Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath
Author: Lyndsey Holder; Ran Cartwright; Brian M. Sammons; Victoria Dalpe; Luke R. J. Maynard; Molly Tanzer; Kenton Hall; Annabeth Leong; Don Webb; Copper Sloane Levy; Shon Richards; Christopher Slatsky; Jonas Moth; Christine Morgan; Jacqueline Sweet; Ambrosius Grimes
Date: 2014-02-08 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Anthologies
Description: “From the wells of night to the gulfs of space, ever praise and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!” With this prayer in the ‘The Whisperer In Darkness’, Lovecraft introduced the world to the mighty and terrible Shub-Niggurath, the fertility deity of his then-fledgling Cthulhu Mythos. A being of primal lusts, overwhelming fecundity, and soul-blasting horror, the Black Goat is regularly invoked, entreated, and mentioned in furtive whispers within the pages of most Mythos fiction. And yet, for all that she is a cornerstone of the Mythos,
Publisher: Martian Migraine Press

CONQUEROR
WOMB

Lusty Tales of
Shub-Niggurath
edited by
Justine Geoffrey
and
Scott R Jones

Be sure to check out these other Martian Migraine Press titles…

SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD
by Scott R Jones

PRIESTESS
Volume One of the
BLACKSTONE Erotic Series
by Justine Geoffrey

ORGY IN THE VALLEY
OF THE LUST LARVAE
a sci-fi erotica short
by Justine Geoffrey

R’LYEH SUTRA
by skawt chonzz

THE ECDYSIASTS
by Scott R Jones

Martian Migraine Press
electronic edition 2014

CONQUEROR WOMB
Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath

© 2014 Martian Migraine Press
edited by Justine Geoffrey and Scott R Jones

All Rights Reserved

Molly Tanzer’s All This For the Greater Glory of the 7th and 329th Children of the Black Goat of the Woods first appeared in Issue 7 of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction (Eraserhead Press, December 2012)

Christopher Slatsky’s Obsidian Capra Aegagrus first appeared in Issue 19 of The Lovecraft eZine (Mike Davis, publisher, November 2012)

Cover illustration © Garry Mac

This book is a work of adult fiction, portraying situations and events intended for mature readers. All events and persons within it are fictional; any similarities to actual events or to individuals living or dead are coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors or Martian Migraine Press, except brief passages for purposes of review.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-927673-03-4
martianmigrainepress.com

contents

PRAISE & ABUNDANCE!
Introduction by
Justine Geoffrey and Scott R Jones

THIS HUMAN FORM
Lyndsey Holder

THAT HIDEOUS THING
Ran Cartwright

UNSATISFIED
Brian M. Sammons

MATER ANNELIDA
Victoria Dalpe

The POTBOILER SIGIL
Luke R. J. Maynard

ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY
of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN
of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS
Molly Tanzer

BABYMAMA
Kenton Hall

OUR CHILD
Annabeth Leong

BOY
Don Webb

PIECES (2) for STRING OCTET
Copper Sloane Levy

The WHISPERER in the VAGINA
Shon Richards

OBSIDIAN CAPRA AEGAGRUS
Christopher Slatsky

DIRTYMAG
Jonas Moth

WITH HONEY DRIPPING
Christine Morgan

IN THE DOWN DEEP DOWN
Jacqueline Sweet

THE SCARLET SCRIPTURE
Ambrosius Grimes

WITHIN YOUR UNHOLY PIT OF SHOGGOTHS
Wilum H. Pugmire

BLOSSOM
Rose Banks

(essay)
The CONQUEROR WOMB:
PARSING SHUB-NIGGURATH
Scott R Jones

About the Authors

About the Editors

About Martian Migraine Press

Other MMP Titles

PRAISE & ABUNDANCE!

I have a confession to make before we begin.

I’ve never liked it when an editor included a story of their own in an anthology. I know it’s a relatively common practice, and really not all that big of a deal, but it never fails to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The way I figure it, an anthology is for the Writers and the Readers, and the Editor is there to bring the two together, with (hopefully!) spectacular results.

But I confess, I really wanted a story of mine in Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath. I wanted to just stomp my spiked editrix heel down on the issue and thrust my Robert Bloch-inspired Notebook Found In A Deserted Sorority House smack-dab in the middle of the book without care or regard for anyone. I wanted to do it so badly! (Cue maniacal laughter.) That’s how much I love the idea behind this anthology.

I almost did it, too. In the first weeks after opening up the Sploosh Pool (our term for an erotica slush pile, natch!) to submissions, as the first stories began to trickle in, I told myself “Justine, if you don’t get enough submissions, if the quality of the tales is low or patchy or otherwise not super, then, and only then, will you consider including Notebook!” That was my vow.

Friends, readers, acolytes of Shub-Niggurath…

You will not find Notebook Found In A Deserted Sorority House within these pages. As the Sploosh Pool got deeper, as fragrant aphrodisiac-laced steam began to rise from the surface and strangely arousing visions swirled in the depths, I gave up on that idea very quickly. My integrity (as an editrix, at least) is intact, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

What you will find here are 18 pulpy tales of fertility and fear, hot sex and chilling sacrifice! Stories that squelch, tales that both titillate and terrify, from some of the best writers working in Lovecraftian horror and mind-bending erotica today: Wilum H. Pugmire, Molly Tanzer, Don Webb, Christine Morgan, Kenton Hall, Brian M. Sammons, Jacqueline Sweet, Copper Sloane Levy, Annabeth Leong, and Christopher Slatsky, along with fresh new voices.

And all to the greater glory of Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

Let’s just face it, folks: the Maddening Momma of the Mythos needs the love. Ever since the Gentleman from Providence dropped Her name into his The Whisperer In Darkness way back in 1930, ol’ Shubby has played little better than a supporting role for creators working within the Cthulhu Mythos. “Ever her praises”, sure. Plenty of praise, plenty of jaw-wagging: the chants and invocations and fearful whispers surrounding the Black Goat and Her Mysteries form the pulsing thaumaturgic backbone of Lovecraft’s dread corpus and still the Great Old BOYS take center stage! Look at Nyarlathotep, struttin’ around all regal like he owns the place. And Cthulhu just sits there, snoozing in his non-Euclidean La-Z-Boy down there in R’lyeh, aeon after strange aeon, and he gets his name put on the whole thing!

I guess we all take mothers for granted.

Well, no longer. Not this Mother.

Because of course, Shub-Niggurath is more than a mother. She is a cosmic force, a living principle of the very idea of reproduction, a potent embodiment of Lust itself. As such, her forms are many, her masks multiple. You’re about to meet her in some of her guises: as a strange obsidian blade soaked in sacrificial blood in Don Webb’s Boy; as a cello (that we’re sure would make Susan Sarandon’s instrument in The Witches of Eastwick splinter with envy) in Copper Sloane Levy’s Pieces (2) for String Octet; and as a long-hidden alien artifact of irresistible apocalyptic allure in Rose Bank’s Blossom.

Her human forms are, naturally, as seductive as they are frightening, tapping into the twin obsessions of our species: Sex and Death. A ravishing avatar of Shub-Niggurath goes clubbing to find a more-than-willing partner/victim/meal in Kenton Hall’s Babymama; she inspires the bizarre polyamorous activities centered around a small-town fertility clinic in Annabeth Leong’s Our Child; a decadent occultist is drawn to her ritual of rebirth deep within the earth in Within Your Unholy Pit of Shoggoths, a brand new tale by Lovecraftian luminary Wilum H. Pugmire; and in Ran Cartwright’s That Hideous Thing, not even the chaos of London during the Blitz can stop the Black Goat from tracking down and bedding an immortal sorcerer.

Her Dark Young are here as well, in their fetid thousands. The very unusual narrator of Molly Tanzer’s All This For the Greater Glory of the 7th and 329th Children of the Black Goat of the Woods bears witness to their cosmic lusts in a summoning gone wrong. A junkie is pushed beyond the limits of ecstasy and sanity when his habit introduces him to the Young (and their Mum!) in Christopher Slatsky’s Obsidian Capra Aegagrus. A horny researcher working for a shady pharmaceutical company goes deeper than he ever thought possible when he interviews a delusional test-subject in the gonzo smut-fest The Whisperer in the Vagina by Shon Richards; and two teens descend to the secret temple below Goatswood High hoping to lose their V-cards to the Dark Young (and a deadly book) in Jacqueline Sweet’s In the Down Deep Down.

And what anthology about the Black Goat of the Woods would be complete without… well, the woods? Specifically, an orgy in the woods? By the end, our Sploosh Pool was maybe 40% sylvan sexy-times, but we picked our way through the tangled groves and even more tangled limbs to the best of the lot, a brilliant and thoroughly erotic blend of pure Lovecraftian horror with the lusty mead-fueled bombast of Norse mythology. Vikings and Shub-Niggurath? You bet! Let the tasty Goat-Girl of Christine Morgan’s With Honey Dripping deliver some of that old, old, old-time religion and show you how to get it on in the grove.

Now, another confession: my hope is that you enjoy these stories we’ve collected, and that this anthology triggers a dark renaissance of Shubby-lovin’ lust-literature in the weird-fiction and erotica writing communities. That last is my fondest desire, because, my fellow acolytes, I really want to submit Notebook Found In A Deserted Sorority House somewhere.

Praise and abundance! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!

Justine Geoffrey
30 January, Hour of the Turgid Mandala
Stregoicavar

A Note About the Conqueror Womb Ratings System

Early on in our selection process for the stories in Conqueror Womb, we came to the realization that our readership was likely going to be split between two groups: People Who Love Horror and People Who Love Erotica, and though there could be some overlap between the two groups, such a thing would be rare. Certainly we noticed this happening with the writers who submitted their work: a piece was either straight-up horrific with a light seasoning of eroticism, or down-n-dirty erotic with a subtle smack of horror, and never the twain shall meet.

Now, all the stories we’ve chosen for Conqueror Womb are great, and we’d love for our readers to enjoy them all, but we realize that some horror fans may have a little trouble dipping into the erotica pool, and vice-versa. So, we’ve created a handy-dandy sliding-scale ratings system for the stories you’re about to read. Above the title of each story in Conqueror Womb, you’ll notice a goat-skull graphic, like so…

ONE GOAT SKULL indicates a largely horrific tale with some mild eroticism, or an examination of sexuality through a horror lens.

TWO GOAT SKULLS means the horrific elements are present but they share equal billing with the sexy bits. Basically, the story has the potential to chill you, but you’ll likely notice a warm tingling beginning wherever you enjoy your warm tingles the most.

THREE GOAT SKULLS are your golden ticket to ride the Black Goat (nudge-nudge! wink-wink!) to your perverted little heart’s content. Very little scare, plenty of shameless smut.

These ratings are in no way meant as a judgment on the stories themselves: again, we here at Martian Migraine Press think they’re all great in their own way. It’s just our way of extending a helping hand to you, the Reader, as we lead you into the thickets where Shub-Niggurath reigns. Clothing optional, of course.

An additional note: unlike Ms Geoffrey, I have no trouble dropping my own stuff into an anthology. I’m just shameless like that, I guess. You’ll find my essay on the Black Goat, The Conqueror Womb: Parsing Shub-Niggurath (from my upcoming auto-ethnographical book on R’lyehian spirituality), at the very end of the book.

It gets one goat skull. Because it’s an essay.

Iä! Shub-Niggurath!

Scott R Jones
1 February, Hour of the Virginal Appraisal
Victoria, BC

THIS HUMAN FORM

Lyndsey Holder

You call me black, but I am beyond black. I am the space between the stars, the darkness that lies on the edge of your dreams, the sound of death in small spaces.

You say I am from the woods, but my woods contain no trees or birds, no peaceful sounds of wind and stream, no quiet rustle of delicate creatures. My forest pulsates, vibrates, glistens. Dendrites slide their feathery branches together, shuddering in ecstatic convulsions. Synapses fork their lightning across the membrane-sky.

You call me a goat, and sometimes I am. I shrug on iron-needle fur, hooves of polished obsidian and I stalk through your world at night. You do not recognize me, but oh, your animals do. They whisper stories about me, ever vigilant, alert for the rustling sound of my breathing, the monstrous curve of my back, the fathomless cruelty that burns deep within my eyes. I press my face deep into their bodies, jewel-sharp teeth making room for me, and smell the thick red scent of beating life. Jaws burst organs in a shower of gore and I play at being a goat, a real goat, a phoenix goat rising from its own pulverized body.

