by C Bilici
“I have no idea what you’re babbling about.”
“Paul. Jasper. Tammy. All of it!”
Fenton seemed to look uncomfortable. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He shrugged and shook his head, changed the subject by saying, “Come on. We need to get ready.”
“Yeah, thanks a tonne for the talk! Meanwhile, should I assume that our flame haired Mhyrr friend will be bunking with you?”
“I believe her red is natural.” Stacey gave him the finger. “And you know what they say about assuming.”
Stacey chuckled. “Well as long as there’s ass, and it’s hot!” Fenton shook his head at her and begun to move large items about in an effort to make something of the space. “Coz mine sure as hell is,” she muttered before joining him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
EXHAUSTED AFTER THEY’D given the shed and an adjoining workman's living quarters a thorough cleaning, they collapsed against the shed wall within arm's reach in the cool night air and passed a thickly rolled joint mixed with the Ward tobacco back and forth.
“This shit is smooth as,” Stacey said, her voice husky as she held the smoke as long as she could, before letting out a big plume that glowed in the moonlight.
“It’s the tobacco,” Fenton said, taking the smoke that Stacey had expertly rolled by the roach.
“If I didn’t know better, I would bet you would have been right at home in the sixties,” Stacey chuckled. Fenton joined her.
Taking the smoke back, she took a long and hard pull then passed it back to him. “I’m fucking done in,” she said and stood. “You comin’?”
He shook his head. “In a bit.”
“Stoner,” she said with a giggle, and stumbled away.
His vision was ultra-sharp, breathing heavy. The very blood that coursed through his body seemed to set his senses alight. He turned to watch her, eyes falling to her legs and rear.
The thing within stretched and awoke, grinning lasciviously. It fought for control, first soothing and encouraging. There were no words, just a push and pull at his own emotions, toying with the ebb and flow of his psyche and chemistry.
He turned his head away from Stacey. “No!”
It urged, stroked, fuelled. Psychic fingers ran over the ridges of his brain. His body tensed as the thing rode his lust like it had ridden Godfrey.
The heady feeling of the THC and panic within him confused his senses. He wanted to flee. Not from it, it was within him, but away from Stacey. He knew it had been a mistake to take on an apprentice. If only he’d known that feeling of trepidation he’d felt had been a portent.
When he didn’t capitulate, the thing increased its assault.
The joint fell from his fingers to the ground as in indescribable feeling overcame him. His body relaxed and he fell to his knees, arms limp at his side. His face slackened and his head rolled. When he opened his eyes, She was standing before him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
FINALLY STUMBLING TO the bed they’d set up for her, screened off by her sheet on a rope, Stacey fell on the dusty smelling mattress. The room span as she closed her eyes, and she felt like she was spinning with it. She rolled about on the surface until the feeling passed enough for darkness to at last descend.
“The fuck was that shit laced with?” she asked herself as she settled in and relaxed.
But it didn’t last.
Without knowing how, she was standing outside beside Fenton, still sitting where she’d left him. Except now he was kneeling, a beatific look on his face. Was he praying?
“The fuck you doing?” she tried to ask him, but the words would not reach her lips. She attempted to speak again with the same results. This was just like—
She span about face and saw the creature.
Stacey was having another vision. She was seeing what Fenton was seeing.
And the vision was seeing her right back.
The apparition was a smear of grey on the air, a phantom shade of a thing with ragged holes for mouth and eyes. And it had totally captivated Fenton.
Stacey tried to yell at him to snap out of it, stood between the ghost and Fenton, but he couldn’t see her. All he could see was his own vision. She turned to face the only other thing that she could interact with, but the creature was gone. When she turned back to the kneeling man, the darkness gathered behind him as the creature coalesced.
It smiled at her, laughed — the sound more a sensation in her mind — and brushed a spectral hand across his head.
The action seemed to flip a switch on in his body. And hers.
