HOPE . . . because that's all there ever is.

by James Crow

  ‘Amazing . . . this K,’ he says.

  ‘Fuck yeah!’ Sasha says and the bruised warheads slap back together as she lets them go.

  Mr Wood’s on his feet now, opening his lab coat. Pete feels himself growing again. Sasha’s moan tells him she feels it too. Mr Wood’s got his dick in his hand and Pete feels a flicker of hurt, or a memory of something. He’s seen this dick before. It’s thin and oddly bent.

  Sasha’s moans intensify. Mr Wood moves to Pete’s side. He pats Pete on the back. ‘Go on, son. Just relax for me.’

  The roof of Annex 5 . . . in the shade behind a low wall, Mr Wood’s balls feel like baby birds in Pete’s hand. Mr Wood’s hands on Pete’s backside are warm and smooth. Relax for me, son. Pete stifles the hot pain through gritted teeth, and before long the pain turns to pleasure.

  ‘I’m no homo,’ Pete says. He can feel Mr Wood’s cum running from his sore arsehole. Mr Wood’s grinning apparition slides back into the shadows spurting ghostly cum.

  ‘Nothing wrong with being homo, Petey,’ Sasha pushes her bulk against him, the wooden scoops straining and bending a little. ‘I’ve pegged a few homos, for pornos. They love it.’

  ‘Pegged?’

  ‘Fucked ’em with a strap-on cock. There’s an eight-incher with a ball-spiker attachment in my bag. I can do you next. Oh, Petey, Petey, Petey, your dick’s so fucking big. I fucking love you, babe.’

  Pete thrusts into her. Sasha cries out and her flesh ripples. His cock does feel big, really big. He grabs her legs to still her and sucks in a great breath at the feeling of splendour as his chest expands and the walls shimmer around him.

  ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop, I’m gonna come soon,’ Sasha says and the room shakes as Pete continues, snorting like a bull, a burn through his dick with every thrust sends pulsing greatness up his back. He feels so big, so strong, and he can’t get enough. Aye.

  A sparrow lands on Sasha’s belly. It stares at him as he fucks her. Pete smiles at the little bird and fucks Sasha harder with ever-expanding greatness, encouraged by her frenzied gasping, both of her chubby hands are gripping the bedsheets.

  Another sparrow lands on Pete’s shoulder, another on the bed, one on Sasha’s left foot, and another on the easel that’s propped against the wall. The eye in the picture on the wall spins into an open hole and a funnel of sparrows pours inside. Sparrows on her tits now, claws pricking, blood trickling.

  ‘Yes, oh yes, oh yes,’ Sasha screams a delightful scream that tremors through Pete’s bones. He feels her glorious heat as she comes around his cock. The room stops shaking and the sparrows lift to the air and fly to the door where they land on the frame, the handle, the bolt, and the curtain at the side of the door.

  Sasha’s tits part once again and she’s smiling at him. ‘Sparrows,’ she says and laughs. ‘I can see a zillion fucking sparrows. That was totes amazeballs, babe. But you didn’t come yet, did ya? Do me, then. Fill me up, Petey.’

  Pete looks to the perched sparrows, to the eye on the wall, to Sasha peering between her tits. ‘I see them,’ he says. ‘Must have left a window open.’

  Sasha wipes the blood from her tits and runs her hand through fresh birdshit. She gags with disgust. ‘They’re fucking real? Get fucking rid of them, Pete. This is fucking disgusting.’ She flicks the birdshit from her fingers.

  Pete ignores her request and starts up again.

  ‘I can’t have birdshit on my butterfly, Pete.’

  Pete looks to the ceiling, gathers breath, grips her fat thighs and pumps it up.

  Sasha huffs and puffs. ‘Please, Petey, get them gone, they’re giving me the fucking willies.’

  Two or three cheeps and chirrups start up and soon all the birds are singing.

  ‘Dawn chorus,’ Pete says and pauses on a brutal up-thrust. Sasha responds by groaning and squeezing the tips of her breasts, smearing the blood where sparrow claws pricked.

  The eye on the wall blinks. Pete winks at it and the sparrows quieten. Wind whistles through Pete’s ear, the ear closest to the door. He stills himself once more, his cock pulsing inside her.

  Sasha shudders out a moan. ‘Don’t stop, Petey, don’t fucking stop.’