There is one thing you do not call me: mother. My body has sent a thousand children into this world, a thousand mewling, crawling things, suckling and whining, slithering down silvery dream-threads into the soft comfort of your warm beds. My womb has created hosts of wriggling creatures: more life than Gaia herself could claim has sprung from me, and yet I am never a mother. I am Jezebel, the whore, the ancient slut.

Dark and sultry, I slouch through your streets in girl-form: hips swaying with invitations, eyes brimming with promises of illicit and forbidden and available. Clothes give way to teeth and nails; flesh gives way to fingers, lips, and tongue.

I have known you since you were hairy creatures rolling in your own filth, and yet I will never tire of this game I play with you. Goats all cry the same pitiful whine with the same thick tongue, but you! You laugh, you cry, you wail, you gasp – never the same way twice, never the same voice repeated, no matter how closely I mirror my actions among you.

I am so gentle with you at first. Patient. Your skin slips against mine and I am aware of this body, the form that I wear with you. It responds to your nearness of its own will, and fills me with an insatiable hunger. I trail my fingers across your body, studying its response, watching blood vessels fill, skin tighten and redden.

I want to taste you, to lick the memories and dreams from your soul as you writhe and moan. I want to know you completely, to steal all of your body’s secrets and bury them deep within my heart. I envelop you in my mouth – you and all of your softness, all of your hardness are mine now, inside me. Part of me. You spill your occult desires and I greedily devour them until I am drunk on your human-ness.

Most of you don’t notice that I’ve bitten through your chest and cracked your ribs. I eat your heart while you are still crying in ecstasy, blood dribbling down my chin, beaming beatifically at you as you die.

Very rarely, one of you will smile at me as I’m chewing your bones. You are my chosen ones. For you, I will shed my girl-skin. I will let you see me as I really am. I will eat you whole, absorbing you into my body, letting your light mix with my darkness, your humanity mix with my goat-self. Our progeny squirms and kicks inside of me, terrified and excited by the swirling black-goat in its soul, staring with sightless eyes through vein-branches that shiver in the amniotic-sky.

Soon it will slither back to your world, stalking you, skulking in shadows until you drift off into slumber. It will find that place in your mind that will accept me – for you clumsy things always have a place for my darkness – and curl up there, whispering to you about the goat with iron fur, the goat with obsidian hooves, the goat with sharp, sharp teeth, the goat who lives in a forest of gore.

THAT HIDEOUS THING

Ran Cartwright

Whistling bombs fall; air raid sirens wail. Anti-aircraft guns fire. Buildings crumble; smoke and ash plume across the city.

Fear and pain, Marjorie Southern thinks absently. She stares in the dark with other refugees hiding in the London Underground.

There’s plenty of fear and pain to go around. The Blitz has everyone on edge.

The King’s Cross Station lights blink. Go out. Ceiling dust and plaster settle to the ground.

Yes, thanks to the Nazis, a lot of fear and pain to go around. A lot of fear and pain to feed on for the thing lurking in the city.

An ancient thing. Now in search of a special meal.

Marjorie sits in the dark.

The city is dark. Has been since the Blitz began.

Above, the bombs explode. High explosives, incendiary, flame bombs. A city in ruins. Rubble and fire and death.

The lights come on. Feeble yellow.

The station shakes; more ceiling plaster falls, clouds of dust roll through the underground, coating the refugees in a thin layer.

They brush it off, mumble. This has got to stop.

Soon.

Fear and Pain.

More bombs, more dust. More death.

Then silence. It’ll last a short while.

Marjorie shakes the dust from her notes. Turns her eyes back to what’s written. She pages, glances at names. Headings.

Nitocris.

Caesar.

Magdalene.

Red Jack.

Bovary.

De Sade.

Crowley.

She sits back, a blank stare, then glances at a bulletin board peppered with lost and found notes. Mostly people, relatives, and friends looking for people, relatives, and friends. Some notes are otherwise. Notes of information and requests. Like Marjorie’s note.

Marjorie’s note clings to a corner of the board. Looking for information about Ibn Schacabao. That strange man from the 8th Century. Still alive. A pact with the Old Ones, it’s rumored. So said Marjorie’s research.

And he’s here, in London.

Marjorie knows; she smiles.

A week passes. Marjorie waits. Studies. Researches.

Bombs fall. More dust and plaster. It has to stop. Soon.

Marjorie glances at her note on the bulletin board. It’s gone. Just a bare spot where it was.

A man watches from the shadows.

Tall. Thin. A greatcoat drapes his shoulders. A fedora tilts forward, rests on his brow. A thin hawkish face. Dark complexion. Black hair. He grins, shows yellow teeth. His dark eyes glitter. Speaks with an accent. Middle Eastern.

He steps into the feeble light.

Marjorie looks, knows, sets her notes aside and rises to her feet.

She approaches the man.

“You posted the note,” he says, holds it up between two fingers.

Marjorie nods. “I did.”

“Come, we talk; I have a place in Islington.”

They leave King’s Cross, glide through ruins and fire and dust and soot.

The night is dark and clouded in smoke. Search lights in the distance search for invaders.

Soon they reach the Islington flat. A basement flat. They enter.

Marjorie looks around. Her eyes big and round. She smiles at what she sees. Ancient books and candles and a skull decorated with strange symbols. There’s a black cloth that covers something on a wall. The man pulls the black cloth away, reveals a large painting, a chipped and faded image of a tentacled thing.

The place looks like the abode of a necromancer. Or the place of a man who knows things he shouldn’t. Terrible things. Hideous things.

“Your research,” he says, voice heavily accented. “I know your claims.”

Marjorie turns, smiles. “You do?”

“Yes, I do,” he replies, “that Ibn Schacabao, Red Jack, de Sade, and others are one and the same. But your claim is false.”

“Yes, it is false,” she says. “Ibn Schacabao is not de Sade nor Crowley nor Red Jack, nor any of the others. But it served to draw you out of the shadows… Ibn Schacabao.”

His eyes go wide. “How do you know?”

Marjorie grins, then cackles as she approaches Schacabao, drapes her arms around his shoulders.

“Because I have been with de Sade, and Red Jack, and Crowley,” she says. “I know them well.”

“You are what you seek,” Schacabao whispers fearfully.

Marjorie’s grin widens. “So much more than you know. I have slaughtered millions, and gave birth to a thousand.”

“Now you come for me,” Schacabao says.

“Of course; why not?” she says, flippant, suddenly playful and childish. But only for a moment. Her eyes turn dark, her voice soft. “A student of yours spoke highly of you before he died outside the city gates of Damascus. It was such a sight. So sorry you missed it. Will you squeal like he did? We shall see.”

She suddenly licks his cheek, nips an earlobe with her teeth. A paralyzing poison passes to the Arab. Strange whispered words echo in his ear, and his clothing falls to ashes, caught up and carried away on a sudden whirlwind that spins across the room, and whistles beneath the door. Another whirlwind carries Marjorie’s clothing away.

Marjorie laughs as she lays the Arab on the floor and mounts him.

Bombs suddenly fall. A nearby explosion rattles the Islington flat; plaster falls, shadows dance on walls cast by burning buildings.

Searchlights claw at the sky in the distance, searching for beasts bringing fear and pain.

Marjorie howls madly as she rocks against Schacabao.

Searchlights flash, bombs fall, dust and plaster fall. Fire and pain and death.

A strange surreal light flashes in the room, a misty dim red. Schacabao gasps, tries to see about the room…strange shapes lurk, shadows on walls, gnarled tree limbs and stones and lurching shapes…

Marjorie grunts, growls, hisses. Her shape changing. Her expanding form looms over the terrified Arab.

He gets a final brief glance of Marjorie in her true form…that hideous thing from the Outside. A hideous thing of monstrous fertility, the Black Goat of a Thousand Young that sends him to cackling madness and gathers him into the folds of her massive quivering body.

Schacabao clings to his madness.

The thing’s unborn child will find nourishment from the body of the cackling Arab until its birth.

UNSATISFIED

Brian M. Sammons

They met in one of those closet-sized bars that you only seem to find in Japan. It was run out of a brightly painted building the size of a tool shed and it sat on a street where over a dozen such alcohol peddlers could be found. The man called Jordan arrived first and took a stool at the rear of the building, keeping his back to the wall. He ordered a single beer that he nursed for an hour. As he was the only customer, the elderly Okinawan man who ran the place didn’t mind.

Then came Hayden. The newcomer was dressed as a U.S. Marine, as was Jordan. While both had served time in The Corps, what they wore now was far more costume than uniform. Hayden was less inconspicuous than Jordan in the disguise only because being both a woman and an officer, she was still a rarity in the Marines.

Despite the years between their last meeting, each recognized the other immediately. Jordan smiled at the memory. Five years ago, Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan. Two lonely people coming down from an adrenaline high after a nighttime op that, while successful, had gone down twisted. Both wanting to revel in the fact that they were still alive, they found a small measure of comfort in each other’s arms. That was a rare commodity in their trade.

Jordan blinked the memory away and refocused. He could see by the gleam in Hayden’s eyes that she had just relived that night too.

She walked over and he saw that in this cover she outranked him. He stood up, wobbling a little, and snapped a salute. “Major.”

Her smile broadened the tiniest bit as she returned his salute. She quickly glanced at the cover name on the front of his combat utility uniform and replied, “Captain Dawson. Long time no see. May I join you?”

“Yes Ma’am,” Jordan said and then turned to the bartender. “One for the Major.”

The Okinawan man reached underneath the bar and produced a frosty bottle of local brew. He opened it and gave it to the woman with a nod of his head.

Hayden sat and took a swig. “Not bad. Better than what they had in Afghanistan,” she said, reinforcing their connection,.Despite himself, Jordan felt a slight flutter in his stomach.

“Just getting started?” She nodded to the beer in his hand.

“No, the barkeep just does a good job at burying the dead soldiers.” He then quickly added, “What are you doing in Okinawa?”

“Well the usual unusual is a bit slow right now,” she sighed, referring to the way-off-the-books special operations that both of them specialized in. “So I’ve been stationed here at the JWTC to oversee the escape, evade, and survival training.”

The JWTC was the Jungle Warfare Training Center at Camp Gonsalves, where the U.S. Marines honed their skills at fighting in some of the roughest, most unforgiving terrain on earth.

“How’re the boys taking to that?” Jordan asked.

“They don’t see the oak leaves on the shoulders, just the tits,” she sighed.

“They are distracting.” Jordan smirked and took a swig of his warm beer.

Hayden grinned, “Well after I knock a few of them in the dirt, the rest stop staring.” Her tongue darted into the open hole of her bottle a split second before she tipped it back. “So what brings you here?”

“The job,” he said simply.

“Anything I should know about? Echo November?”

Echo November was military phonetic alphabet used by NATO forces for the letters E and N. E N had always been their way of saying eighty-nine. Eighty-nine referred to Code-89, the U.S. government’s secret designation for anything of a strange and unearthly nature. The reason both Jordan and Hayden knew that code was because they were real life monster hunters. More accurately, monster killers, for such other-worldly things never actually came in peace.

Ever since the 1920s when a small seaside village in New England shocked the American government into realizing the very real threat from what most would call the supernatural world, there have been a select few who looked into such matters. It wasn’t glamorous work, much darker and more hazardous than any episode of THE X-FILES. A lot of people died, many went mad, and some just vanished. The fact that both Jordan and Hayden were still alive five years after their last meeting was nothing short of a minor miracle.

“No, mundane work,” Jordan said, letting his counterpart know that he wasn’t looking for some shapeless, nightmarish horror. Not all the work they did pertained to the alien and the occult. There were always plenty of normal, everyday people who needed killing for some reason or another.

“That’s good,” Hayden said, her hand lightly running up and then down the length of her bottle. Her fingers left trails in the beads of condensation on the glass. She then rolled the water droplets around on her thumb and forefinger before bringing them up to her lips to suck the moisture from her fingers. Her green eyes darted to look at Jordan, to see if he was watching. He was. She dropped her hand and smiled.

“Last I heard, you were in Iraq with the SEALs.”

“It was Delta,” he corrected. “Bad shit happened, as usual. Lost a lot of good men.”