Stacey felt a torrential rush of chemicals as they washed through his body, and a jerking between his legs as the wave of pleasure spread through his body.
The thing snickered, leant down and gently pressed its fingers through the cloth at his crotch and into his flesh. Fenton let out a wail of pleasure that was almost pain. The creatures fingers dove deeper and, try as he might to hold it in, his body betrayed him as he let out another cry, this time from pain that was pleasure.
Then it looked up, and sneered at Stacey.
It was punishing him. Retribution for not listening to it about something she hadn’t seen. Or was it just toying with him, with them both? Showing them it could control him whenever it wanted now that it had been let loose?
Images and sensations flashed in her head through whatever link was projecting the vision. She saw herself beneath Fenton as he drove incessantly into her. It had been trying to convince him to seduce her.
A moment of confusion and doubt flickered across Fenton’s face and his body twitched.
“No!” he said, voice hoarse.
Pushing off from his knee, he turned from the shed and fell into the dark of night.
Stacey followed behind him without any choice, she found, anchored to him as he fled. She felt his resolve to protect her from the thing within. And she and felt the reaction when the creature appeared in his path and he passed through it, tugging her until she passed into the thing as well.
An intense psychic frost so cold it burned touched Stacey’s being, the mental equivalent of taking a lungful of frozen air.
She was jerked to a stop as Fenton fell to his knees once more. He gagged in pleasure at the sensation of the cloth against his flesh, now painfully erect, and Stacey felt the jolt of it through her own system, could almost feel the member herself. Were she corporeal, she knew from experience that the sensations would have left her gasping and moaning and utterly drenched. She wondered, momentarily, how her body would be coping with it.
On the move again, she was yanked forward as he scrambled into the darkness. She felt his panic rise as he moved, and he let out a whimper. He trotted into a jog, but the motion of his body set the organ swinging and rubbing, and the sensations were unbelievable, electric.
He rounded the orange and lemon trees and, finally unable to go on, fell. Fingers flying, he untied the shorts and yanked them forward and down, stretching them forward to avoid any further stimulation.
He stared, and Stacey stared along with him.
She didn’t know what the organ looked like normally, but she felt his thoughts, felt its alien unfamiliarity in his hand. Judging by site alone, her vision blessed —or cursed — with whatever acuteness her condition gave it, the thing seemed to be twice as thick and long as it should be, like something only glimpsed in extreme porn, and certainly bigger than she had ever witnessed in person. Though its oddity didn’t end there.
A slimy slickness covered the glans, gliding with alien intent down the overly veined length. The flesh was grey, its colouring all wrong, like a cadavers.
The uncertainty and dread grew within him until he had to make a decision. The fingers of one hand wrapped around the thing, then the other. His eyes rolled back into his head, and Stacey felt every delirious painful and ecstatic inch as he worked at it.
She watched in terrified fascination as pleasure flowed through his body in waves at every touch. It was something similar
to how she herself felt in the moments before orgasm, the same sensitivity, but held in perpetual flux, no end in sight. It was as thrilling as it was maddening for Stacey, and she couldn’t imagine how much moreso it must be for Fenton. If something didn’t happen soon and the creature tormented him like this, it would break him and he would go mad and the Umbra would take permanent control.
Not being granted the same sight as Stacey, Fenton scrambled for his shorts to rip the plastic lighter from its pocket, lighting it up after several failed attempts to stare at it in horror. She gaped along with him, though she was alarmed to find she was filled with a morbid fascination, almost excitement. Her head snapped up to see the creatures eager gaze over his shoulder. It wasn’t her own excitement. Almost every emotion that flooded her senses was a projection of both Fenton and the things, so much so that she know longer pick out her own.
Stacey’s head turned jerkily back to Fenton.
Thick, wiry hairs stood out at the base of the flesh, and from there to its swollen tip, the skin was grey and Stacey was reminded of Tammy’s creatures, one who had looked so very much like this in both colouring and construction. Stacey was grateful it didn’t have arms and legs like that minion thing. She wasn’t sure her or Fenton’s psyche would cope with that site.