  ‘Be quiet and listen,’ Pete says.

  Someone outside, coming this way, a dragging sound, no, more than that, a step and a drag. A step and a drag that brings something new: increased strength, power, and control. Pete’s fingers are tightening on Sasha’s thighs. His nails pierce her flesh and his fingers follow through into hot meat.

  ‘Oh fuck, Petey, my legs feel all weird.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘It’s the K, babe. Get me done, will ya. I need your hot cum inside me.’

  step – drag – step

  A tap on the door and the sparrows flutter to the carpet, all of them facing the door.

  ‘Was that a knock, Pete? Did you hear that?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Well who the fuck is it?’ Sasha says. ‘Tell ’em to piss off.’

  ‘Quiet!’

  The bolt securing the door scrapes and turns and slides free of its own accord. Each little sparrow on the floor takes a hop back as the door breathes open with a rush of cold air.

  A girl – or more accurately the rotted corpse of a girl – in a tattered yellow dress, steps inside. She drags a mangled leg in after her. She’s holding a pick to her decayed chest and grinning from a skeletal face. Only wasted muscle keeps her eyeballs in place.

  ‘Holy shit,’ says Sasha. ‘I once saw Elvis, he was dead and rotten, and he licked my foof, but I can actually smell that thing. This K fucking rocks.’

  ‘I see her,’ Pete says. ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘You see it too?’

  The corpse moves forward, a step – a drag.

  ‘My Elizabeth,’ Pete says.

  ‘You’re fucking scaring me, Pete. Stop it.’

  He wriggles the fingers he’s embedded in Sasha’s thighs and Sasha shudders and moans. ‘She’s beautiful. My perfect child.’

  ‘We can’t have the same hallucination, Petey.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  ‘Well it fucking stinks. Push the cunt outside and get me done. I’m dying here.’

  The corpse moves closer, one step – one drag. A rotted hand touches to Pete’s arm. ‘Take her,’ the corpse says. ‘Take her now, Master.’

  ‘See,’ Sasha says, ‘even she agrees. Take me, babe. I can feel you growing again. God you’re so fucking big.’

  Sasha’s belly rises once more. Pete can see the incredibly huge outline of his cock, straining at her insides.

  The corpse’s cold fingers touch to Pete’s bare arse, gives a little shove. ‘Now, Master.’

  2

  The girl appeared to be delirious, or maybe that should be deliriously happy. Even in the grey dawn light with the cold drizzle damping her hair, the girl’s face is bright with – joy? Rapture even.

  Rose looked back up the path from where the girl had come. She could hear something beyond the mist, distant laughs and screams. Someone having wild sex, by the sound of it.

  Despite the girl’s pleas that they should be running away, Rose hurried the girl inside the cabin, bolted the door and sat her down on the sofa, where she clutched the lucky cup to her stomach as if it were a baby.

  ‘How old are you? Have you been drinking?’

  ‘I’m fifteen, and you mustn’t drink the water.’

  ‘I meant alcohol. Or drugs, have you taken something you shouldn’t? Sounds like your friends are having a good time.’

  ‘Not friends, but I have had horse powders. And I’m pleased to see that you’re the one.’

  ‘The one?’

  ‘Yes. We have to go now.’

  ‘I’m Rose. What’s your name?’

  ‘Bethany Black, but really, we have to skedaddle.’

  ‘Are you staying here, at the loch?’

  The girl nodded, ‘Cabin six, with Mum, and sometimes Dad, but we can’t go there.’


  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘They’re done for, and so are the M&Ms.’

  This girl’s off her head. ‘Your parents have a car?’

  ‘Two, but the cars are also done for. Please, Rose, he wants me, he’ll take me away and keep me forever and kill anyone who gets in his way.’ Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. She glanced to the door, to the window, fidgeted with the lucky cup and took a great breath. ‘He’ll split you in two, Rose. I don’t want that to happen. It can’t, it just can’t.’ A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away.

  Rose tried to settle the girl, she seemed to be high as a kite, and when she pushed for more information the words that came back didn’t make any sense. The girl had been captured by a wood spirit and plonked inside its mind, and, apparently, the spirit’s master – who happened to be a supreme being with a big ego – was going to be coming this way anytime now.

  ‘Is it the manager, Peter? Do you know Peter?’

