The pirogue glided through the bend, and I spotted Libby Mumford.
She was lying on her back along the muddy bank of the bayou, completely naked, both shapely legs raised into the air and spread wide as she writhed and wiggled like a mambo who’d been mounted by the loa. The honey-colored skin was splotched with dried mud, the platinum hair tangled with leaves and twigs.
“That!” she cried out in a voice distorted by intense lust. “That, oh yes, do that! Do me deeper, harder, oh yes, your big cock is tamping my shit! Yesss, like that!”
Her taut round ass began flexing and releasing like a blowfish, her pelvis thrusting up rapidly from the ground, and her nipples were swollen so stiff they looked like little chocolate thumbs. She was so amped up with passion that every breath included a slight groan. Clearly she was enjoying the fuck of her life.
Or thought she was. Because in fact she was all alone on that muddy bank.
I was witnessing some kind of insanity. Yet, all I could feel was my own demanding lust. My cock throbbed like there was a tourniquet around it, and I could hear my pulse surf-crashing in my ears.
“Like that!” she howled, thrashing like a gut-hooked fish. “That’s it! Yes, yes, yes, I’m going to – oh, Christ, I’m gonna – anhh!”
In my time I’ve watched a few babes get their rocks off, and if I’m lying, I’m dying – Libby climaxed just then, a shuddering, screaming orgasm that left her gasping, spent, and weak.
Don’t get me wrong. The objective cop in me knew damn well that even a PERK – a physical-evidence recovery kit – would’ve turned up no signs in her vagina of actual sexual intercourse. Yet, “real” it was. Beyond the swamp’s fungoid stink of rot and decay, I could detect another odor staining the air: the faint bleach smell of spent semen.
“Libby!” I called out, starting to paddle toward the bank.
She sat up quickly, and I received another jolt when she looked in my direction: her lips were visibly swollen, as if from passionate kissing.
Her glassy-eyed glance touched me and slid away. She scrambled to her feet and turned to flee into the swamp.
“Libby, wait! I’m a cop! Dammit, stop!”
For a moment she obeyed, but when she looked at me again her eyes were mutinous.
“I don’t need any cops!” she flung back at me. “Just leave me alone! Don’t take this away from me, please don’t!”
“Take what away? The hell you talking about?”
I had stood up to leap ashore. She pointed toward my crotch. I didn’t have to glance down to know there was a huge furrow along my left thigh, the outline of my raging blue-veiner.
“That! You felt it, too, didn’t you? Come back if you want the best sex of your life!”
“Wait! You can’t survive in this—”
But it was no use. She had already disappeared like a frightened rabbit.
“What, I gotta pop you on your snot locker just to get a freakin’ report out of you, Neal?”
Breaux stared at me across his bomb-rubbled desk, that lopsided mouth of his twisted into an impatient scowl.
I opened my mouth to reply, but the words snagged in my throat like half-chewed bread.
“Well, Jesus Katy Christ!” Breaux exploded. “You did search the swamp this weekend?”
I nodded.
“As much of it as I could,” I qualified. “But it’d be easier to bite your own teeth than for one man to search that entire swamp.”
Breaux’s eyes puckered with suspicion. “That dog won’t hunt, Sergeant. What are you holding back?”
Again I opened my mouth to report, but I felt like a snake trying to get started on loose sand. Since Saturday I hadn’t been able to shake the retinal after-image of Libby’s gorgeous body thrashing around like a downed power line. Come back if you want the best sex of your life.
“All right, I get it,” he essayed next, changing tactics. “You didn’t find out jack shit, did you?”
Holding back was one thing. But in twenty years of being a cop, I’d never lied to a superior yet.
“I saw Libby,” I finally told him.
Breaux’s eyes bulged out like wet white marbles.
“You saw her alive?”
I nodded, thinking: oh, she was sure-god alive, all right. More alive, probably, than any other woman on Planet Earth.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Sure. She told me to leave her alone. Then she ran off.”
