boy his pass.
"Looks like we will be neighbors," the boy replies, taking the man's satchel, "Follow me, I'll show you."
As they make their way into the belly of the ship, he studies the boy’s graceful movements of the boy and arousal stirs within his mouth.
Yes, the voice intimates, Beautiful.
"Go away!" He curses beneath his breath.
"I'm sorry?" the boy glances over his shoulder at the strange, attractive man.
"Nothing," he replies, "I just have a painful cramp in my thigh."
"Oh," the boy says, his full lips stretching into a smile. "Here it is."
They arrive at a rough heavy door which the boy opens exposing a utilitarian cabin, bare except for a squat table, a chair, and a threadbare cot. Over the table a small mold-covered portal looks onto a sky that is just beginning to cloud over. He sets the man's bag on the bed.
"If you need anything, I am two doors down, on the right. Most of the mariners say that I have magic fingers; I could come back later and work that cramp for you," he states. To the man's surprise, the boy winks at him.
"Thank you. I think I will take you up on that. I need to get some rest first."
"I'll come back in two hours with some dinner, and some tallow to rub into your thigh." He smiles at the man and exits the cabin, closing the door behind him.
Perfect! The voice speaks up, when they are finally alone. That was too easy.
He curls up and drifts into a fitful sleep. The boy has triggered memories of his childhood, images that shift in and out of focus. He dreams.
The voice had started when he was twelve. He went to bed one evening smooth and had woken up the next morning with soft, downy hair under his arms (even the small, wing-like, third arm had this new growth) and around his groin. While exploring the short, wiry pubic hair, he had also found that what used to be a loose piece of skin beneath his penis was now heavy, swollen, and dangling. He stroked the bulging sack and squeezed it lightly discovering something that felt like a large olive. Intrigued by this find, he had prodded a little further counting three more of these 'olives'. He knew what this meant. He had often played Adam & Eve with some of the older boys from the nearby town of Joppa, and these boys' testicles had already dropped. What confused him was the fact that he had four of them where his playmates had always had only two.
Later, that same afternoon, the voice had come. He was playing Samson and Delilah with an older boy named Nephi. Because he was younger and a 'freak', he had always played the female in these games.
After a few minutes of the familiar groping, Nephi had noticed the change in his playmate's organs.
"What’s this?” he asked, cupping the younger boy's bulging scrotum, "Looks like it's time for a new game. Get down on your knees, Delilah, and put it in your mouth. Move up and down on it." While giving these instructions, Nephi had reached up and untied the leather strip that held his hair into place, letting it fall loosely around his shoulders.
"Don't worry," he said, "when my seed comes, just swallow it. Put it into your mind that you are swallowing a bunch of tiny fish. It’ll be easy."
The boy, ‘Delilah’, following orders, dropped to his knees.
Nephi spread his tunic and withdrew a rather large red erection.
"Come on now; show Samson that you love him," Nephi had said, putting his hands on the back of the younger boy's head and guiding his mouth towards the rigid member.
From the boy's position on the ground, Nephi's penis had been at eye-level and looked like an angry red cobra ready to strike.
After a moment of hesitation, the boy had gripped Nephi's waist, and pulling him forward, had wrapped his mouth around the pulsating flesh. It squirmed around in his mouth, probing for his tonsils. Within moments, Nephi began to convulse and applied pressure with his hands, shoving the mouth all the way to the base of his engorged penis, gagging the boy. Thick, venomous liquid had exploded into his strained throat.
At the moment of Nephi's orgasm, two unexpected things had simultaneously happened. While his two normal hands still gripped Nephi's waist, Jonah’s third arm, which had always hung limp and lifeless from his chest, twitched, then shot up between the legs of the older boy, his clenched fist entering Nephi's rectum, the force pushing the older boy's cock further into his throat.
Second, a voice, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere all at once, spoke.
Bite it. Rip it from its root.
He had not known the origin of the voice, but instinct had taken over. At Nephi's severed member had slid down his semen-lubricated throat, it caused a gusher of a different kind; blood erupted into his upturned face. Nephi screamed, then slovered and gibbered before dying. After removing the extra appendage from Nephi’s ass, the boy had licked it clean of blood and feces. Then climbed atop his molester and started ripping hunks of hair from his head with his teeth.
"Samson, I have found the secret of thy strength," he mumbled, his mouth full of bloody scalp.
Later on the same long ago afternoon, he had cleaned up the mess and dragged Nephi's body to the swamp for his daemon siblings to feast on. Even at that young age, he had grasped the irony, for it had been Nephi who had first taunted him with lurid stories about his mother and her offspring. Some had called her Black Widow, others a vampire. The grotesque tales had been shadowy and marvelous; of which grandmothers had whispered to children through the centuries.
His mother was a legend.
That same evening, he had started to have second thoughts about the existence of the voice; thinking maybe he was going mad. Much had been happening; he had felt confused and violated. Maybe it had been nothing more than rage. Still, he was curious. He had decided to probe the question.
"Are you there?" he had asked the empty room around him.
"Hello? Who are you?"
I AM, a booming voice answered. He jumped. The voice had not been external, but somehow remained separate from his own thoughts. He had hear
d the stories of Moses and his experience with an unbodied voice - and Noah and Avraham and Yosef and Samuel.
"Who ... who's th ... there?" he had asked again.
I AM!
Again the voice. Then wicked laughter.
It told him that he was to go to Nineveh.
That dream drifts away and merges into a new one:
A naked woman lies on her back. Her stomach is swollen and covered in a fine sweat. She is screeching like an owl as she strains in childbirth. The woman is his mother. To her right stands a man. He knows the man as Amittai, his father. It dawns on him this dream is a memory of his own birth.
She pushes one last time, a scream escaping her throat. The babe is shoved into the world with a gush of warm blood and afterbirth; a third arm protruding from his gore-slick alabaster chest; a small broken wing.
Lilith brushes her sweaty hair from her brow, lifting the infant to her waiting mouth, and uses her teeth to sever the cord that connects them. Swallowing it, she puts the infant to her breast.
“My little dove," she whispers, “I will call you Jonah.”
Amittai’s adam’s apple bobs up and down, as he swallows nervously. Lilith turns to him and smiles. She then bares her sharp teeth and rips his throat out.
Dedicated to Chuck Palahniuk
Last Respects
By D.K. Thompson
I pulled the sharpened dentures from my mouth and dropped them in the cup of water. Crimson strings threaded from the incisors through the liquid. The bed creaked as I lay back; the taste of blood still lingering on my tongue. It had been a long night and even vampires get tired, especially ones my age.
I looked at the picture of Jesus nailed to the wall. He stared down at me with a sad smile and I felt my wife’s cold impression on the bed. Moments like these were the hardest, forcing the truth; she was dead. Even with her funeral the next day, I couldn’t believe she was gone.
She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror Page 10