The scent of Charly’s breasts as his brethren chewed her soft, white flesh to hamburger.
Eric opened his eyes.
Melanie was still weeping, bless her delectable body.
He could take her right now, but the longer he waited the more he could relax and abandon himself completely. Soon he’d have some serious fun, and man, his body ached thinking about it. He’d actually taken a peek inside his shorts to confirm what he suspected was happening, and when he discovered how long his cock had already grown—he’d added two inches, perhaps more—he felt like a kid staring at a gleaming new bike. And like a new bicycle, he’d mount Melanie, oh would he mount her. He could already feel her luscious body beneath him, moaning, undulating, likely crying a little.
Or a lot.
Then the real fun would begin.
Eric grew erect thinking about it.
He could feel the tight muscles in his arms, man, like high-tension power lines. The strength was indescribable. He felt big, so damned big, and another scent came to him now, the scent of Melanie’s deodorant. It would have some stupid name, Morning Mist or Fresh Mountain or something, but what it smelled like was Patricia the Babysitter.
Yet he was astonished how little her memory was affecting him now. In years past he couldn’t stomach the odor of ketchup—a couple times he’d blown up at the kids for slathering their goddamn fries in it—without feeling small, without feeling reduced. The first time she’d sat for him she insisted on being in the bathroom while he took a piss, and though he pleaded with her to leave—he was for chrissakes old enough to hold his own peter and flush the toilet—she simply sat on the edge of the sink until the scalding tingle in his bladder won out. He’d hated her a little that day, had considered the whole thing abnormal and more than a little unsettling. But what chilled him worst of all was how she bent low so they were eye-to-eye and told him he better not tell his mommy about how she watched him tinkle. She actually used that word, tinkle, and that had been the beginning of the reducing. Big boys did not tinkle, they took a piss, or a leak, or if they really wanted to impress their friends, they drained the radiator, they had to see a man about a horse, or his personal favorite, they bled the weasel.
That night he dreamed of bleeding a weasel. Not his own two-inch weasel, of course, but the six-foot-tall weasel with tight brown curls and ketchup breath that made him want to puke.
She returned the next day, and it was as if nothing had happened in that upstairs bathroom. She didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned about Eric informing on her, and that too represented a further reduction, that she was so confident in the terror she’d imposed on him that she hadn’t made him repeat his pledge.
When his mom went out, the tall, blocky weasel girl turned to him, and with that wheedling, sinister smile, she said, “Take off your shorts.”
Eric recalled how scared he was and how badly he wanted to escape through the back door. But worst of all, he remembered how excited he was too, how deliriously naughty the prospect of taking off his shorts was to his nine-year-old self.
When they were balled on the floor, he faced her in his Jockey shorts.
Patricia waited.
He gave a little start when he realized what she wanted. “The underwear too?” he asked, and it came out way too agreeably, way too eagerly, and when had he become such a servile little mouse?
He tried to reclaim a shred of his pride. “I don’t want to.”
Patricia’s smile never wavered. She merely raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch and waited. The living room was awash with buttery morning sunlight, and in the glow he could make out the miniscule beads of perspiration forming on her upper lip. Soon he realized just how much she sweated, which was why she coated herself in that patina of talcum powder, and by the time she was done doing things to him that day, the sweat had eroded the powder into white runnels that caked every one of her many crevices.
And the things he she did to him, the things she made him do to her…they had changed him. Prior to Patricia, he’d been mildly interested in sex, and of course he’d been interested in the female body, but despite her stertorous ketchup breathing and her sow-like appearance, she’d transformed him into a sex fiend, one who wanted more than the mere act—one who needed to mess around with power as well. To avoid that reduced feeling as an adult he most often insisted on being in control. Being emphatically in control. He found most women dug that, liked their men and their sex strong. But on a couple occasions—once with a college girlfriend who’d laughed at him and whom he’d punched in the belly and threatened to kill if she told a soul what had happened; the other time with Charly—he’d suggested that maybe, you know, they could do things to him that were a little out of the ordinary. In the college girlfriends’ dorm room, both of them quite drunk, he’d insinuated that rather than walking down to the restroom she might relieve herself on him instead. She blinked at him a moment and then burst into laughter. That ended badly, almost life-in-prison badly, so he kept his secret desires hidden until he and Charly had been married a couple years. One night he’d asked her if she would humiliate him, spit in his face and call him cruel names and slap his genitals with a damp towel. Her face clouding, she’d blundered her way through it until she achieved the effect he was after, and though the release had been sweet, her silence afterward forbade any further requests on his part.