The creatures maddening hold increased, and with it so too did Fenton’s feverish pumping of his flesh. Tears ran down his cheeks now and a sob escaped his lips. Pleasure rolled out and back from him, through the creature, through Stacey.
It reminded her so much of her experience on Mhyrr. The memories of her encounter with Jasper swept through Stacey along with the waves of sexual energy and joined into it.
He soon reached the tipping point that would normally indicate the height of pleasure and the release to come, but found it would not. Instead of overflowing, it plateaued. He fought the thing in desperation, but still the end was nowhere in sight.
He was no frantic. If Stacey were capable of doing anything but hover like a spectre, she would have fallen to her own knees long ago.
Slick dark fluid covered the entire thing, aiding in his efforts but also increasing its sensitivity. Every sensation sparked through the connection to stab at Stacey, and while Fenton wouldn’t look, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the scene.
Whatever the things intentions, it didn’t seem to want to completely torture him, Stacey thought in the back of her mind. It could just as easily have left him dry, his skin to blister as he plied it ever faster.
The creature laughed again, as if in response to her thoughts.
“You can hear me,” Stacey said, hearing the words in her mind.
The thing nodded, licking its lips with a lengthy spectral tongue, and looked at her hungrily.
Stacey wasn’t there, had no form, but she screwed up her face in disgust regardless, knew that the thing would understand.
Unlike Stacey, Fenton didn’t currently have the mind to question its motives. Instead, he loosened the iron like grip of his hands to allow a deluge of that tainted precum under his fingers and palms and resumed. This time, however, Stacey could feel he would be at the precipice soon, and both the thing in his hands and inside of him seemed to expand, ready to complete their task.
Something physical and mental clenched as the climax began, and as it did, the creature solidified, fading in as the darkness was driven away by a brightness that obliterated its features. Before it and the world were obscured, Stacey saw it bite its lip and roll its eyes back in its head, and slide a hand between its thighs to join in.
Fenton’s working of his possessed cock was the dammed flood being held back, but the thing’s sliding of its hand between its own legs, imaginary or not, was the trigger to the following detonation.
And Stacey came with them. It was an orgasm that rocked her very spirit, for that was all she had. As she screamed out, she heard Fenton release an animal cry that didn’t seem humanly possible, joined by the creatures which definitely was not. All the while, Stacey felt that alien mind drinking in their intertwined pleasure that seemed to spiral ever higher, a pleasure that filled every crevice of Stacey’s mind, her astral self — or whatever it was — bursting with a light so prevalent it became a constant.
Fenton fell to his side, easing the pressure on his eyes and flesh, gasping all the while. Stacey reacted in much the same way, in only what she could describe as a psychic pant, a strobing ebb and flow of her being in this dream plane. But she could now see clearly, not constrained by physicality.
Nexus light bathed them all. The light had not been purely induced by the experience. Had Fenton travelled there, or had he been pushed into it by the creature, which now floated opposite Stacey fully formed.
It was female. Grey like the flesh it had moulded. It’s body had ample sumptuous curves and was bereft of a single hair, though Stacey knew that should it choose to it probably could change that. It looked Stacey over with a languid stare wrought by absolute confidence and brimming with sensuality.
Between them, Fenton struggled to sit, breath still ragged, and surveyed his body and surroundings. Confusion etched lines on his face at his location, but he did not register the presence of either Stacey or the creautre. A thick silvery puddle stained his thighs, and a trail was spattered from his abdomen across his chest at a diagonal to his neck. His equally coated penis was now flaccid, but to his dismay still overinflated and discoloured. Somehow finding the energy to move, he sat up, aghast.
Stacey had already seen it, but it amazed her still. They had appeared by hole in the pristine white of the Nexus Despina had told them about.