“I’m sorry. I know how you take such things.” Her hand came over and rested on his and a spark that had nothing to do with static electricity passed between them.

“That’s the job.” He took another gulp of good Japanese beer. “What about you? You were in China?” His eyes, shaded by the brim of his cap, focused on her face intently.

Her lower lip quivered, but she hid it well by taking another drink before answering. “Yeah, Hong Kong. Like with you, things went bad.”

“The Madam Yi whore house thing?” he pressed.

Hayden looked at Jordan, her eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”

“I was sent in after you disappeared to clean things up.”

She paused for a moment too long before answering. “Oh, I didn’t know. Did you find anything out?”

“Nothing to find. Everyone involved was gone. Including you. There was talk for a while that you were either dead or off the reservation.”

Hayden grinned mirthlessly “No, just after… that I needed some time to myself. It’s not like the bastards we work for would let us retire.”

“I understand,” Jordan said and he honestly did. When you dealt with the horrors that they did, it often took some time to get your shit wired back together between ops.

Hayden obviously thought he was being condescending. She turned her entire body to face him, her eyes wet and filled with a mixture of anger and fear. “It’s not like that. I didn’t pull a Baxter or anything.”

The name she had dropped belonged to another in their line of work who, one day, out of the blue, murdered the wife and child he had successfully kept secret from the agency for years. Before eating his own gun, Baxter had used his family’s blood to finger-paint the walls of his house with all sorts of insane gibberish, quotes in Latin, and arcane symbols. They’d all heard the story.

“I do get it. Honestly. I’ve been there too.” Jordan reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re here now, alive and looking good to go. That’s what matters.”

Hayden smiled and leaned her head to rest her cheek against his hand, but only for a brief moment. Remembering the parts they had to play, she straightened up. Following her cue, Jordan removed his hand.

“Well.” Hayden took another drink. “I think that’s why I’ve been benched. Come on, training jarheads to run through the jungle? Talk about a waste of talent.”

“We’ve all got to do the routine at times to keep up appearances.  Last month I spent some time in Greenland at Thule Air Base, and man did that suck the -”

“Hey,” Hayden interrupted and then paused as color rose in her cheeks. “Do you want to get out of here? Go somewhere else to… talk?”

Her last word could not have been more laden with innuendo. It had the appropriate effect on Jordan. He felt something starting to stir down below and he shifted on his barstool to give it a bit more room to grow.

He was a bit taken aback at the suddenness of her question, but not overly surprised that it had come. Hayden was a practical person, like him. You didn’t survive long in their line of work being anything but that. She knew when she wanted something and acted accordingly without the usual games. In fact, it had been Hayden who had grabbed him and suddenly kissed him hard and deep on that chopper years ago in Afghanistan.

The bird had not been more than twenty feet up from their emergency evac point, and both of them were lying on the helicopter’s cold metal floor. They were panting, sweating, and covered in filth and blood, which thankfully belonged to neither of them. All Jordan could think of as he shivered was the five men they had left behind to a gruesome death. Suddenly Hayden’s hands were on him. One went to the back of his head, the other held his chin, as if holding him secure, making sure he didn’t turn away. Her face leaned over his, the black camo paint she wore was streaked by her perspiration, blood splatter freckled one cheek, a wisp of short blonde hair stuck out from under her black cap, and her breath was hot and smelled of cinnamon Tic-Tacs, her one vice when in the field. Without a word she bent down and stuck her warm, wet tongue in his mouth. That was the only time Jordan had ever felt physically taken by a woman, so desperately and completely needed that it stunned him. And it felt good. The rest of the twenty minute ride back to Camp Leatherneck had been a torturous tease. They didn’t touch after that first kiss broke, lest the chopper pilots see them, and both were filled with anticipation for what they knew was coming.

Reliving that memory meant that Jordan had hesitated in answering.

“It’s been some time since I had the chance to talk with anyone. I really want to talk with you. I need to talk with you. You know about the kind of crazy shit I’ve been through, no one else does. I remember the last time we had that good, long talk, and I’d like to continue that conversation,” she said. Her wet lips were slightly parted, and mixed in with the scent of beer on her breath was that same hint of cinnamon from years ago.

“I’d really like that too,” Jordan said. For a man who could lie as effortlessly as he could breathe, he meant every word. He tossed some cash on the worn bar and the two of them left together.

“Where to?” she asked.

“I passed a little place where we can rent a room on the way here.”

“The love hotel? Really?” Hayden laughed.

“Yeah, wherever there’s the American military in Japan, there’s going to be a love hotel or three nearby.”

“Isn’t that a little public?”

“I guess, but since it’s officially off limits to Marines, if anyone from the camp sees us there, they’ll keep it to themselves.” Jordan grinned. “Besides, what’s life without a little danger?”

Hayden giggled like the proverbial schoolgirl, then stopped and looked around to see if anyone from the camp had seen it. “Why not? Still, it’s got me nervous. How about you go in first and get us a room. I’ll follow in a few minutes.”

“It looks like your covert skills have improved since the last time we were on an op together,” he teased.

“Bite me.”

“Oh, I intend to.”

“Promises, promises.”

They walked together for the half mile to the hotel. They didn’t hold hands and tried their best not to laugh or smile too much. Once there, Jordan went in first and rented a basic room. The love hotel had theme rooms like offices, hospitals, and even a dungeon available for a premium, but Jordan didn’t care about such things. He paid for three hours, with the option to add more time if needed, and told the Okinawan kid behind the desk that he was expecting company. The young man gave Jordan a big thumbs-up and smiled.

Once inside the room, Jordan went to the bathroom and splashed cool water on his face. He stared at his reflection in the mirror. “You ready for this?” he asked himself. After a minute he nodded and returned to the bedroom.

He removed his belt, holster, and 9mm Beretta and placed them on the nightstand next to the bed. He then pulled his non-regulation back-up piece, a Smith and Wesson Air Lite revolver, from the small of his back. He also set it on the nightstand, but closer than his gun belt, within easy reach. After years as a killer, Jordan was never without a gun nearby. Hayden would understand.

He took off his utility shirt, tossed it onto a nearby chair, and then gave his chest and abdomen the once over in a full mirror on the wall. Jordan worked hard to keep his ‘average’ appearance, as it was his job to blend in and be forgotten. While not bulky with muscle, he was corded and cut in all the right places. He had a long distance runner’s build, built for high endurance rather than bursts of speed or amazing feats of strength. Still, he had to admit it, he looked damn good.

His self-appraisal was interrupted by the room’s door opening and Hayden walking in with a wicked smile on her face.

“Looking good,” she teased.

Jordan dropped his hand from an old knife scar that ran along his side, shrugged a little self-consciously, and mumbled, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Hayden quickly walked over, wrapped her arms over his shoulders, entwined her fingers in Jordan’s short brown hair, and kissed him every bit as deeply and desperately as that first time on the helicopter.

Jordan responded, thrusting his tongue hungrily between her teeth and attempted to walk forward with her still clinging to him. He had wanted to back her up to the wall, pin her there, take back some of the control he felt himself losing to this beautiful woman, but she was having none of it. She stood her ground, her hands went from his head to his chest, and she pushed against him with remarkable strength for her small size. The kiss broke and Jordan flopped onto the bed behind him.

“No ‘guess so’ about it,” she purred.

Jordan started to sit up, but Hayden wagged a finger at him. “Stay there, I like you the way you are.” Her hands then went up to the top button of her shirt and began to undo them slowly.

“I was just going to take off my boots and pants,” Jordan said with a smile but he didn’t move. He was enjoying the show in front of him and what had been only semi-erect before was now standing at full attention before his superior officer.

She was finished with her shirt and dropped it to the floor. Her hands then went to unfasten the practical but unflattering Marine Corps bra. “Don’t worry about that, I’ll take care of you.”

Jordan’s smile widened and he felt like a dumb high school kid instead of the world-weary warrior he had become. He propped himself up on his elbows and watched Hayden as she undressed. It wasn’t a real striptease, but it was slow and controlled. By the time she peeled off her last sock and stood before the bed completely naked, Jordan was ready to grab her by the hips, toss her onto the bed, and sink into her warmth. But he knew that the woman still controlled the game.

Hayden dropped to her knees before Jordan and removed his boots. She then ran her hands slowly up his legs, coming tantalizingly close to his crotch, but at the last moment veering away to undo his button and zipper. With a series of yanks he lost his pants. Then her fingers were slipping under the elastic waistband of his green boxers. She smiled up at him, biting her lower lip, eyes sparking, and in one deft motion, peeled him like a banana.

She remained on her knees, her eyes now locked on his erect member. Her right hand came for it and she lightly traced a single finger over its length. Jordan shuddered at the touch. It was electrifying. She cooed as it twitched in response to her feathery touch. Then she lowered her head and took him into her mouth.

Jordan’s elbows slipped out from under him and he crashed back onto the bed. This wasn’t Jordan’s first time receiving but he couldn’t remember any other time it felt this good. Hayden all but attacked him, like a starving person finally given something to eat after far too long. She devoured him in almost every sense of the word. Jordan had always prided himself on being a good lover, able to control his body’s responses until after the woman was satisfied, but this assault was almost too much.

She certainly didn’t do this in Afghanistan, he thought. He was about to warn Hayden to be careful, that if she kept going like she was he was sure to explode, when she suddenly stopped on her own. She slowly crawled up onto the bed on her hands and knees and positioned herself over him, looking down at him with a predator’s eyes and a wolfish grin.

“Wait, my pants, get my wallet,” Jordan said through gasping breaths.

“Why?” she whispered and lowered her head to bite his neck. Her hard nipples dragged across his chest.

“Got to get a condom.”

She giggled and then flicked a tongue into his left ear before whispering hotly into it, “You didn’t need one last time. What, do you think I’m dirty? What happened to ‘what’s life without a little danger’?”

“It’s not that. Accidents happen and neither of us can afford you getting pregnant.” Jordan’s mind flashed back to many years ago and a world away, to another woman and the unexpected consequences one night of passion had wrought.

“Oh, that,” Hayden said and then grabbed his right hand, brought it up to one of her firm breasts, then down to her tight stomach where his fingers felt three puckered bullet scars. “Some North Koreans took care of that.”

“Oh, I’m… I’m sorry, I didn’t see them when -”

“It’s OK. Long time ago,” she whispered and then continued to move his hand down until he felt the moist heat from between her legs. He slipped two fingers inside her and she trembled at his touch and moaned. Her warm folds embraced him, welcomed him. It almost felt like a tiny mouth sucking greedily on his fingers.

He next felt her hand around his manhood, moving it into position. He pulled his fingers out just in time for her to sink fully onto him.

“Oh god,” Jordan groaned and closed his eyes.

“Yes, god,” Hayden whispered.

She then began to slowly raise and lower herself on him, increasing her pace and force with each thrust. As she did so, Jordan felt warmth and wetness spilling down his inner thighs.

She’s gushing, Jordan thought happily.

He was in bliss the likes of which he could not remember ever experiencing before. It was unreal. His entire consciousness was focused on the amazing sensations caused by this woman. The way she gripped him down there, the heat, the wet warmth that continued to flow across the top of his legs, over his hips and slowly continuing up across his belly, spreading everywhere…

Jordan’s eyes snapped open and he looked down. What felt like heaven looked like hell.

The lower half of Hayden was an unrecognizable pile of mush. It was as if her bones were gone and her flesh was a thick liquid sludge that slowly oozed over his trapped legs, abdomen, and the bed. Her golden, tanned skin was now pale, riddled with blue veins, and covered in weeping sores. From navel on up, she was the same beautiful woman, but below that she was a nightmare of flabby, diseased flesh. Worst of all, while she appeared not to move at all, something down below in the cancerous mass of meat continued to work him, suck him, milk him for everything he had, and it was still the most amazing sensation he had ever felt.

“Oh God!” Jordan said again, this time screaming it, and one of Hayden’s small hands pressed over his mouth, muzzling him with an unearthly strength, and pressing his head into the soft mattress. He tried to roll the horrible thing off of him, but discovered that her spreading, diseased flesh somehow had a firm grip on the bed beneath him. He wasn’t about to go anywhere.

“Ssshhhhh,” she whispered and her voice now had an odd, humming quiver to it. “Only my god is here right now. Can’t you feel Her? You’re inside Her. I know She feels wonderful. Just lie back and let yourself enjoy Her. Give in to Her. Every man does, eventually.”