  ‘It’s not but it is,’ the girl said. ‘He might be inside him by now, and I wouldn’t like to see inside that dome. Really, really, really, Rose, we need to fly!’

  A bang-crack of thunder, followed by a howling gust of wind sent a shower of rain from the trees above, hitting the cabin roof like bullets.

  ‘Rose?’

  She looked at the girl on the couch.

  ‘He will split you in two.’

  3

  Sasha’s belly is still expanding. His cock, of which he can clearly see the outline, is thicker than his thigh. Pete wonders how much K costs, and if Lennie could hook him up with a bucketful. If only he’d dumped K in the water supply, what a merry fucking time they all might have had. Maybe next time, he thinks. The corpse’s cold hand pushes at Pete’s arse. Pete grunts and thrusts into the groaning lump.

  ‘Good, good,’ says the corpse by Pete’s side, ‘focus on the change, Master, focus and it will come.’

  Pete focusses on the tightness, feels a crackling sensation within, as if his bones are moving, changing form. An unbidden image awakens in his mind – a shocking image of Sasha with a dog. He relays it to Sasha, ‘You fucked a dog in your living room, a Labrador.’

  No reply from Sasha, only grunts and groans.

  Pete stops fucking her, pulls his fingers from the holes in her thighs and slaps her bound tits, ‘Hey, a dog, you fucked a fucking dog.’

  The warheads part with chubby fingers. ‘All I did was keep still. The dog fucked me. Besides, I barely felt it.’

  Another image: ‘A horse as well. In a sunny field. All on film.’

  ‘Horses’ dicks I like, so big, but not as big as you, Petey. Please get me fucked. I’m gonna explode soon.’

  If only she knew, came the thought. The warheads slap back together and Sasha pushes against him.

  ‘I am so fortunate,’ the corpse says and its hand pushes Pete into a rhythm. Sasha’s belly bulges some more. ‘Don’t lose focus, Master . . . You are Supreme.’

  ‘Supreme,’ Pete repeats and the crackling sensation comes again, outside now, at his arms, his hands. The whiteness of his cream-soaked shirt blooms into brilliance. Now another image comes to him of Sasha with a knife in her hand, her father fucking a bleeding girl. ‘Snuff films,’ he says. ‘You’ve made six, with Lennie . . . big bucks for real snuff,’ he adds, in Lennie’s voice.

  ‘So shoot me, Daddy,’ Sasha laughs, ‘just keep on with that gorgeous big dick of yours, babe. I ain’t ever had one so fucking big,’ and she groans as the bed rocks and the walls begin to shake.

  His hand on Sasha’s leg is turning grey, old-looking with wrinkles, fingers extending and fingernails turning black and pointed. His brilliant white shirt glows with golden threads that shimmer like the finest feathers. His fingers curl into claws and the black nails click together. In his mind a new image arrives, a girl Pete knows, her eyebrows are high, her face bright as a new button. So bright that she lit the cabin like a flare when she ran past. ‘Bethany Black,’ he says and Sasha mumbles something and heaves against him.

  ‘Take her now, Master,’ the corpse says, pushing at his back.

  Electrifying tingles, like those you get just before you shoot your load, only these are pulsing, empowering and surging up Pete’s spine. Pete breathes it in, sees his chest rise. Sasha’s bucking changes to twitching, she’s gurgling . . . now choking . . . now coughing. A spurt of blood rises into the air behind the darkened warheads.

  The corpse at Pete’s side giggles. ‘Now, Master. Take her soul.’

  Pete feels the straining tension within as though he’s going to come, but that doesn’t happen. A line of pressure marks running from Sasha’s swollen clit and up, appears on the bloated belly before him, as if a dozen fingers within are pressing to get out. Blood pushes through the first impression as the skin breaks, followed by the emergence of what looks like the dorsal fin of a tiny shark – or a bramble spike – more spikes slide through the flesh, all the way up Sasha’s front. She screams a gurgled scream. Her torso strains, stretches, then splits, and the cord around her breasts is cut through and her body falls open with a slop of steaming entrails. Sparrows swirl in a frenzy around the ceiling, cheeping and chirping. Pete takes a juddering step back. The grey appendage curving out from his groin is thick, long and barbed and dripping with bloodied flesh. His clawed hand pulls the child corpse to his side – only it’s no longer a corpse, it’s a beautiful girl in a yellow dress with blonde hair and a sweet, sweet smile.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Pete says.

