The Lurid Sea

by Tom Cardamone

  However, I knew of one such temple he would never willingly visit, a place he would never think to look, as it was in his backyard, so to speak.

  Chapter Twenty

  Mouths Agape

  There are, indeed, myths known only to the mythmakers. Once I had become aware of Obsidio’s sinister powers, I researched his father, Pluto, within the luxurious libraries of the Baths of Caracalla, to better comprehend the bloodline and see if some action or unction could undo the deadly intent of his seed. The often-told story of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, had permutations, iterations, in poems and bald prose retellings. I uncovered no useful knowledge in my hellish research, though through deeper investigations in ancient texts, I was able to discover that the landscape of Hades was far more complex than I had imagined. There were entire cities filled with shades, some quite similar to those within the empire. Many, however, were not. No, it was via a tale told by quite a different “queen” that I learned the underworld possessed its very own bathhouse.

  An unnamed Bithynian poet, a dedicated lover of boys whose work is far from lost but was rather decidedly erased from literary history by the church, recorded a brief description of just such a place. He referenced other equally vanished works about a haven for deceased sodomites and their ilk, implying an epic of Homeric proportions had once existed detailing the exploits of the residents who haunted this murky palace. Though I failed to find a method to dam the darkness issuing forth from my brother’s throbbing member, the image of this place in Hades never faded from memory. Now that I had tentatively learned to navigate the watery gates of my travels, I took aim, diving deep, heading downward like never before. Best I escape to hell, where all the souls had already had the life force Obsidio craved wrung out of them, I thought. Surely I would be safe among the shades.

  Even though I did not require oxygen, the pressure and increasing darkness of my plunge filled me with fear. I nearly reversed course as the waters took on all the blackness of the void and the temperature dropped to the point where my clenched teeth chattered mightily. I lost all sensation in my hands as I tried to ford this invisible stream toward hell. Then suddenly the temperature stabilized, and I found myself headed upward toward faint light. Breaking through the surface, I sputtered and gasped, afloat in Hades.

  I was alone in a large pool, the water tepid and thick, more like spittle than anything deposited from an aqueduct. The sky above was cracked and earthen, the distant roof of a massive cave. The source of light was invisible and as prevalent as it was diffused, with enough illumination to see but not understand. I rolled into a backstroke, eager to explore my new hideaway. Mounting the steps out of the pool, I had to push through a lumbering mass of shades. These ghosts were mute, shambling things. Eyeless, mouths agape, they clawed and groped one another with fruitless abandon. Unfulfilled hunger was their only form. Whenever a shade attempted sexual congress with another, their ghost cocks would become as ethereal as twisting fog, only to reappear once they moved on in frustration. I pushed my way through the swarming horde, looking for a spot of respite. The marble beneath my feet was cracked and crumbling. Black vine strangled the familiar columns surrounding the pool. As I made my way down a recognizable hall, I realized this subterranean bathhouse was a replica of none other than the Baths of Caracalla. I could return to the library and study in peace. Centuries of books and scrolls awaited. I just had to fight through this thicket of ghouls.

  Gray, transparent hands pawed my thighs and backside. The pressure of countless dead souls was suffocating, but I moved on, relieved to find the familiar library relatively free of shades. A lone dead philosopher kept tripping over his tattered toga while attempting to reach a once-coveted scroll. I thought to assist but worried that if this was his fate, I could somehow inherit it, or something worse and unimaginable would happen if I intervened.

  My favorite seat near a tall window was available. I touched the familiar blue, tasseled cushion, and it turned to dust. No matter. Once I was lost in a familiar ode, no amount of discomfort would distract. I scanned the shelves for something demanding and longish, thinking to bury myself in texts for millennia. All of the authors I had yet to devour would divert me from the monster sibling rampaging across the living world. His hunger for breathing souls would keep him from ever finding me here, ensconced among the dull departed. I pulled down a fat scroll, the first book of Livy’s opus. I had long avoided the history of the republic, so noble and exemplary, preferring the feverish poetics of gods and monsters, or contemporary gossip, tales of imperial treachery and debauchery; but reading good old Livy would be like slipping into the icy waters of a vast frigidarium, a tonic to the fraught adventures I had endured of late. Settling into my spot by the window, I unrolled the scroll and gazed upon a white nothingness. The parchment was empty. I blinked and thought this a prank or some odd mistake, but upon reviewing the nearest tome, I realized this emptiness was replicated throughout the library. All of the pages of every document were blank.

  Of course. This made perfect sense. After all, what lessons can you learn once you are dead?