But Jordan intended to fight. His hand reached for the nightstand, but the Hayden-thing that rode him recognized his intent, and one of her arms snapped out. It stretched out two feet longer than it should have been able to and slapped both guns away. She then looked down at the trapped man underneath her, and smiled a rictus grin.

“None of that,” she laughed. The incredible sensations of pleasure intensified, something Jordan could not imagine possible. “Come on, give it to Her. Feed Her. She wants it soooo bad.”

Jordan answered by punching the thing in the nose. Instead of the familiar crunch of cartilage, the face of the monstrosity collapsed in on itself. It was like hitting a rotted melon. He pulled his hand free of the sucking wound, bile rising in his throat, only to be met by firmly shut jaws. Before his stunned eyes, Hayden’s face reformed perfectly into its beautiful and cruel visage.

“I can feel you getting close,” it said with its awful, quavering voice. “Just a little bit longer and She will taste you. Know you. And you’ll be Hers forever.”

The she-creature closed its eyes and moaned as its rhythmic vibrating, tickling, and sucking increased even more, taking Jordan to the edge of sanity and ecstasy.

Then Jordan slipped something long and hard between Hayden’s lips, and it exploded.

The revolver he had pulled from under the pillow was made my Taurus and was called ‘The Judge’. While it was a thick hunk of chromed steel, it only held five shots because it fired .410 shotgun shells. The .410 was the smallest gauge of shotgun shell, but by handgun standards it was a huge load. And when the little shotgun shells were Dragon’s Breath rounds, that shot not lead but burning phosphorus, the result was pure carnage.

The flesh-thing’s head split apart like an erupting volcano. Chunks of meat went flying as a jet of orange flame burst out of the top of its head. Blonde hairs crisped and the black ichor that passed for the creature’s blood began to spill down the gaping ruin.

And still the lower part of the insatiable horror kept working on him, desperate for its reward.

Jordan placed the gun’s glowing muzzle to the thing’s chest, right between Hayden’s still beautiful breasts, and squeezed the trigger twice more. The eruptions of flame tore through the beast, blasted out of its rippling back, and at last the thing lost its pinning grip on Jordan and the bed.

He pulled out of the twitching, drooling orifice with a sickening slurping sound, kicked the burning mass of meat off of him, and yelled out, “Now, damn it, now!” He then shot it once more with his fire-spitting gun for good measure before leaping away.

A second later the room’s left wall exploded and out of a hole cut by a loop of detcord, a man in black fatigues and wielding an industrial sized chemical sprayer entered. He looked at Jordan as if unsure of what to do next. The tip of the dripping sprayer jittered as his hands trembled.

Jordan took a last look at the bleeding, smoking mass as it crawled away into a corner of the room. In the charred remains of what had been the thing’s face, Jordan saw one of Hayden’s green eyes still intact. It looked at him, tears streaming from it, fear filling it.

“Do it,” Jordan said.

The black-clad man stepped up and hosed the monster down. The chemical inside the seven gallon backpack he had on was designed to voraciously attack organic matter and was far more volatile than any acid. It instantly dissolved the shuddering hulk that burbled, boiled, and leaked foul smelling sludge all over the floor as it melted away.

Through the hole in the wall another man entered the room, this one older and with two silver stars on his shoulders. Behind the commander of Camp Gonsalves stood a small group of other Marines, none of which wanted to follow the general into the room.

“What took you so long?” Jordan huffed out. He was covered in sweat, slime from the waist down, and black ichor from the chest up.

“Sorry, just… Jesus. None of us had ever seen anything like that. Never. I guess we all just froze staring at the monitors. Shit, son, what the hell is that?” The old general had made his bones in the green hell of Vietnam but there was fear in his voice.

“What we were after,” Jordan said simply. He walked over, picked up a nearby towel, and began wiping the muck from his body, starting with his still engorged member.

“When that CIA fella arranged all this, I thought it was crazy. Nothing like that… thing over there could be real. But it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you let it fuck you?”

“When Hayden first returned from being MIA after Hong Kong, all manner of tests were performed on her, right down to her DNA. They all said she was fine. At first everyone thought she had got lucky, that she was telling the truth about escaping the thing she was sent to find when things went bad. But my superiors kept an eye on her, and while no one ever saw her do anything, once Marines started going AWOL in increasing numbers at whatever base she was stationed in, they thought something was up. But they had to be sure.”

“So you had to fuck it?” the old man asked again, disgust all but dripping from his words.

“That thing can mimic people perfectly down to the cellular level. It only shows it’s true form when it’s about to feed, and well, fucking is how it feeds. So I had to see if she would respond.” A hint of sadness crept into his voice as he watched the black-clad Marine continue to spray the corrosive chemical onto the steaming pile of goo that had once been a woman. “I hoped they were wrong, but unfortunately, they were right to send me.”

“Christ Almighty,” the general whispered.

“It’s a drone of sorts,” Jordan said as he dropped the filthy towel and picked up his pants. “It’s somehow connected, by means we don’t understand, to a central organism. A queen, if you will. That bitch is known as Yidhra and we think it needs new infusions of DNA from time to time to stay alive. And the DNA it likes the most comes from men, if you get my meaning. Maybe it’s the purest or something, I don’t know. So a drone like that fucks a guy, gets his seed, somehow transmits that DNA to the mother-monster somewhere in the world, and then the drone consumes the man so it can keep on living to get more DNA for the queen. That’s pretty much all it does.”

“How do you boys know all this?”

“Way I heard it, there was something of a Yidhra epidemic back in the 60s,” Jordan said and then turned to the Major General. “In Vietnam.”

The General’s face blanched.

“It pretty much was a war within a war. That’s where they cooked up the chemical the Sergeant is using on it now, and found out that drones sure don’t like fire.”

“And the Hayden woman? Was she replaced by whatever that was?”

“Near as we can tell, no, just… changed somehow by whatever Yidhra is.” Jordan nodded at the spreading puddle. “That’s all that’s left of the woman. She’s gone now.” And at peace, I hope, Jordan thought.

“Jesus.” The general took the Lord’s name in vain for the third time. “Now what?”

“You and your people pretend this never happened. You mention it to no one and do your best to forget it. My people will clean up the mess and lose ‘the major’ in paperwork so she’s not missed. As for me,” Jordan said with a gleam in his eye that had nothing to do with sex, “I’m off to Hong Kong to find an inhuman whore that needs killing.”

MATER ANNELIDA

Victoria Dalpe

She ran it over her body. She loved its coolness, its smell, the feel of its grit on her sensitive skin.

She pressed it to her face and breathed deep, intoxicated by the heady scent. It was vegetation, it was time rendered to dust. It was that which had lived and that which wished to live again.

She knelt in the rounded clearing worn smooth by centuries of footfall. The foliage grew in on all sides, dense and reaching, but the circle remained clear. It was as if an unseen force kept the forest at bay.

She sat in the center, brazenly nude for such a cold night. Her hair hung long down her back, nearly to her bottom. Her eyes were shut, resting, preparing.

One cannot go into this sort of thing unprepared. And she had prepared for months and months. Nine whole months to be precise.

And now her time had come.

The moon was full and fat in the sky and it shone down upon her. Her fair skin was bleached white by it. White flesh surrounded by dark night. She imagined herself a reflection of the moon. It was pale and round in the sky, she was pale and round below.

And round she was. She let her gritty hand roll over the swell of her belly, marveling at the responsive movement on the other side of her taut, warm skin. Where her hand moved, it followed. They were in synch. They were mirrors. Like she and the moon.

She cleared her mind and purged all things extraneous from it. She needed to be a vessel, an empty, transparent, focused vessel. Or she would fail. So she breathed and she scrubbed at her mind till it emptied and opened, until only a singular goal existed within.

She began to chant. Low in her throat, guttural, the lowest octaves she could reach. And her hands moved. Scooping and gathering. Piling up, packing down. Piling up, packing down. All in rhythm with the chant.

The moon, her twin and mirror, shone clean and kind onto her, as if it knew what she was doing. Her skin grew hot in anticipation. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She wiped it away, leaving a trail of dirt on her brow.

When the mound was tall, and smooth, she stood and looked upon it. It was a mud woman, sculpted in her own likeness. It looked up at her, without eyes, its hands over its distended brown belly. It was her and she was it. She mirrored her creation; it mirrored her.

When she knelt and straddled her effigy, her belly wriggled, eagerly. She whispered and cooed, and eased her nakedness onto her earthen twin. Bulbous belly met bulbous belly; breasts met breasts. She kissed her dirt twin’s mouth. As she did, she found her eyes had grown teary.

Amen. She whispered and opened her mouth.

And began to eat the double. To consume herself. First she ate the face of the dirt woman. The dryness choking her, each swallow progressively harder to get down. The grit and grain scraped along her insides, abrasive. She yearned for water. Just a sip. But there was none. This was not done for comfort. This was bigger than her thirst. She focused. She continued devouring herself. By the time she reached the clavicle and breasts she was sobbing, a slug trail of snot and drool stretched from her to her avatar like a spider’s webbing.

She pulled her eyes up to the moon, beseeching, and it shone down upon her, pure and bright. It gave strength.

She resumed with new vigor and found a rhythm at the belly. Perhaps because its roundness reminded her of her own, and what this was all for. The pain became pleasure, the taste of earth a delicacy as her senses transformed.

When she reached the middle of the thigh, she could feel a warm wetness between her legs. The movement in her womb intensified. By the knees, she could feel pressure, the pressure of something inside wanting to get out.

She forced another mouthful, silty and delicious. It slid down her throat and landed heavily inside of her. The weight of her sand effigy nearly matching her own. She pictured herself the wolf from the fairy tale, its belly filled with stones.

By her ankles, the pressure in her loins had transformed into pain, a throbbing, gut-carving pain. And by the last toe on the last foot she was gasping. The pain was explosive, tiny starbursts and electric rosettes blossomed behind her eyes.

Finally the toe went down and she lay back and let her eyes roll back to the watchful moon above. Only then did she push.

Time slowed and the forest was silent, silent as if in anticipation, as if nature was waiting to see what would happen. And perhaps it was.

Her focus was sharp as a needle and singular: push, push, push.

And then she opened up like a flower blooming. It unfurled out of her, shiny and wet, and slid free to the ground.

She sobbed, gasped, collapsed.

Her work was done.

Her skin cooled and her eyes glazed over. The last remnants of her life ebbed out, wetting the soil, softening it. She died.

Her offspring writhed between her splayed legs. It moved slowly away from her. Its brown skin steamed. Eyeless, its other senses exploded with stimuli. It found the soft earth, damp with its mother’s blood and it knew what to do.

It burrowed.

Mindless, save for hunger, it took its first huge bites of dirt. Inside of it, elaborate tubes of muscles coiled and uncoiled, not so much digesting the dirt as changing it, remaking it, then forcing it back out through its anus.

As it ate, it was propelled deeper into the Earth. And so it would go, bite by bite, remaking the world in its image.

THE POTBOILER SIGIL

Luke R. J. Maynard

Sam Simone didn’t masturbate, the same way her father-in-law didn’t drink. The holidays were special, naturally; and a glass of wine with dinner was a different thing altogether; and sometimes old Jim at the liquor store had that ninety-proof whiskey in, the stuff he could only get at certain times of year. Sometimes he’d put a bottle away, to surprise Mr. Simone out-of-season on one of his weekly visits. But Mr. Simone wasn’t a drinker, of course, and Sam never masturbated.

She was an entirely respectable woman now, with a job and a mortgage. Her guilty pleasure, when Ted was away, was to heat her slippers in the microwave and head to bed wearing nothing else but her curlers, looking ridiculous but feeling divine as the cool cotton sheets slid over her naked skin like angel wings, caressing her every nerve to arousal. She didn’t masturbate, of course; but she liked to read on her stomach, and the newest potboiler by Melody Lamoreux was always close at hand. The Training Howly series of werewolf romances had gone fifteen volumes, now; was it any wonder she had animal urges? Jared Howly had put her to bed more nights, with his rippling muscles and uncontrolled aggression, than Ted ever had with his comical plastic snore-guard. So when the urge came, she would lie on her stomach with a pillow between her legs and read the latest Training Howly while biting her lip; and she would shuffle, then squirm, then buck against the bed until a crest of cathartic pleasure filled her limbs from the inside out as she clenched tight her muscles and brought herself, exhausted, into the easy peaceful afterglow of a new chapter well-read.