Yet again, he felt reduced.
Patricia was still with him after all these years.
It had gotten so bad that during his worst times coaching—at the tail-end of a six-win season and a potential suspension for inappropriate contact with a player—he’d become enshrouded in a smothering cloud of ketchup and talc that dogged him wherever he went. It was like Patricia had transmogrified into a ghost and was preying on him at his darkest moments, enveloping him in her stink and whispering those long-ago words that made him want to cry, scream, ejaculate and shit himself all at the same time: Is Wittle Ewic’s wittle peeny lonely? Let Patwicia make it better. Now roll over and tell me how this feels and if you’re good I’ll let you lick me in the wet place.
Small, small, it made him feel so sickeningly small. But now…
Now everything had changed.
Because now he was large. Now he was invincible. His puling, execrable weakness had been expunged by the creature’s touch, and he was thrumming with his desire to experience the world anew.
And now he can smell myriad odors baking out of Melanie. The salt of her tears. The febrile moisture of her skin. He can smell her crotch, and it almost overwhelms him: the clammy undercurrent of exertion commingling with the maddening juice of her arousal.
The scent galvanizes him. He looks into her eyes and sees a new fear there, not of losing him, not the fear of a concerned lover, but of a person who suddenly realizes she might be in danger. It is the exact expression the sunfish had exhibited that day back in junior high. He’d swiped that greenish, iridescent fish with the big net, slapped it down on the dock, and watched it flop around for a good minute or so, always of course making sure the little cocksucker didn’t find its way back to the lake.
When he was sure the sunfish wasn’t going to flop off the dock, he hustled to the house and found one of his dad’s hypodermic insulin needles.
He told himself in the intervening years that he’d done what he did next without premeditation, that it was a harmless act of preadolescent cruelty. But that was bullshit, and deep down he’d known it all along. That gimlet eye of the sunfish had fixed on him before, and its name had been Patricia. That eye had reduced him and reduced him, and he refused to let it happen again. Emasculating him. Deriding him. And he was big as he dipped the syringe into the foul brown lake water. He was bigger as he flattened the fish with a trembling hand. He was huge as he brought the needle slowly down toward that gaping, lidless eye, grew even larger when he recognized real fear in the creature’s silent stare. He became positively colossal the moment the needle tip pierced the cornea of t
he gasping fish, and when he depressed the plunger and the eye began to swell like some overfilled balloon, he felt an atavistic lust superheating his penis. He ejaculated at the exact moment the sunfish’s eye burst, and then he sat back on the dock, his energy spent. He watched with a loopy kind of apathy as the one-eyed creature struggled in anguish, and when the fish actually got lucky and flopped into the water again, he was amazed to find he really didn’t care.
Until the nightmares began.
He’d dreamt of that little sunfish ever since. It had been especially awful when he still lived with his parents on the lake. He imagined that sunfish—which had been nine inches long at most—swelling to a barracuda and eventually to great white shark proportions. He’d lie in bed shivering, certain the one-eyed beast awaited him in the waters, was out there trawling in the moonlight, ever watchful, ever filled with wrath.
Melanie has lost that fearful look, is talking to him now. He endeavors to reply, but his tongue is a sluggish wad of meat, his lips rubbery and gummed together.
“Can you hear me?” he hears her ask.