  ‘I missed you,’ says the girl.

  Pete’s legs give way and he falls to the floor and almost blacks out, but the girl is shaking him and helping him back to his feet. The barbed appendage has gone, his hand is back to a normal hand. He flexes it, wipes the blood from it onto his shirt. ‘Thank you, Elizabeth.’

  The corpse smiles at him, no longer the beautiful girl.

  Sparrows drop from the ceiling and peck at Sasha’s steaming insides.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Master?’

  ‘All right? I feel . . . I feel like a god.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘I need that girl, don’t I, the special one, aye?’

  ‘Take her and the change will be complete. She’s close, Master. I can smell her harmony.’

  Pete sniffs the air. ‘As can I, child. Aye, as can I.’ He strides through the kitchen area to the back door. The machete he used only last week to chop away encroaching bindweed is lying across his toolbox. He picks it up and slips it through his belt and pats it. He returns to the corpse and takes its hand.

  ‘I love you so much,’ says the corpse. ‘Will you love me now, Master?’

  Pete strokes the corpse’s matted hair and kisses its decomposed nose. ‘Soon.’

  The corpse gives a disappointed pout. Pete touches a finger to its cracked lips. ‘Patience, child. We take care of the others first.’

  Cracked lips curl into a toothy smile.

  4

  ‘I’m feeling super, super strong, perhaps not strong enough to actually carry you, but I’ll give it my best shot if I have to.’

  Rose dropped the curtain back into place. ‘Carry me?’

  The girl on sofa sighed. ‘Or I could knock you over the head with this pretty cup and drag you away from here.’

  Rose returned to the sofa and sat by the girl’s side. ‘Bethany,’ she touched a hand to the girl’s brow. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been up to, but you’re running a temperature.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I wouldn’t really hit you. It’s just . . . I know he’s coming, I can hear his boots.’

  Rose listened. ‘It’s only the rain, sweetheart. Let me get you a coat and take you to your mum and dad.’

  The girl hugged the lucky cup. ‘We can’t do that, Rose. I told you, they’re done for, so are the M&Ms. We have to run, and if you won’t run with me, I will definitely have to drag you.’

  Rose couldn’t recall the last time she’d run anywhere. ‘You’re not mak
ing any sense.’ Should she tell her about the danger, about the camera she found?

  ‘You found a camera hidden in the smoke alarm. I know.’

  Rose looked at the girl. ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘I saw it in your face. I also see you’ve had an operation, an important operation, one you don’t like thinking about.’

  Rose prickled. She got to her feet.

  ‘You’re not hearing things, Rose. I’m telling you so that you might believe me, and we can leave. We haven’t got long.’

  ‘What else do you see?’

  The girl stared into her eyes. ‘You smoke happy baccy and cigs and you regret the cheap red. You also have a strange relationship with the phantoms. You like them, but you don’t.’

  Rose took a step back. That girl from The Exorcist came to mind, spinning head and projectile vomiting.

  The girl shook her head. ‘I am not evil, and nor are you.’

  ‘What the hell are you?’

  ‘Your mother knits socks in Hell,’ the girl smiled.

  ‘That’s . . . that’s . . .’

  ‘Danni’s little joke.’

  A mind reader? This was fucking nuts.

  The girl gave her a look and Rose knew she’d heard that.

  ‘Rose, you’re not nuts. This is not nuts. This is really real.’

  ‘It’s the pot, the happy baccy. They always said you could go bananas. Schizo. Flippadoodaa.’

  The girl shook her head no. ‘I’m Bethany Black and I’m special. You’re Rosanne Narran and you’re special, too, and right now you need to pay attention to our situation.’

  ‘Special?’

  ‘Very, very, very special, although you hate the use of weakening adverbs.’

  Rose laughed at that, beginning to accept this was nothing but one weird trip, that’s all. ‘Trust your Auntie Rose, darling, I’m nothing special, not at all.’

  The girl was shaking her head again. ‘People have bricks around them. I can see them.’

  ‘Bricks?’

  ‘Yours are strong and golden, around your head and shoulders, just like mine.’

  ‘Ah, like an aura.’

  ‘I think so. Good energy, a good soul.’