Standing through his daze, he walked to the holes edge and together they peered into it. Its edges were a tattered grey that almost looked veined, as if the Nexus had contracted a disease, and Stacey guessed it had. A bad case of the Umbra. The dangling flesh between his thighs superimposed over the edge of the hole, Stacey noted it was the same colour. Not merely similar, but exact.
Stacey looked up and saw the creature stretching in delight from both the sexual release it had fed on, Stacey had no doubt of that, and its own cleverness. It drew its thick, curved thighs up and stretched its arms out, luxuriating, a smug look on its face.
“You’re no fucking Umbra, whatever you are,” Stacey said, to which it cracked open its eyes to peer at her with a knowing smile. She sensed movement at her side and saw Fenton whirling about.
“Where… Where’s Godfrey? He should be here.”
He was right. The avatar was nowhere to be seen. She could understand her own not being here, Stacey wasn’t here herself. But Godfrey?
They had no further time to ponder on it. The floor beneath Fenton’s feet flexed and convulsed, causing them both to look. The surface of the Nexus pulsed, a glowing patch reclaimed amid the grey between his feet, as if something had bleached it clean. Not only that, but the edge of the hole had moved also, no longer a perfect circle. He took a tentative step forward and, at that movement, a drop of his semen spattered to the dark ground.
It was drawn into it in an instant, causing it to again ripple. The edge of the hole skewed as they watched.
The creature congratulated itself with a giggle and a clap of its hands. It nodded slowly, with intent. Stacey felt that nod mentally, and knew that it was intended for Fenton, as if to say, you know what to do now.
Fenton looked at his stained body and hands. He scraped the warm slickness off his chest and stomach and flicked his hands at the greyness and watched as it healed. He snorted in surprise and cracked an almost mad smile as he walked about the circle, the Nexus moving with him as he spread his seed. The creature laughed with him.
Stacey looked at the two of them, her concern growing by the minute. The thing’s infectious mirth combined with the drugs in his system and after effects of the orgasm was clearly weakening his resolve. She felt him growing accustomed to it and the power it gave him as he continued, the anomaly in the Nexus shifting to an ever shrinking ragged wound.
> As concerned as she was, Stacey floated forward, watching as he used up the last of his semen. The hole was greatly diminished but not gone. Gathered about it, they all stared at it. To Stacey, the hole looked like melted plastic, the edges bubbled or wrinkled, curving inward to disappear into darkness. It almost looked like flesh. Like another sexual organ the same colour as Fenton’s.
She heard the creature laugh at the thought.
Fenton stared down at the ovoid slit, now roughly a hands breadth. Its edges were curved and pouted. She heard the creatures sultry laugh as it sent out whispers and urges to Fenton, and she knew what it wanted him to do. To lay down and plug the hole.
“No! Don’t do it, Fenton,” Stacey pleaded. “It’s playing you. That’s what it wants!” But the words only sounded in her head.
The creature tutted her, a hurt expression on its face. But Fenton had not listened, was standing there staring. Stacey could see he was fighting the thing too, but seemed to be losing, his spent flesh rising once more at the creatures command, albeit much slower.
The creature decided to give him a hand, literally, and drifted to his back and pressed against him. Its lips to his ear, eyes locked on Stacey’s, it reached around and stroked him back to full attention.
Stacey was not invited to the mental ménage à trois, it seemed. None of the feelings came to her. She was only allowed to watch. That was the only thing she felt, that she was privileged to witness this.
Fenton’s gaze was drawn deeper into the hole at his feet, which now seemed to pulse and engorge and beckon, mesmerising him completely. The thing continued its stroking and whispering even as he lowered himself to hand and knee to look more closely. The thing in the ground opened further as he neared it, inviting him in.
After that, everything was lost to the exquisite pleasures the creature put him through again.
* * *
Stacey awoke to a banging that she initially thought was in her head.
“What the fuck?” she said as she sat up groggily. She quickly sobered as she saw her state.