Oh, I can hear you, he thinks. Now that we’re off that godless dock and in this beautiful dark place, yes, Melanie, I can hear you just fine.
“The others went on,” she explains.
I know, he tells her.
She wipes her nose, sniffles. “I can’t believe your wife…” She trails off, her eyes filling.
He sends her the thought: It’s okay, I’ve got you.
She is looking down at him now, abruptly attentive.
You’re better than Charly anyway, he goes on. I want to make you feel as good as you’ve made me feel.
“Are you…” she asks, an incredulous smile dawning. She’s shocked, a little scared, but mostly she’s amazed.
And turned on?
Yes, he realizes, she’s definitely turned on. He can smell it on her.
Yes, he sends to her, I’m talking to you in your mind.
“You can—” she begins, but he puts a finger to her lips, reminding her she no longer needs to speak.
But she speaks anyway. “What am I thinking now?” she asks, and in her mind he sees them last night in her car, sees himself from her vantage-point, feels his own sweaty hands plunging inside the rear of her basketball shorts, and then the memory is fading, and he knows why. Because soon after that she shut him down, told him not yet, she wanted to wait.
Do you still need an engagement ring? he asks her now.
A troubled look. Then she peers at him with such coyness and such lust that it’s all he can do not to throw her down and take her by force.
But the longer they wait, the sweeter it will be. The others are almost certainly out of earshot, and perhaps they are dead. He doesn’t want that. He wants to kill them. To eat them. To screw Charly one last time with his huge new cock and laugh at her while he does it. Then he’ll strip her flesh, he’ll do it slowly. Keep her alive as long as he—
“Eric?” Melanie asks, her eyes huge.
What? he replies.
“Your face,” she says and actually gestures toward her own face, as though he doesn’t know what a goddamn face is, and since she obviously can’t get the hang of this telepathy thing he talks to her in his own voice, and that’s a mistake.
Because when he says, “Stop looking at me,” it’s in a different voice, and the sound of it surprises even him, its deep, cicada-like drone at once demonic and insectile. The voice he imagines Satan having.
Melanie scuttles away from him, her mouth a gaping black O, and fuck, she lets his head smack on the rock floor, and for the barest fraction of an instant Eric feels human pain.
Then what remains of humanity is suffocated. He scrambles onto all fours and glares at Melanie in the meager glow of the flashlight. She screams, and a perfunctory glance down at himself reveals why. His limbs are tight and knobby, his penis a jutting pylon. The cumbersome coaching attire he still wears has already grown taut in most places, and he helps it now, peeling it effortlessly off his body like old skin. Out of simple curiosity he fingers his teeth, and the flesh pads come away bloody. The blood is black, of course, which he should have expected, but it still astounds him. He realizes she’s been retreating and he’s been following, and they are well clear of the light now, her human eyes useless. But his glorious new eyes reveal all: her gorgeous legs streaked with urine, the crotch he will soon violate, the succulent fat of her supple breasts, and then…
Her huge, blind eyes…like the blind, popped eye of the sunfish. It has followed him down here, after all these years it has wriggled into the waterless cave to indict him for his atrocity.
Eric begins to pant, the sound a feral growl in the blackness of the cave. Oh no, he tells the sunfish, tells Patricia, tells Melanie, I will not be frightened by you, I will not be reduced!
Eric springs.
In a whir of limbs he is on her screaming, maddeningly sweet body, and her thrashing only makes it better. The sharpened key that Bledsoe gave her pierces the flesh of Eric’s shoulder, but he hardly feels it. He spins her, wrapping his elongated black tongue around her neck and gives her a squeeze that cuts off her scream, and then he tears off her shorts and plunges his phallus into her anus. She utters a silent shriek, and he hears her think that this is the worst thing that can happen to her, the most painful thing, and he tells her, This is only the opening ceremony, Sweetie, this is only the beginning.
How does it feel to be reduced? he demands as he punctures the pulpy lining of her rectum. How does true love feel?