Grandma’s house had always been boring. The smell of dollar-store potpourri and cigarettes never came out of the wallpaper. The books reeked of cigarettes too—especially these ones. For some reason, the books with the little black marks always got the worst of the smoke.

Her illness was long, severe, and desperately mad. She died screaming, though the nurses never told the family. They only said that she “collapsed in a fit,” though she clawed at them with bloody fingernails for hours before her leathery old heart gave out and her spent soul fled away.

Cody came up on the Greyhound, last to arrive, to a house that hadn’t been this full since they stopped doing Christmas. The boys had blown up air mattresses in the basement. Mom and Kate were on the couches; Cody would get his old room upstairs. And no one else, he knew, would violate the sanctity of Grandma’s bedroom. That room had been unchanged for years; it would stay unchanged now.

A row of gimmick-themed murder mysteries—food mysteries, quilting mysteries, poorly researched Elizabethan period mysteries—were scattered across the front of Grandma’s bookshelf, shielding the Melody Lamoreux books from view. But they were hidden where they’d always been.

Cody was grown, now—a lot bigger and heavier than when he was young—but he’d grown clever, too, better at sneaking on old floors. That summer he’d learned to creep down the old wooden fire escape from his girlfriend’s window. Winter was coming on, now, and she was on exchange, and his neglected cock was already half-hard in his flannel pyjamas as he crept down the hallway. He sucked in his breath, enjoying the growing, swinging weight of it between his legs. In a moment it was lengthening in his hand as he crept into the vacant room, warm and willing, its broad head swollen with anticipation. Old habits die hard, and Grandma’s house had been, all things considered, boring as shit.

Melody Lamoreux’s books were unabashedly smutty, flagrantly pornographic. He’d known it from a very young age: they were about cowboys, which he liked, but these men and women didn’t do cowboy things. They didn’t ride or rope steers or get in gunfights. Sometimes, though, they would go to bed and do things, weird things—things that made the bats in your stomach flutter as if somebody turned all the lights on down there. As a kid, they’d been forbidden curiosities, hidden books in a secret language whose undulating words he’d never quite understood—save that they were wrong, and that reading them made him wicked. By the time he started college, though, the mystery was gone, and he understood Melody Lamoreux’s Passion Creek westerns with eager clarity. When he couldn’t get weed in town and there was nothing to do at the house, he’d crouch on his grandmother’s bed while she went to church—or now, to the grave—and bring himself off to the sex scenes in Three Times a Cowboy, The Tennessee Harlot’s Baby, or The Naked Posse.

The publishers, in their shamelessness, had seen fit to mark the juiciest scenes. Cody held the book to the window, where a pinkish halogen streetlight illuminated the rotting sill, and looked for the first telltale black mark on the outside corner of the page, a black spiral wreathed in little flames or squiggles, that signalled where somebody’s pants were going to come off and the fun was about to begin.

Far beneath the old subway station, where five tunnels met under a dome of bricks blackened with smoke and the untold graffiti of eons, Stanley Zayter lay on a rusted bedframe, wracked by dreams of strange fluids, gasping lungs, secret and hidden screams in the dark.

The metal screech of a train through one of the tunnels above woke him a little early. The thousand cries of secret ecstasy in his pounding head were cross-faded, just for a moment, with the metal-on-metal squeal of the subway in a monstrous, half-conscious subterranean wail. It was how the Statue of Liberty might have sounded, he thought, on the edge of a rivet-rattling climax. It was not a pleasant sound. One woman in the throes of orgasm, he thought, sounded like a personal, intensely private birdsong. Two women together sounded like a symphony. But a thousand at once—some screaming, some wailing, some calling out to God or Christ Jesus in a moment of sudden squirting reaffirmation, some gasping, bug-eyed, desperate for breath—no, that was the sound of a genocide sonata, the nightmare cacophony of a locked boxcar of suffocating refugees. That was the sound he heard tonight, and every night our dark Muse called him—the screams and the squealing rails, the women and men giving it up in a thousand moments of slimy fluids and face-twisting inhumanity.

The dreams were getting worse. Perhaps the babies were kicking.

Like a monk to his matins, Stanley rose to perform his ablutions in the men’s room sink. He bent double over the basin, wrenched the tap—the water ran cold and red—and gave himself a birdbath over the rusty faucet like a prisoner in solitary.

In the corner storage locker was fifty grams of cocaine, a sharpened goat’s horn, and a half-empty flat of old toner cartridges. These ones were small and spent; it took two of these to fully cover his body in the sticky black powder. The cocaine he saved, for now—it took steady hands to apply the powder, to make the signs of the Mother with absolute precision. Cosmic syntax was serious business. A comma splice could end worlds.

He dressed his tattoo, the black spiral that marked him as part of the rite, with special care before he began the etching, dressing it as one would dress a wound. Then, cracking the toner cartridge, he worked the water on his skin into an inky gel and blackened his limbs in reverent silence. With the horn’s tip, he scratched the same sigil into the black powder clumping on each of his hands, and began to spell out untold and ancient blasphemies in the powder caked upon his thighs, his soft belly, his face. He’d have to scavenge some more toner when he went topside for more bread, and to drop the next manuscript CDs in the mail.

His cell phone was ringing when he came back washed and tonered and etched. He padded down the tile steps and took the phone to the center of the atrium. He didn’t know if there had always been such things as ley lines; but there were ley lines now, in this century: anyone who said differently had never been underground in New York with a cell phone. He walked until the air was full of invisible power, then answered as he found a clear signal.

“Stanley,” he said simply. Since his initiation, he considered himself too important to say “hello.”

“Stanley!” barked the unmistakable voice of the Keeper of the Sigil. “God damn, do you know what time it is?”

Stanley looked up at the grey skylights, distant foggy panels that barely let in the light from the Upper Station. “Time doesn’t seem to hold much water here,” he said.

“It’s the second Trimester,” barked the Keeper. “And I’m up to my knees in lonely American spunk, when I should be up to my goddamned waist.”

“Take your shoes off,” Stanley said, holding back a yawn. “That’ll buy you an inch.”

“This is no laughing matter, kid!” spat the Keeper. “Do you think you’re writing fluff pieces for the fucking Digest? The hour is late, the shadows are long, the Dark Mother’s on to pickles and ice cream, and you, my little golden goose, are three books behind. Do you even know what day it is?”

A battered and probably stolen bank calendar adorned one of the pillars. Stanley squinted over at it. “Is it the third?” he asked.

“The thirteenth,” said the Keeper. “The babies are hungry, Stan. She’s hungry. What are we at?”

“Oh God,” Stanley breathed. He didn’t want to look at the battered old ThinkPad. He counted his chapters. He felt black sweat collecting under his arms.

“I’ve got a hundred pages on the next Jared Howly wolf-porn,” he told the Keeper. “I’m one chapter away from the threesome at the end of A Rose in the Badlands, and… what’s the last one?”

“A Victorian period smutter,” said the Keeper, “for Laughing Man Press. The Scurrilous Tribulations of Miss Coralie, it was called.”

“I know, I know,” said Stanley, too dismissively.

“Publish or perish, Stan,” said the Keeper. “Next consecration is Thursday, at the printer’s. Publish. Or. Perish.” If his cell phone had been an old desk phone, a nightmare crackle and a harsh dial tone would have followed. But the friendly chirp as the Keeper disconnected was no less ominous.

Publish or perish. Stanley knew it better than anyone. The last Melody Lamoreux, Jeremy Higgs, had lived and written in a double-wide trailer parked upstate until he just ran out of juice. There was no retirement after that: the Keeper had shown him the police reports. Even the state troopers didn’t think it was natural. Gored by a wolf, said the autopsy; but Stanley knew how, and in whose impossible thorny embrace, the last Melody had died.

Of course, Higgs had been nowhere near the same caliber of writer, and he didn’t have the same resources out there on the edge. The Hell’s Kitchen nightlife was the place to be. Higgs couldn’t have scrounged up a gram of coke to save his life. Stanley hoisted the ThinkPad onto the desk and set his little stash beside it. There’d be enough, at least for now. On a cocktail of Red Bull and Ritalin with a half ball of cocaine, when the Dark Mother was with him, he could do 60,000 words on a good night. He’d have to hit fifty, in any case, if he hoped to keep his skin on right-side-out. He needed her now in the back of his brain, that matron of fecundity. But believe me—the nameless ecstasy of being skinridden by that savage Muse is a pleasure worth any price.

Stanley drew the Spiral of Shub-Niggurath on a mirror with a black Sharpie and began to fill in the intricate design with a line of coke. This stuff was bad—Stanley could smell the laundry detergent as he took it in—but ritual-grade cocaine was not the stuff he used for the writing. It did the job, as it always did; and as darkness fell on New York and singles trundled home from work, aching for lonely release, the infernal gasping in the back of his mind had started up again. Stanley revelled in their wantonness, let it wash over him, soaking in through the sigils scratched in the toner; and as the sun was swallowed by the horizon and his nerves hummed like an old refrigerator, he set his fingers to the keys and began to write.

The words came as easily as weeds in a fertile wood. Under its slick coat of toner, Stanley’s cock was a living tower of ichor—though whether it was from his own writing, the coke, the presence of a ravenous god, or some other part of the ritual, he could not tell. In the heat of the craft as imaginary bodies twined and bucked and slammed under his typing hands, he was both male and female. Their wetness was his wetness, their ecstatic dizziness his to command and control. It was like conducting an orchestra, clawing out those frantic and desperate sex scenes.

There were heaving bosoms aplenty, of course. Turgid pillars. Crescendoes and climaxes. A hundred florid metaphors for the raw squelching business of making with the flesh a sacred union of tainted souls. Miss Coralie’s less-than-scurrilous wedding night was, of course, appropriately holy in the eyes of a Victorian Church—angels smiled, and the most prudish reader could take guilt-free release from it. But the fury of werewolf sex—bite bite bite bite bite, he wrote in one line, before punctuating with an all-caps BITE—was holy in its own way, to other, older gods, alien in their appetites and brutal in their execution.

Between the high plateaus of the act, dull boilerplate connecting scenes rolled out like farmers’ fields, regular and well-ordered in their proportion. The less said about them, the better. No one would read A Rose in the Badlands, he knew, for its picturesque depiction of a fading American west. Yet in the throes of his trance, the harbinger called Melody Lamoreux would sometimes throw his chair back and thunder: “with a roar of restless hooves the plucky band descended!” Once, he shouted, “the ball at Mr. Twickenham’s was of a magnificence unrivalled!” At this he threw his gin bottle to the ground, and it smashed, and with slick black hands running frantically through his wild hair he turned again to composing the scene at hand.

The cosmos was a poor self-editor; scenes and pages came out of order, and the filthy little novels gestated together in the womb of the screen, a litter of unholy potboilers coaxing each other to fruition. Two coasted through lifeless dialogue while another sexual crescendo mounted in the third. In time he was chanting, then screaming, as the thunderous ritual seized him and he felt the caress of her goatflesh in the back of his mind, and the blackened old veins of the New York subways echoed for a quarter of a mile with his unholy wail:

Y’fhalma! Y’fhalma! Wgah’n lw’nafhnyth ph’ebumna!

And in the depths of those forgotten tunnels, unlit by a power grid long abandoned, a full clutch of twisting fetuses abode—a hundred thousand great monstrous things of shadow too deep to be real.

The visit to the publisher, in contrast, was almost civil. There was no time for the courier, this far past the deadline. Stanley checked into a motor inn just to shower and shave. He was gone again in fifteen minutes. The police would later ask the desk clerk about him, who only said there was a desperate fury in his eyes—a fury that, like most furies, was born of some hidden and unnameable fear.

The publisher was belowground in a nondescript brownstone building. The foyer at the bottom of the stairs was empty except for the receptionist’s desk, a tasteless calendar of sailboats, and the Keeper of the Sigil, who paced nervously from wall to wall. I was down in the press room, typing feverishly to the sound of his boots on the tile. The ugly first draft of this thing was already flowing when Stanley Zayter bounded down the old steps.