  * * *

  The bathhouse of Hades revealed itself to be much, much larger than the Baths of Caracalla, which, as a faded replica, was but a facet within seemingly endless labyrinths. This immense composite of a multitude of bathhouses from across the empire and time, some real and some imagined, stretched across the topography of Hell. A stairwell led down to what must have been private imperial chambers reserved for water sports far different from what the rabble observed when the Coliseum was flooded and gladiators took to fighting one another on miniature ships. The shade of an emperor, his gray visage tinged with purple, was on his knees, permanently parched as he turned from ghostly slave to ghostly slave, their flickering erections ever dissipating when the shreds of his lips strained for contact. The surrounding men all appeared to be relieving themselves upon his haunted form in equally thwarted revenge. The wisps of urine that streamed from their white cocks dissolved before reaching his black open maw. Other rooms were thick with shades rubbing up against each other, but without any erotic friction. And the pools, whether meant to be warm or cold, all felt an unsatisfactory tepid temperature, the same as the stale air that filtered through the statue-filled halls, statues of familiar forms I somehow could not place. Forlorn, I decided to retrace my steps back to the Baths of Caracalla. Possibly the sacred spot beneath the caldarium, where the Fellatiolympics were held, retained some hot spark of life.

  * * *

  As I navigated a length of marble stairs, the press of shades was so concentrated I could barely make progress. I pushed hard against the jellied shoulders of multiple spirits. Their ectoplasmic forms seemed concocted of cold slush, though I tried to avoid sustained contact; their touch was repulsive to the living such as I. Would I remain living if I stayed here too long? I knew enough not to eat or drink while in Hades—even a nibble or sip guaranteed permanent tenancy. But what about simply staying past one’s welcome? I had half a thought to head back to the library and read up again on all the devious traps and pitfalls a visit to hell entails, before I remembered that all the books were uniformly bare.

  I forded this packed tributary of the departed and discovered this otherworldly version of the basement was quite different from the one I experienced. I faced an infinite hall of glory holes. Shade after shade pulled at their brothers who were positioned on their knees before each opening, desperately trying to pry them away and take their place. As a corporeal being, I was able to exert myself and push past them, the better to see what spirit-penises summoned such a conflagration from the other side of the glory holes. No cold cock waited. I peered through one such opening and looked out across an immense, pallid moat, an undulating river of slowly percolated sperm. This endless tributary of rolling opalescence spread in every direction. Gray tongues hung from an infinite row of small openings, glory holes forever out of reach from the slow slap of sticky waves that beat soundlessly against th
e marble walls of the bathhouse of Hades. A looping river of cum. But how deep? What source? As deep as any and every untapped desire. The source was every erotic dream deferred, every dream dreamed since men stopped being dumb animals and grew into the self-appointed guardians of one another’s needs and intentions. Regret begets just such a White Nile, and how the unquenched are hung out to dry, like desiccated crocodiles, all teeth and tongue, scales like jewels that could not buy you more than a passing, judgmental smile.

  The men haunting this never-ending stretch of glory holes are not the forbearers of the vices on display; rather, these poor souls belonged to those who never once partook. They are the denied. The hesitant. Those hungry men who never tasted other men. The men who thought a “sin” imagined was somehow worse than one committed, not knowing that “sin” is defined as much by inaction as anything else. Their name is Legion.

  This was not my intended brotherhood. At least not yet. As I was alive, my presence among the living was required. I rushed up the stairs and parted the spectral throng. Back at the Baths of Caracalla simulation, I took a running leap and dove into the lukewarm pool.

  * * *

  Colorless steam hissed and billowed as I sat, shaking off the pull of the vortex, desperate to get warm yet left cold from all that I had discovered. I was in a familiar, albeit nondescript, bathhouse. One that Obsidio had yet to touch. Someone let out a hopeful cough, more to announce their presence than clear their ready and willing throat. I moved away. I tried to gather my thoughts, but fear and confusion ran a chariot race inside my empty skull, kicking up clods of grit, the crumbly stuff my brain used to consist of.

  After I dove into the water, I looked down and saw what Obsidio must have discovered one hellish morning, taking a constitutional swim: my travels had left open what I can only describe as otherworldly tidal pools. Floating there, I could see my footprints across the earth, mirrored reflections of every place that I had ever been. Open portals. All he had to do was dip in, and there he would be, appearing almost immediately after I had departed.

  I wanted to tally the dead. To lovingly bury the corpses so many families would disown once the bodies were discovered in such ill-reputed establishments. Unknowingly, I had created one battlefield after another, my tracks across time a march toward certain doom for those I left behind.

  I alone could stop this madness. I needed to find my brother and rein him in, capitulate in every way, cry to Mount Olympus for Father to rescind my curse and allow me to wallow in the dry pits of Hades, a poor beast tethered to my brother’s ankle, loping beside him like a hellhound, lapping at his long, deadly dick wherever and whenever he stopped to inspect some novel torture device or question a newly arrived shade.