“And you let her?”
I shrugged. “How could I stop her? Honey Island is public land, after all, and she’s broken no laws I know of.”
I watched him turn the problem back and forth for a while, studying all the facets and angles.
“I spoze you’re right,” he finally ceded. “It ain’t none of our picnic if some pert skirt decides to play Jane in the jungle. So what do we do now, sit and play a harp? This chick’s got family looking for her.”
I said nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, hearing Libby’s urgent voice in my auditory memory: You felt it too, didn’t you?
Since Saturday I’d been trying to convince myself I had only gotten aroused at sight of her in sexual ecstasy. But it was more than that, different somehow. As if I had wandered onto the periphery of an area of electrically charged particles. And as if, had I gone any closer to her, I might have been “mounted,” too.
“I think I should go back,” I finally replied. “Try to find her and talk her into resurfacing. Hell, how can she survive there?”
Breaux approved this with a nod, shrewd eyes studying me like a bug under a magnifying glass.
“You do that. Just one more question: has this got anything to do with that porno soundtrack she left behind? Or the last comment we heard on her tape recorder? All that doo-dah about how fucking is the ‘ultimate no-mindedness?’ ”
I shook my head. “Hell if I know.”
“Who’s the ‘you’ she’s talking to?” he added, eyes piercing me like a pair of bullets.
“Nobody I know,” I answered truthfully.
He watched me a few seconds longer, trying to read the unspoken subtext but drawing a blank.
“You bolted to that chair?” he finally growled. “Get the hell outta here, and don’t come back without Libby.”
The next day, when I made my return trip to Shrieking Swamp, one part of me intended to carry out Breaux’s order. Libby, I told myself repeatedly, needed help. Sure, she had begged me not to “take this away from me.” But heroin addicts felt the same loyalty toward their sickness, too.
Another part of me, however, rejected this supposedly noble impulse of mine. Piss on the humanitarian schmaltz about “helping” – she had invited me back for the best sex of my life, and naturally I assumed she meant with her.
And with her is how it turned out. As in “in the presence of.”
I returned to the very same spot where I had last seen her. For hours I waited, slapping at bugs, until the waning sun was replaced by a moon bright enough to make shadows.
I could hear the nocturnal predators coming to life, slithering and splashing all around me, and still no sign of Libby. Bored and dejected, I started to drag the pirogue back into the water, intending to return to my car.
“You came back,” a voice behind me said softly.
I whirled around. Libby stood there in the buttery moonlight, wearing a muddy and torn brisa del mar dress. Her platinum hair gleamed like quicksilver.
“Yeah, but I’m not sure why,” I admitted.
“You’re about to find out why,” she assured me, starting to unbutton her dress.
She let it fall in a puddle at her feet, naked now, and the sight of those huge, high-thrusting tits on such a slim girl sent blood surging into my cock.
“You get naked, too,” she ordered me, and I didn’t require any further persuading to peel off my clothes. I expected the mosquitoes to eat me alive, but oddly, there was no longer an insect in our vicinity.
“Not too close,” she told me when I st
arted toward her.
“But I’ve been thinking about you since Saturday.”
“About me?” Her laughter was softly melodic. “You still don’t understand. But you will. Oh, you will. Be patient.”
A few minutes passed in a strange, communal silence. She hadn’t even asked my name, and yet, I felt as if we were already close – closer, even, than lovers.
“You’re here,” she said abruptly, joy sparking her tone, and it was clear she wasn’t talking to me this time.
Soon I heard urgent sucking noises and watched in slack-jawed astonishment as both her nipples stiffened in the moonlight. Whimpering, she sank to her knees, her breathing suddenly ragged and hoarse.
I was on the verge of stepping closer to take her right there in the muck. But invisible hands seemed to grip my shoulders and propel me down onto the ground. My first reaction was abject fear, but that quickly passed as the incredible pleasure took over.