“My dear boy,” the Keeper said with a false air of elation. He moved with arms wide as if to embrace, but seized instead the three CDs in his outstretched hand. “You have them, I see!” (By this point, he had them). “Are they good?”

“They are powerful,” said Stanley. “I don’t know if they’re good. But they’ll excite the fancies. She’ll be happy with the results.”

“And the mechanical business of the ritual…”

“Performed with precision,” said Stanley.

“You are aware she feeds on women in equal volume to men.”

“There are romance plots,” said Stanley, as if that settled anything. The two men came into what was once an office. The smell here was overpowering, but seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was colder than the rest of the building; Stanley felt himself shifting uncomfortably and clutching at his elbows. The reception in the back of his mind was uncommonly good here. Even with his waking eye he could hear a thousand women, and no few men, diverting themselves violently to the dog-eared smut of the whole Melody Lamoreux series. He felt, somehow, the Great Sigil nearby, the fecund mother of all those insidious little squiggles in his dimestore potboilers, and his heart quickened a little.

“Do you want to see it?” asked the Keeper.

Stanley was taken aback. “How did you—”

“It’s plain as the nose on your face, son. Come on down.”

Down they came. There was no other way to describe it. Perhaps the floor slanted, or the hallway sank into depths by some trick of Escher’s pen. Perhaps they only went down the hall—but the hall had such a feeling of slope to it that Stanley felt faint on the descent. The track fluorescents cast hideous jungle shadows over the potted plants. The flies imprisoned in the lights buzzed mercilessly, harmonizing with the dead and dying bulbs.

The potboiler sigil, the real one, occupied almost the whole floor of the press room. It was painted onto the concrete, several coats thick, in something worse than blood. I was sitting as far back from it as I could, hidden behind a black Underwood typewriter on a steel desk. Stanley looked at me with a little surprise—we’d been in a writers’ group, once, before he and Melody Lamoreux took off.

“I know you,” he said. He hadn’t quite placed me, yet, but you could see in his eyes that his heart suddenly plunged about six storeys inside his ribcage. He looked as if he was going to throw up. On the Underwood, I typed: STANLEY: I know you... – v. unsettled.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. I typed that too, and hit the carriage return without breaking eye contact.

“It’s just a writing gig,” I said, “and I need the money. You don’t know how badly.” Then I typed that too. KEYS – LOUD, I reminded myself. One of the printers’ assistants, a skinny albino with the face of a lecherous Peter Lorre, came out from behind one of the presses—they were bigger than cars—and took the CDs from the Keeper.

“Get these laid out right away,” said the Keeper. “I want the plates shot for number one tonight.”

Stanley’s face tried on many unsettling colours, before settling at last on a horrid white. He might have strangled me, if not for a sudden fear too unsettling to describe: he was a man who knew, after all. You couldn’t fault him for that.

“Do you remember,” I asked him, “what Mr. Gardner taught the writers’ group?”

He cleared his throat. It didn’t help. “Deadlines.”

When the black edge of the sigil reached up and caressed his ankle, Stanley finally broke eye contact with me. It didn’t look as if it seized him, really—it just got its frosty venom onto him, like the tendril of a monstrous black jellyfish, and it led rather than dragged him into the circle. A dozen other tendrils met him there, and began teasing his skin, invading his pockets, playing with buttons. In time there were more of them, twenty or thirty, all welling up from the centre of the sigil. As the day wore on there came hundreds. I don’t need the money so badly, and I never will, to tell you what they did to him at night.

What I will say is that there’s no mistaking it: the ritual mating of Shub-Niggurath is a sexual feast. You could tell when her tongue came up out of the blackness: it resembled those anemic little tendrils only as a queen resembles her drones. It was gentle and strong enough to shred his clothes without tearing his flesh, and in the lusty half-trance of its venom Stanley was made a consort of the Night Beyond. It took the better part of a day for him to die—or at least we call it dying, that thing he did. After the fifteenth or sixteenth hour I watched the spectacle with nearly irreverent exhaustion; I filled thirty loose-leaf pages with a catalogue of indecencies as she played with her food, absorbing from him the sum total of all he had become as a willing vessel for her unfathomable gluttony. At last he gave himself up utterly, ejaculating his life and his soul into the bottomless oblivion of that all-hungering mouth, and with it went some little piece of every man or woman whose loins had stirred for the eighth and shortest-lived Melody Lamoreux. She flayed him one well-savoured lick at a time, from skin to beating heart, and once his heart alone was left she began masticating strangely, turning it over with her inquisitive tongue to see how she might reach deeper. In the end, I think, she found a way, for when the heart was gone she kept gyrating her mouths, twisting and chewing; she was chewing Stanley still, in some way, when the presses roared to life and I left with my notes under my arm. Perhaps that’ll go on forever, now.

What I saw can be described only as hunger, lust, some ravenous disembodied force demanding to become flesh, some unspeakable and impossible thing birthing itself into being even as it conceived its innumerable children with the semen of depraved and secret onanistic legions. Shuddering and gasping in their most private and intimate places, they were handmaidens all, so to speak, of the creative principle that was Melody Lamoreux, she who in boundless lust has made a thousand such novelists, who have each made a thousand relentlessly erotic little potboilers, each of which summoned a thousand secret orgasms in the name of her fullness and glory.

Hail, my Mother! Hail, my Mother! Come from beyond the pit! Reside in your dream-servants!

Stanley Zayter left behind a pregnant wife and young child, in goddamn Minnesota of all places. If they’d found a body, his insurance wouldn’t have been enough to bury it. As it was, the neighbourhood raised a little money for her; she’d fixed the roof and got the cat some shots, and then it was gone. I found the receipts in their trash—the story needed an ending, after all. I could see her bedroom light on from the curb where I opened the bags. I couldn’t see up into the room from below on the street, but if I crept beneath the window I could just make out her whimpers as she pleasured herself—it was a lonely life she’d been left with, after all. In her hands, no doubt, or leaned against her growing belly, was the last of the Training Howly novels—the last that will ever be written, before the end. As the ninth and final Melody Lamoreux, these are things I have the terrible privilege to know.

I am well-paid now, widely read, and caressed by a genius too alien to be mine. Writing hand-to-mouth like Faulkner was a bad gig; I dwell now in a cosmos empty of hope, but the rent is no longer a monthly fear. There’s peace in that, at least, for the time we have. Long ago, when they asked why I didn’t turn out erotica, my answer was vain and condescending. I told them I was a “serious” writer, and it offended them, but seemed to suffice. But I am more deadly serious, now, than a Giller Prize could ever make me. You’d be serious, too, if all you heard at night was the scream of the subways and the churning of a bottomless womb, only the boxcar moans of a thousand self-abusers and the birthing screams of black goats in the deep. On a clear night under unforgiving stars, I still hear the ecstatic noises Stanley Zayter’s body and soul made as they tore themselves to pieces in the fatal embrace of their eternal custodian. And I smell only the charnel stench of Patricia Zayter’s week-old trash on my hands, haunted in waking nightmares by the mad lonely sorrow of a woman widowed by the insatiable night, her fatal womb unspeakably pregnant with terrors. Under a stolen name, I bring forth deliciously awful potboilers in pulpy imitation of the Dark Mother, marked with the sigil that nourishes her festering womb with the secret desires of the thousand cities of the lost and lonely.

The time of birth is coming, now; I dare not go on, but I dare not stop. There is a peace in it, after all. I can tell you so little of the festering shadow to come—only that this life of suffering, this quotidian toil and hardship, is by comparison a perfect ecstasy, a perpetual orgasm of existence that conceives, even now, the dread future. The fiction that feeds that perfect darkness, call it literature or life, is all now that we have.

ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY
of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN
of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS

Molly Tanzer

When I’m alone for any amount of time—which is, sadly, more often than I prefer—I sometimes make up little poems about the things I’ve seen. Here’s one of my favorites. I wrote it during a day when I had been carelessly left out upon a windowsill after an early-morning bout of fucking, and was, atypically, able to observe an entire day in a country garden:

Red robin in the tree-o,
Do you sing of what you know?
The joy of flight,
Morning light on the lake,
Ripe blackberries and fat worms.
Or is that merely the dream
Of we earth-bound who listen, envious?
Perhaps you know more
Of broken wings,
Eggs fallen from the nest,
Starving through the winter,
Death in a fox’s mouth.

A meager effort, I know, but also I know you will not judge me too harshly. I have never been to school, of course, and while I may have had ample opportunities to hone my craft, my only knowledge of the art comes from those who read poetry aloud in my presence. And usually when in my presence, people are doing things other than reading poetry.

Not always, though; not always. It occurs to me that there was a remarkable episode in my life where some rather extraordinary poetry was read, and things very different than lovemaking done, all as I watched on, at the very center of the thing but entirely helpless to interfere.

It all began during my short tenure as part of the British Museum’s “Exhibition of the Early Classical Material Culture Collected During The Recent Expedition to Cyprus,” an uninspired title for what was, in reality, a very exciting show. The display contained (along with my person) several ceremonial daggers, some excellent sherds of pottery, a copper kettle, four shields, a metal vase, a few pieces of gold jewelry, several lance-heads, and six bas-relief friezes taken off the Temple of Aphrodite.

Being unique even in such company, I had a glass display case all to myself. It was rather lonely (I am a social creature by nature) but at least it was not boring, as I could watch the porters and archaeologists and museum staff setting up the displays. And after they left, I had an unencumbered view of those treasures that were so recently found alongside my person. I could see in all directions, which is how I came to observe those aforementioned friezes.

The entablatures fascinated me, but for no reason I could easily identify. Thus, I studied them, trying to figure out the source of my interest. Clockwise from the entrance to the square exhibition hall, these were the represented subjects:

1. A man, scolding a group of veiled women
2. The same man, at work in a studio, carving a sculpture of a woman
3. The same man again, kneeling before the finished sculpture
4. A procession, with figures in profile bringing offerings to a temple
5. The man from the first friezes, making an offering of some sort of object to a naked goddess perched upon an altar
6. The man, back in his studio, embracing his sculpture, now a living woman

Long did I study them—the scenes as a whole, but also individually. I was fascinated by the man’s obvious disgust as he rebuked the well-dressed women, curious about his face, contorted with shame and longing as he beseeched the goddess, eagerly noted the differences between the sculpture on a pedestal and the newly-human woman. I wondered at length what was happening, what intrigues were being described in stone.

It was the night before the show opened to the general public that I discovered the obscure-to-me meaning of these carvings. I had passed a boring afternoon, for just before tea-time the—if I might be so bold—handsomest of the museum’s docents had thrown a velvet cloth over my enclosure. This did not surprise me; I had heard the museum staff agree on this protocol for the sake of so-called decency when women or children might observe the exhibition. My personal feelings on my own wholesome, salubrious nature (and appearance) are not shared by all, of course, even in this modern year of 1869—but, unable to speak on my own behalf, I must be a silent party to the distressing unwillingness of humanity to embrace their wanton desires.

I feared it would be a long isolation, but as it turned out, it was only to be a few hours’ duration. That night, after any sounds other than the occasional gust of springtime breeze and mouse-squeak had diminished, I heard the click of a key turning in a lock, then saw a dim brightness through the cover on my case.

“Are you sure this is allowed?” whispered a feminine voice.

“It is most certainly not allowed,” murmured a male. “That’s what makes it so exciting, don’t you think?”

The woman giggled. “Am I really the first person—first layperson—to see all this?” She was almost breathless with pleasure at the prospect.

“You are not only the first layperson, but the first woman to see it,” said her companion. “Come along with me, m’dear… and enter the past.”

Despite who and what I am, I was more innocent then; at the time it did not occur to me that I was hearing a seduction-in-progress—or, at least, the attempt. I recall actually wondering if this man would dare uncover me in his lady-friend’s presence. I know now that there was never any doubt.

They progressed slowly through the exhibition, for this man was a good tour-guide, taking his time to discuss if not every, then most of the objets d’art. She, as well, delayed their drawing near to me, for she asked many questions, displaying an active and curious mind.

“Can you identify the strange metal of this vase?” he asked her.

“Is it… gold?”

“Electrum.” The man made the word sound sensual as he purred it. “It’s a naturally-occurring alloy of gold and silver. But the Greeks did manufacture it, sometimes. Today it’s called white gold.”

“Is that what that diadem is made of?”