  I did not even have to go and find him. I just needed to be somewhere where he could find me. The stream grew thicker, and I leaned in, ready to dive into the cold, deadly pool of fate.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hades’s Swimming Pool

  The rooms were all dark. Even with the lights on, darkness was as pervasive as an insipid fog, for his deadly touch had emptied out untold erotic palaces. I walked once-familiar halls and heard no sounds, saw no other men. Some of these places had been shuttered so quickly that moldering towels still clung to wet floors. Others had been stripped until they were unrecognizable and denuded spaces save the unmistakable odor of chlorine. And death. My brother’s slipstream of carnage was a meandering path of unreal cruelty made more painful in that he was following my dainty wet footsteps across the tiled floors of what should have been an adventure for any and all. These sanctuaries were not supposed to conceal a death sentence. And not one delivered during such intimate, naked moments of touch and sharing, making executioners out of kiss and cock.

  As I dipped into the hellmouths at the bottom of Hades’s swimming pool, I found scenes of cruel murder and obscene catastrophe. Naked bodies on steam room floors kept warm by the heated environs, black semen seeping out of cold cavities. The limp body of a blond ephebe in a sling suspended from the ceiling, the men lined up to fuck him unaware that he had expired, not surrendered. An entwined couple on a black vinyl mattress as still as the statues of fallen Grecian warriors beneath the flickering thrusts of pornographic films playing in a continuous loop on screens embedded within slick walls. Mouths slack with cooling drool against glory hole cavities as lifeless as open graves. Room after room revealed the ransacked churches of my secret pagan fraternity. These rare spaces of sexual reprieve—for some, living during eras of oppression or at the very least circumspect times, their only literal succor—now desecrated. Now destroyed.

  Once I realized certain tidal pools opened into vistas wherein he had decimated the populace, I forced myself to return. I needed to take census of the butchery for my anger to build, to fuel the strength I would need to take down Obsidio and avenge my true brothers.

  I arrived within a small, homey bathhouse in San Francisco, thick with incense and laughter. I had not been to this one often and had assumed its existence was short-lived, but I always enjoyed its bohemianism, the casual mixture of drugs and sex. The men smelled more like men here and were far less preened and plucked than in other time periods. Now it was a lifeless husk. A body lay half in and half out of a small cabin. A twist of sheets covered the face and torso, revealing young legs and a shrunken cock encased in a sticky cocoon of its own semen, the last expulsion of life.

  I parted more drapes of mist and steam. A familiar bathhouse in Berlin. Men fully clothed in uniforms towered above nude corpses talked into black radios strapped to their shoulders. I hid behind a cart brimming with dirty towels and observed the dismissive way they regarded the dead, as if the men on the floor were simple bags of trash. They smoked cigarettes and brusquely joked under their breath. Some of the cruder men even took pictures of the bodies, arranging them in ridiculous postures. Their colleagues chortled. One young ambulance driver stiffened as he entered the locker room. I sensed he was a regular patron and that his assumed indifference to the scene of carnage was a gross act. His coworkers did not know about his love for other men. He rolled a body onto a gurney and pretended to smirk as one of the policemen helped push the carcass with the heel of his boot. I understood that reflexive fear kept him from crying, from attacking these beasts, but as the color drained from his cheeks, I also knew today’s horror would turn to tomorrow’s shame. This inaction would haunt him long after the perpetrators had forgotten their weak humor in the face of tragedy.

  The next sauna was again a gruesome sight: small, cramped, dank and hot. The bodies had gone undiscovered for too many days. Lifeless flesh had erupted into malodorous cankers. Unregulated heat had quickened decomposition. Gray flesh slid off blunt steeples of bone. Sickened and saddened, I stumbled across the killing field, my hand over my mouth to stifle the dry heaves racking my upper body. I pushed through a filmy curtain to what I hoped was the shower room so I could flee this mad panorama of death. In the darkness, I brushed against another body and recoiled as he howled to life. I was relieved to find someone alive, but his howl hollowed out as he fell to the ground and pushed away from me across the floor in wild desperation. His arms outstretched to ward me off, I could see his fingernails were long and his hair unkempt. This naked, hungry man had been trapped among the dead. I could only imagine how he survived Pluto’s Kiss, as the devastation had been named in those locations that somehow remained open after a visit from Obsidio. Perhaps he was napping in a dark corner of the steam room. Possibly he was one of those birdlike voyeurs who visit the baths, standing in the corner for hours, observing the various couplings, ranking the bodies but never touching any of them. How he looked at me, eyes wide with terror, silently begging that I not come any closer; he thought I was the demon that had delivered death. I saw him as the penultimate harbinger for my true mission. I must keep this from happening again.

  * * *

  During my travels, I had visited specific palaces of exquisite vice only once, while others I h
ad returned to again and again, across the eons, very little changing among the interlocking bodies, the lust-filled basements and large subterranean pools. I understood the vagaries of such establishments and that the changing morals and even laws of certain cultures and countries naturally led to the closings of these businesses. But now also this ebony drip of plague. I was not responsible for the initial onslaught of this fraternal pestilence, but I soon would be if I did not do everything in my power to put a stop to the next sexual slaughter.