Moist heat flowed over my erection, the unmistakable feel of a hungry mouth pleasuring me. An invisible tongue swirled all around my swollen glans, invisible teeth raked along my length with just enough pain to hurt so nice. A hot, tingling pressure began to build between my asshole and my balls, and it felt like every nerve ending in my prick had been raised to the fifth power as a pleasure receptor.
Whoever or whatever was sucking me into a spastic frenzy never did take any recognizable form. Yet, the “substance” was all there: a feminine odor like honeysuckle and lilacs, even the tickle of long, silky hair brushing my belly while this . . . demonic nymph teased me to the brink of explosive release.
“Lick my cunt!” Libby screamed from only a few feet away. “Faster, faster, yes, like that, you fucking stud!”
I managed a quick glance in her direction. Her legs were raised, drawn back to expose her sex, and the wet slapping sounds of a good tongue-lashing were unmistakable. Her pleasure-glazed eyes met mine in that eldritch moonwash, and watching each other had a powerful booster effect on our lust.
Her sharp cry of orgasmic release was followed almost immediately by my own. Both of us came so violently that we went limp and comatose afterward, floating on a sea of dazed bliss.
But that supernatural blow job was only the beginning of my initiation into the erotic addiction that had already claimed Libby. I came to with my erection back in full force. A tight velvet glove seemed to slip over it, I felt invisible vaginal walls parting, and for hours Shrieking Swamp lived up to its name as Libby and I were both fucked with savage sweetness while the moon crept toward its zenith.
It’s been several months since that night, and I haven’t left the swamp except for brief trips to a little Cajun grocery store near the mouth of the Pearl River. I live with Libby in an old shack built on stilts, somebody’s long-abandoned fishing camp. It’s primitive: a rusted hand pump for water, no toilet, and when it rains the place leaks like a perforated bladder.
Search parties have come through a few times, and we hid in a giant deadfall until they left. Neither one of us ever wants to leave our invisible lover.
It’s weird, but neither of us wants to fuck each other, either. Oh, sure, we’ve bonded, all right, grown inseparable. We even sleep together naked in the shack’s old leather-webbing bed. And we love watching each other in the throes of carnal abandon. But Libby was right when she claimed that “normal sex” pales in comparison to what we now have.
But all is far from bliss. We bought a battery-powered radio. Late one night, when it was too hot to sleep, we were listening to some stump-screaming evangelist: “My friends, the Devil is sailing on a sinking ship, and the place where he reigns is called Doomed Domains.”
After that we tossed the radio out. It was a reminder that we ourselves are doomed – doomed and damned. For neither of us doubts that whatever holds us in thrall is demonic. We simply aren’t strong enough to resist it. We have willingly immersed ourselves in the destructive element.
There’s shame – and fear. When lust becomes your drug, you must constantly up the dose. Each night the sex becomes more savage, more physically punishing. What will our ravenous libidos demand by this time next year – if we even live that long?
The darkness within us all is deep, and for some it makes demands like a stomach that must be fed. I only know one thing for sure about Shrieking Swamp: whatever lurks there lusts there, and now it lusts within the two of us.
Under the Frog Bridge
Debra Hyde
During the first weeks of spring, everyone around me complained about the winter that wouldn’t end, but I kept my mouth shut. I said nothing when sleet hissed against our windows, when the snow pack melted and the river frothed mad, or during the countless gray days of pounding rain. Even five inches of snow from an early April nor’easter didn’t compel me to speak. Saying anything would jinx me.
All that changed mid-May. In its usually chaotic way, the southern New England weather swung from intolerable to temperate, pushing people from sweaters to tank-tops practically overnight, proving, I suppose, how native nutmeggers can’t escape that locally indelible Twain-attributed saying, “If you don’t like the weather, wait.”
But wait, I could.
Unfortunately, forty-eight hours into the 70-degree days, my luck ran out. Standing at the kitchen sink as dusk neared, I heard them from the window, spring peepers, they who herald the first warm nights of spring. In the seasonal wetland behind our neighborhood, they sprang up, tiny creatures no bigger than a fingernail, always heard but largely unseen. They would signal my fate, a fate I’d meet under a man-made shrine that, ironically, worshipped their kind.