I heard them amble toward the jewelry display, which was closer still to me.

“No, that’s just gold,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It would look lovely against your hair.”

“Never,” she said firmly.

“Why not?” His tone was sweet and daring at the same time. “Bright gold against those midnight tresses, why—”

“It would be irresponsible to use anything so very old for personal pleasure!” There was genuine shock in her voice, as if she could not believe anyone would suggest such a crime. “I can’t imagine a single circumstance where that would be acceptable!”

“No?”

It was, I realized then, the opportunity he’d been waiting for. I heard footsteps, firm but muffled by the oriental carpets on the floor, and then came a great whoosh as he dramatically pulled the fabric off my case.

“What about this?” he asked.

The gentle glow of lanternlight guttered momentarily as the cloth settled on the ground. When it steadied, revealing the faces of the two intruders, I was surprised to find the man was the handsome docent who had earlier covered me up—I had never heard him speak with such confidence before. Usually, when I would watch him, he said only “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” with pleasing deference. But here he was, in a natty black tailcoat and trousers, a walking-stick in his hand and a fob hanging from his vest, with a white scarf around his neck, the very picture of a gentleman going out upon the town.

His companion was more demurely attired, in an evening gown with a smaller bustle than was fashionable at the time, and a jacket that hid a modest neckline. She was not as handsome as he; smallpox scars marred her nose and cheeks, and her thick eyebrows were unplucked. But such bright eyes she had—large, keen, thoughtful orbs, wide with her first sight of me. I said she was not so handsome, but I mean the way humans calculate such things. I found her charming, but I have yet to meet a person with a kind expression and an intelligent air who failed to win me over.

“Do you know what a dildo is?” asked the docent roguishly, his mustache twitching as he tried not to smile.

“I…” She swallowed, eying my length, the gilded veins that ran from my carven scrotum to my head, the teardrop-shaped piece of cut onyx that glinted where, in a human male, the urethra would vent. It pleased me when she bit her lip, blushing, before stammering, “Mr. Lee, I don’t know if I…”

“It’s all right,” he assured her. “You wanted to know more about ancient Grecian cultures, didn’t you? They weren’t so shy about the human body. They… celebrated it. Reveled in it, as do some modern cults today…”

“Mr. Lee!”

“Miss Balvenie!” He made as if to reach inside his waistcoat. “I have a phial of smelling salts, are you in need of them?”

She surveyed him coolly. “I am fine, thank you. I simply wasn’t expecting you to show me—speak to me—of such… indecent things.”

“Indecent!” Mr. Lee’s stage-surprise displeased me; he was toying with Miss Balvenie. What I am—what I am used for—disquiets people sometimes, and why should it not? Too many are taught from a young age that their natural urges are shameful. This is especially true when it comes to females of the species, which is silly, for they are the same, I have learned, as the males. They have the same desires and the same lusts, as evidenced by the way Miss Balvenie could not tear her eyes from me, even as she said:

“Yes, indecent! My Uncle Peter would never have allowed you to take me out had he known your intentions!”

Mr. Lee scoffed at her. “Your uncle is on the board of the British Museum, and knew well what was here before he allowed me to take you out, as you say. But I would never have agreed to give you a tour if I’d known you would judge the past so prudishly!” He made a grand gesture in a circular motion, indicating the friezes all around us. “This beautiful little dildo was found in the same place as these, m’dear, the temple of Aphrodite! Her temple, on the island of Cyprus—her birthplace!” Mr. Lee danced over to the friezes, the fourth, with the man holding something up before the nude goddess. “Do you know what this is? What these are?”

“You said they were from the temple…”

“Yes! They adorned the central of the temple, the holiest of holies,” he said. “But the subject matter, Miss Balvenie, can you not identify it?”

“Pygmalion,” she said unhesitatingly. “Yes, I know it. The Cypriot sculptor who despised the wantonness of the women of his homeland, so he fashioned himself a virtuous female companion of ivory.”

“And after he prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess changed the statue into a real living woman, Galatea,” finished Mr. Lee. “Yes, of course you would know the story, it’s famous. But what you don’t know—what none of us knew, was that … well, look at what Pygmalion is offering Aphrodite in this image.”

Miss Balvenie hesitated to leave my side, dear creature, but she walked over to inspect the carving.

“Is that…” Her dark brow furrowed.

“We think so,” said Mr. Lee. “Our hero does seem to be offering a dildo to Aphrodite, and this dildo—an ivory dildo, I should note—was found in the inner sanctum…”

“And you think it’s the same one?”

“I’ve held it,” said Lee. His voice had changed in tone, he sounded almost ecstatic. “There’s something about it, something magical, otherworldly. I can’t define it. Who knows, perhaps it is also… alive.”

I had never before known that humans could sense anything remotely odd about me—for while I am, of course, alive, I am mute and made of marble, and thus incapable of speech or motion. It had always been my dream to let my various and varied partners know that I received as much pleasure as they did during the use of person, but I had never been able to do so. I confess, as they chatted, I spent a few self-absorbed moments wondering about this matter, but a gasp from Miss Balvenie brought me back to the present, and I saw her looking rather alarmed indeed as Mr. Lee loomed over her.

“Yes, I do believe in gods other than the Christian god,” he said. I have no idea what precipitated such a remark, but I assume while I was lost in contemplation the conversation turned to that subject—rather strangely, I remember thinking at the time. “Actually,” he said, “I know there are other gods, for I have seen them—while I have never seen any evidence of the one Christians believe in so fervently.”

“Mr. Lee.” Miss Balvenie seemed nervous. “I believe it is time for me to go, so if you would be so kind as to—”

“And just where do you think you would be going, m’dear?”

Miss Balvenie frowned. “Back to my home? You promised Uncle Peter I should not come to harm… you’re not considering going back on your word, are you?”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, no—not considering. I have already decided to do so!”

She took a step back; he smiled wolfishly and then smashed my case with his walking stick. She screamed and covered her face—as I would have done, were I able—as glass flew in every direction. “I knew I would discover if you were truly an innocent by showing you this precious artifact,” he said, dusting sherds of glass off of my shaft and head with his handkerchief. Then, shoving me into his inside breast pocket, I felt his jolting steps as he closed the distance between himself and his victim.

“Please,” I heard her say tremulously, “Mr. Lee, I must… please, what are you, what do you mean by… oh!”

“It’s just a little chloroform, m’dear,” he said. I could not see, of course, but it sounded as though he smiled. “I needed you a little more pliant than you were. These modern girls!” he mused aloud. “Well, so it goes.” He grunted, and I felt him bending. “Now, to find that wheelbarrow…”

I should not complain about my blindness that night, before Mr. Lee took me out of his pocket and all the… all the things began to happen. How many dildos can see and hear at all, when you really think about it? Well, I suppose that is fundamentally unknowable—an unfair question, for I have never interacted with another of my kind, nor have I met a human who confessed knowledge of such.

At any rate, what I know of the time during my concealment is that Mr. Lee did find his wheelbarrow, and transported the insensible Miss Balvenie outside, where a vehicle waited to take them to wherever Mr. Lee desired. The driver, you see, was familiar to Mr. Lee, as I gathered from their conversation. They were conspirators—members, though it sounds so very sensationalist—of the very same cult!

Shocking, I know. Sinister sects, operating in the very heart of London! But, as with matters I am more personally (and pleasantly) acquainted with, what is assumed to be impossible is more than likely actually happening everywhere, all the time. While I have trysted with happily married couples, many times I have spent enjoyable evenings, mornings, and afternoons with men who love men, women who love women, unmarried couples of all ages, groups, and, of course, solo individuals pleasuring themselves despite the warnings of quacks within the medical profession who caution patients avoid such entertainments for the sake of their health.

But I digress.

Or really, perhaps I do not. There are many similarities one can find between engaging in illicit sex and practicing an illicit religion, and one of them—at least in this case—is Hyde Park.

Yes, that famous broad swath of green inside of London is, I assure you, used for all sorts of amorous matters, as well as for ceremonies considered… untraditional by the Christian church. Being large, it is easy to sneak into—even, I suppose, when rolling a girl about in a wheelbarrow, as I knew Mr. Lee was—and there are secret spaces that go unpatrolled by lawmen during the day, to say nothing of the darkest parts of the night.

When I arrived, still inside Mr. Lee’s pocket, but sensing from his footfalls that he was on springy turf rather than dirt or stone, I heard many voices whispering to one another, salutations and stranger words by far. I wondered who they were, and what they were doing, wearing, thinking. You might think a sentient chryselephantine dildo, carved long ago in ancient Greece, would know more about matters cultic, but all that went on that night was strange to me.

“Ah, Saturninus,” said a hearty male voice. “What’s this? Have you actually managed to procure us a sacrifice? I’m shocked, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“We’re all wrong at some point, I suppose.” Mr. Lee—I wondered if his first name was really Saturninus, or if that was some sort of denominational moniker—sounded a little annoyed. “I’ve acquired much more than that, I assure you.”

“Is that so?” There was skepticism in this interlocutor’s tone. “Well well. I saw Aetius in the center of the Hallowed Grove, I know you’ll want to find him. I wonder if he’ll be impressed by your… party favors.”

“It’s no concern of yours, I’m sure.”

“No, perhaps not…”

“And yet?”

The man laughed again. “You’d better go. Looks like your little friend there is stirring. Wouldn’t want her to wake up and scamper off, no no no.”

Of course, this exchange made me madly curious—and, truth be told, anxious. I guessed that I was the “more than that” to which Mr. Lee had referred, and while I am usually nothing loath to be used during a party, I do not approve of menacing young women or kidnapping innocents. I had substantial reason to fear we were both to be used against our will in an event we knew nothing about.

But if there is one thing I have learned, it is that humans are fascinating, remarkable, surprising creatures—and never more so than when they find themselves in a tight spot.

Miss Balvenie was certainly in the tightest spot imaginable when at last I was taken out of Mr. Lee’s pocket. Shivering in only her shift, she had been chained to a tree, her wrists bound behind her back. Her black hair had been unpinned and it cascaded over her shoulders, covering her chest, which I’m sure she appreciated, given how modestly she had been attired earlier in the evening. I admired her fortitude—she did not cry out or carry on in any way. She coolly observed the goings-on as though above it all.

I was not much better off than she was, really, having been set upon an altar of sorts, and I fear I might not have borne my captivity so elegantly had I a mouth with which to scream. I wondered if Miss Balvenie’s nonchalance had anything to do with when she recovered from her chloroforming. When I saw her, she was already sensible, but I could not say when exactly she regained consciousness. As for myself, I know I had heard every word of Mr. Lee’s intentions toward us when he spoke with the man called “Aetius” in the Hallowed Grove, for they were diabolical.

You see, both Miss Balvenie and I were to be used in some sort of ceremony dedicated to a deity called Shub-Niggurath, or the Black Goat of the Woods, and to hear Aetius go on about it, our survival was not at all assured. Though I am, and have always been, a proponent of tolerance, this Shub-Niggurath sounded like rather a nasty customer, and while I could not readily ascertain if this god were female or male, it apparently had many children. Tonight, Aetius (who seemed sort of a cleric, or high priest of this cult) would be attempting to draw some of those children “across the veil” into “our space,” whatever that meant.

Miss Balvenie and I were to be gifts, bribes really, to ensure the deal went through. Shub-Niggurath had tastes that ran to the carnal, it seemed. Mr. Lee—Saturninas—was hoping to become an initiate of the cult, and had procured us as a show of his devotion.

To that end, Saturninus had divested himself of his gentleman’s garments and dressed in a long red robe covered in strange yellow symbols. He held up his hands, and the group of perhaps a dozen cultists quieted down. Then, he bowed so low his forehead brushed the earth, bowing before a throne surrounded with torches, whereupon Aetius sat.

Aetius… I have refrained from describing him so as not to alarm and appall you, but to set the scene, allow me to note that he was naked save for a golden mask wrought in the shape of a goat’s head, with enormous horns jutting from the forehead. The most terrifying thing about that mask was that there were no eyeholes, yet every time I cast a mortified glance his way, he was acting as though he could see perfectly. He stroked the breasts of an older woman by his side—she was also naked save for a mask, but hers, though caprine, had no horns—and occasionally would pluck a flower from a vase to his left and sniff the blooms. He seemed almost bored by the proceedings.