Melanie batters at his tongue and he relaxes it slightly to allow her to breathe. As he listens to her gasp, his bony hips thrusting and tearing, he tells her, You must stick around for the duration, my love. You mustn’t die too quickly.
Slowly, exulting in Melanie’s unfettered screams, he begins to eat her right ear.
Chapter Seven
What Jesse expected to see when they reached the upcurving slant of the tunnel and the vast cavern beyond it was some kind of hive. They’d heard the weird chatter of the Children for the past couple minutes and the bloodcurdling screeches of the Night Flyers for twice that long. He hadn’t said anything to the others, and they hadn’t spoken it aloud either. None of them had to. They understood they were about to run into both species, and maybe this was why Jesse had expected some kind of elaborate hive.
What he found instead reminded him of a domed amphitheatre.
Entirely comprised of stone, the lofty walls were steeped in shadow. What he glimpsed there were carvings. The lower carvings, he realized, were of Children and the upper images of the Night Flyers, all the figures etched in the walls and created to scale.
Light came from a circle of fires roughly fifty feet in diameter near the center of the amphitheatre. They’d come upon the arena, he now saw, from one of more than a dozen openings in the rock walls, which reminded him crazily of box seats at an opera. All they needed were those fancy binoculars and a bunch of women singing Italian, and the effect would be complete.
To the far left of the domed cavern he spotted an immense vertical tunnel and immediately wondered where it led. When he continued his scan of the capacious room—hell, it was nearly the size of a college basketball arena—he discovered scores of the white monsters.
All around the arena, there were pockets of Children dining on what Jesse assumed were the gory remains of campers they’d captured aboveground. But many of the beasts had apparently become interested in the fresh catch of humans the Night Flyers had ensnared. There were at least three dozen Children skulking forward to have a look.
A score of Night Flyers had formed a ring within the seething circle of fire, and inside their snarling ranks crouched four more Night Flyers.
Each one with a captive.
Clevenger was long dead. The Ruth-creature had upended the professor’s severed head and was gobbling the goodies within. Jesse watched, grotesquely fascinated, as her face darted up from her meal, her maw smeared with
gore, to snarl at a pale Child who was tall enough to peer over the panoply of guards. The Night Flyers forming the protective circle, Jesse now realized, weren’t noble sentries standing a post to ensure their buddies enjoyed an uninterrupted repast. Nearly every one of the bastards was chewing gobbets of flesh or innards from the professor’s eviscerated body.
Colleen thrashed in a Night Flyer’s arms. As it clutched her in a bear hug, the creature did not evince a desire to use Colleen sexually. What Jesse thought he read in the thing’s face, though it was difficult to tell due to the distance, the tenebrous lighting, and the darkness of the creature’s skin, was a cruel antagonism akin to a schoolyard bully. Only rather than consummating its teasing with a nasty rubbing of Colleen’s face in the dirt, this creature was on the verge of devouring her.
The terror on Colleen’s face would have been understandable if it were begotten solely out of fear for her own safety, but when Jesse followed her wide-eyed gaze and glimpsed what lay just ahead of her, he realized there was another reason why her terror was so extreme.
The Night Flyer sitting astride Marc Greeley’s stomach had begun to carve up his handsome face.
All Jesse’s jealousy, all his petty resentment of the man for his having messed around with Emma vanished the moment he beheld the deep incision along Greeley’s hairline.
The Night Flyer was slowly scalping him.
Now and then one of the sentry Night Flyers would creep over to Greeley’s wailing body and scoop out a bit of his flesh. The sooty gouges and trenches cut in his body made the once-handsome man look like he’d been besieged by giant leeches.
Jesse swallowed, strove to look away but couldn’t. Even worse, he couldn’t shut his ears against Greeley’s tortured wails. Jesse felt a powerful surge of hatred for the Night Flyers. This slow murder of Marc Greeley was somehow worst of all, worse even than what had happened to Tiara Girl, who’d already been dead when Jesse happened upon the Big Nasty’s defilement of her body.
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