When John came in from hauling the trash to the curb, I knew I was doomed. The smirk on his face told me so.
As Friday turned toward twilight, the temperature slid from hot to comfortable with forecasters predicting a clear night. Spring birdcalls faded with the sunlight and in the void between light and dark, those spring peepers rose again in choir. Unlike the birds that dominated the daylight, their sound was not diverse; it lacked the distinction of a mocking-bird among crows. No, the spring peepers croaked in cheeping, high-pitched unison and, lone soul that I am, I didn’t welcome them. If anything, I wished they’d croak deeper so they could sound more like the doom I anticipated.
My fate arrived hours later, once darkness had fully wrapped itself around my world. John came to me, collar and leash in one hand and a small duffle bag in the other. He motioned me to follow him to the couch where he dropped the bag at his feet as he sat down. He opened it and drew out my clothes.
“Strip,” he ordered.
He needn’t say more; I knew the drill. I peeled off my common, everyday clothes and stuffed my trembling body into the uniform of the night: flannel shirt, leather chaps, and a custom shaped, leather underwear that hid my crotch and the roundness of my ass but left one thing accessible: my asshole.
In the dark, only that hole matters.
Once I had dressed properly, Master strapped the collar to my neck and the leash to its O-ring. He picked up the duffle bag and rose with a “time to go.” As we moved to the front door, he turned off the lights, both inside and out. To my immediate relief, we left our house under the cover of darkness. It was unlikely that anyone would see us like this, the leader and the led, bound by collar and leash.
As we walked down our driveway and along the street, my relief dissipated and the anxiety that comes when John does this to me flooded me. The cover of night was not enough to protect me from what was to come. If anything, it facilitated the inevitable.
The walk to the bridge is brief, just a “down the hill, cross the street, turn left” jaunt. Little in the way of living things moves about this time of night, rarely anything beyond a stray car of teenagers trying to make curfew or the bark of a keen-eared dog. All too often, I long for something to halt our steps, something that would deter us from the bridge, but I’d yet to see so much as a cat cross our path.
East of the bridge, John found the trail
down and pulled me by the leash to follow. I stepped over the guardrail and watched my steps down the narrow footpath. The ground was soft and my boots sank slightly into a near-muck that had not yet grown slippery. The air smelled of moldering leaves, a rank odor that said last autumn’s detritus had yet to give way to its final decomposition. Soon, the smell of lube and human bodies would overtake my senses. I cannot say which odor I find most detestable – or more morbidly attractive.
Where the footpath met flat ground, a puddle of water greeted my steps. Wet, everything was wet with spring. My time indeed had run out.
We walked along level ground until a gravel slope encroached on us and forced us toward the train tracks. I stumbled as John trotted me over the tracks and toward the bridge’s first footing. There we settled into the obscurity of darkness. I could hear the river running just yards beyond us and the rush of its waters spoke of spring runoff, too swift to host those little frogs of dusk.
John dropped the duffle bag, knelt before it and rummaged through its contents. A cursed word of frustration, then the tiny beacon of a penlight shined down. Onto the hood.
The hood obscures me, but it also shields me. It muffles the sounds of that which gets done to me. It soothes me with its musty scent and renders me anonymous so I need not focus on how vile I am. It saves me from the worst of what occurs to me.
The first time John did this to me, the hood kept me from a panicked flight. It soothed me the same way it might comfort a horse being led from a barn fire. It kept me manageable and in my place.
That’s not to say it freed me from all anxiety – I was well aware of why I was there, even then, that first time – and when the man stepped up to me, I flinched at his nearness. As rich as the smell of my hood was, it could not overcome the smell of this man. He was feral with the need for release. Yet he hesitated.
“Man or wo—” he tried, but John interrupted.
“Does it matter?”
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