Saturninus began, as I hinted earlier, with a poem.

“Ia ia, Shub-Niggurath!
Tonight, we have brought offerings
Offerings old and young, to honor you!
Grant we who love you, therefore
Something both old and young!

Take them both unto your hairy bosom,
Cherish them, as we shall cherish you and yours!
Take it all for the greater glory
Of the 7th and 329th children
Of the Black Goat God of the Woods!”

After that, things happened so quickly I find I am hard pressed to relate it all accurately. As far as I can recall, Saturninas seemed rather surprised when, after ceasing his declamations, his robe began to smoke. After a moment, he began to scream and claw at it until it was rags about him. Then did I see the source of his discomfort: it was not his robe that had caught aflame—his blood had begun to boil! Enormous pockets of pink steam were exploding out from under his skin. He clawed at them helplessly, until the largest, over his abdomen, exploded.

A demoniac bleating began to fill the grove, drowning out all the screaming and ululating from the spectators. Stars and galaxies seemed to fill the cavern of Saturninus’ body, a troubling sight, but not half so troubling as the twin horrors that jumped from—or perhaps through his lifeless figure as he fell to the earth.

They were not goats, but there was something goatlike about them. They were almost, not to wax too poetic, black, goat-shaped holes in the universe, capering hither and yon, giggling and bleating, and—in the case of one of them—masturbating an enormous ebon erection so vigorously I worried he might do himself a mischief.

“Ia ia, Shub-Niggurath!” the one not masturbating cried, in a voice that would have made me shiver, were I capable of such.

“Ia ia!” agreed the other, laughing in a sinister fashion as it approached Miss Balvenie, cock in hand.

“Do it now!” cried Miss Balvenie, to my surprise, for I did not see her as the sort of young lady who wished to be ravished by horrors. Then again, you never can tell. “Please!”

Aetius and his masked companion uncovered their faces, after which he withdrew a shotgun from below his throne, and she, a stick of dynamite which she quickly lit off a torch. Aetius blasted one of the demoniac goat-things through the head, whereupon it shattered like glass; his female counterpart tossed her sputtering explosive through the other’s body—whereupon it disappeared from sight, startlingly enough.

The creature paused, cocked its horned head in confusion… then I heard an explosion, though faintly, as if it had come from somewhere very far away. It fell to the earth, writhing, and then disappeared in smoking shadow.

“Any of you who run now, we won’t pursue you!” This command came from the woman, naked and glorious in her triumph. She was beautiful to me in that moment—I am, of course, always in a state of erection, but I felt exceptionally enervated then, and wished we had met under different circumstances.

Her words scattered the cultists who had not already fled, of which there were only a handful. The grove went very quiet as the man and the woman raced across the grove to free Miss Balvenie from her captivity.

“Lydia!” cried the woman. “Oh, you were wonderful—so very brave!”

“It was nothing,” said Miss Balvenie modestly as she massaged her wrists. “I was unconscious for most of it, really.” She embraced the older woman. “But I did well, Aunt Ingrid? Well enough to join your organization?”

“I still can’t believe it,” said the naked man, before the woman had a chance answer; however, as he continued to speak, she nodded to Miss Balvenie, who beamed. “Young Lee, a would-be cultist of Shub-Niggurath! I suppose it’s old Price’s influence—we must find a way to remove him from the museum’s board of directors.” He shook his head. “But really, what on Earth is wrong with boys these days? When I was two-and-twenty, all I could think of was—”

“Peter,” said the woman, a warning in her voice.

“You, my dear Ingrid,” he said, embracing her. “Only you, of course!”

Lydia yawned then, and Ingrid and Peter began to fuss over her. Was she very cold? Had Mr. Lee tried anything improper? No, she assured them, she was simply tired, and concerned for their catching a chill, standing about with no clothes on.

It warmed my soul to see such a lovely domestic scene unfolding, but I was anxious I should be forgotten, left behind—or worse yet, returned to the museum. I had no great wish to be observed and discussed and examined. I was fashioned to be used, and that was therefore my only wish. Thankfully, dear Miss Balvenie remembered her poor companion before her aunt and uncle were done dressing.

“What shall we do with this?” she asked, picking me up in her delicate hand. It was surprisingly warm, given her state of undress. “It was stolen from the museum…”

Peter and Ingrid looked at one another only for a moment before he cleared his throat.

“I’ll see it’s returned, dearest niece,” he said, taking me from her and pocketing me. “I’m also on the board, after all. As you trusted me to keep you safe tonight, trust I shall return him post-haste.”

“Of course, uncle,” said Lydia. “Take care with him. He’s been a very brave fellow.”

Mere anthropomorphizing on her part, but I appreciated her words. And, of course, the squeeze Peter gave me after settling me into his pocket.

“I wouldn’t see him harmed for the world,” he assured her. “Now, just in case any of those rotten cultists return, shall we retire for the night? I’m longing for a cup of tea.”

BABYMAMA

Kenton Hall

I shouldn’t have called her pussy a slavering maw.

That was a mistake. I accept that. But it was one of those arguments, fuelled by vodka and madness and that sensation of the usual rules having melted away, where unkind thoughts take unbidden shape and burst, shrieking, from the deepest shadows of your psyche.

I was also right, not that it matters now.

Besides, at the time, it was also one of those arguments that I could tell was going to end, once we’d exhausted our respective vocabularies of disappointment, with cum on our lips, blood under our fingernails and bruises blossoming under every soft square inch of skin on our bodies.

So there is every possibility that I may not have been guarding my tongue particularly vigilantly in the first place.

Sorry, that just made me laugh.

Anyway.

I don’t remember my name, but I know I used to love it to hear it spoken by strange mouths. Mouths on faces above which hovered a sheen of sweat, mouths muffled by the pillows into which they were pressed, mouths thrown back on taut necks and expelling each syllable as if it were the by-product of an exorcism. It was like a lifeline being extended from the self who had fantasised and plotted and purred and persuaded the moment into being and the strange, borderless netherworld in which fucking takes place.

Names have power. They tether magic to memory, where it can play at being true.

Without that tether, we would lose ourselves forever in the throes.

Men often say that their cocks have a mind of their own, which is usually an excuse for the appendage in question having wandered off into someone it shouldn’t have and is therefore quite rightly countered with withering looks and the occasional slap.

Deep within this convenient lie, however, resides a kernel of truth. Arousal, whatever gender or genitalia you claim or are driven towards, is a sentient creature. It lives within you, yet its morals, its boundaries, its senses are its own.

It likes to taste different things than you do. It likes to hurt more than you do. And it cares far less for its personal space.

You can call it depravity or you can call it Steve, but you deny it at your peril.

Steve and I got on like a house on fire. I approved of the uninhibited choices he made on my behalf. But I liked it when they reminded him who was in charge.

Half an hour before I met Her, Steve had been in fine form, tracing my tongue lightly between the belly and the breasts of a dark-haired, full-hipped young woman, causing its tip to flick at the trail of semen that marked its path, gathering and shepherding it towards this particular strange mouth.

My Steve pressed that mouth to my own with the force of a dying man and they drank at each other, the flavours mingling and singing. Our fingers were moved inside and around, over and against, ensuring that every drop of sweat and cum had been drawn forth, that every shudder, every cry, every gasp at control being wrest away had been exploited to its full.

And then the collapse, as our bodies were returned to us and we teetered along the dizzying edges of bliss, struggling to hold on before reality returned, bringing with it scratches and aches and stings where only moments before there had been nothing but need and want and take.

Clothing was grasped at, shoved over limbs, buttoned in haste. Small talk was exchanged and smiles forced on to faces as though it had been a single experience, shared, rather than two, mutually and violently stolen.

Within twenty minutes, I was at standing at the bar, a glass of vodka cold against my palm and a crick in the back of my neck the most immediately lingering artefact of the experience.

Back then, when other people still felt important, I would often be accused by friends of taking my pleasures in an unpleasantly cavalier manner. I was shallow, they said, I was disrespectful. And, worse, I was denying myself the much more fulfilling rewards of home and family, of love and trust and commitment.

I would always counter these slurs in the same way.

I was honest. Far more honest than most. I chose to bed and be bedded only by those with the same mind-set as I. I made no extravagant claims, no false promises. Love – if that was the word with which they chose to paper over their envy - was something I neither offered, nor sought.

And if, as they maintained, this was such a despicable aberration in the way a human being should behave, then it was clearly for the best that I did not go forth and multiply, as one voyeuristic and agenda-laden Deity would say.

My friends would almost always laugh – knowingly - and mutter the mantra of the conformist: “Wait until he meets the right girl.”

Steve and I saw the right girl within seconds of one another. This was seldom the case. Despite my friends’ protestations, neither of the creatures who shared my body thrived on the exterior alone, we had just honed our respective senses to such a degree that we could sense inner beauty and, vitally, that inner heat that would challenge our prowess without recourse to long conversations about their mother.

Not that we didn’t go in for social discourse. Intelligence is a core element to a vibrant sense of Steve, provided it has been applied, at least sub-consciously, to an understanding of one’s own erotic nature. You don’t need to have catalogued your every peccadillo before the starter pistol goes off, you’d miss out on those slippery, glorious moments of discovery if you did, but you do need to have accepted that your desires run darker and deeper than whatever first, fleeting images contracted and stiffened and lubricated you in those heady, initial days of self-love.

So, while intellect can get in the way of a good time, its absence always does. Neither submission nor dominance are worth a damn without a will to exercise or abdicate.

The moment we saw Her, however, we knew that all those years of experience, all those memories of sharp and soft and wet and hard had been for naught. We were operating blind and, oddly, we were operating as one.  The door to the bar had opened, she had stepped through it, and we were both in awe. I was considering her aesthetic, the bounce and shine of her long, honeyed hair, the maddening silhouette of her understated contours. I was appreciating the way in which her face, so individual without erring towards the exotic, exuded beauty and approachability in such equal measure that it could have formed the basis of a successful advertising slogan. And Steve, while acknowledging all these points and more, was arranging her limbs and her mouth, pushing down on her wrists as he entered her, filling his mouth with her breasts, turning her on to her stomach, biting at the nape of her neck.

She turned her eyes on us, as though acknowledging our interest and weighing up her own. It was those eyes that forced our hand. They were dark, skirting towards coal, both in colour and talent for fire. And before we knew it, she was walking our way, moving through the crush as though it were parting in front of her. A film might have scored the moment with a low, repetitive bass drum and a flutter of electronic melody, but in truth, she brought utter silence in her wake.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand, “I’m Kathy.”

It wasn’t. Or was. I can no longer recall. But it was something as innocuous and, therefore, dangerous as that, a plaster over a name I was neither ready to nor capable of hearing.

Yet.

Steve immediately began whispering suggestions as to an appropriate response. The first three or four began, “I would very much like to,” followed by a number of socially unacceptable shortcuts between hello and cunt. He was clearly feeling as rattled as I, as he soon cast aside anything resembling manners and progressed to “I am going to.”

I was doing my best to silence him, before he drove this exquisite creature beyond our grasp. There was a palpable sense of a blessing bestowed, of which he seemed wilfully unaware. Every man and woman in the place who would have sacrificed material wealth and mental health just to feel a drop of her hot juices land upon their tongue seemed to be staring at me, willing me to fuck this up. Whereas Steve already had her breasts bared and pressed against the wall, as he pressed my cock purposefully against her ass.

He was getting ahead of himself. This was no ordinary woman and it would take careful planning to coax her from that dress and into that blissful void where consequences conceal themselves in favour of satiation.

“Hello,” I think I said, buying us both some time. It came out, I can only imagine, in a low guttural whisper. I was harder than I had ever been, my cock chafing against my clothing like an innocent man against captivity.

In reality, she stood graceful and tall before me, eyes dancing with amusement at my discomfiture. But my eyes, under Steve’s influence, were telling me lies. They saw her hitch up that dress and slide her hands between elastic and skin, the tips of her fingers curling inside herself. They saw her head tip back and her eyes glaze. Saw one of those fingers glide back up her body to be tasted, drawing a wicked, animal smile across those lips that I already ached to bite.

The crowd seemed to gather, extending their arms and locking their hands together into a cradle on to which she fell back, her legs falling naturally apart, to reveal a heat and a warmth that invited and demanded my attention. I fell to my knees and this human swing took the barest step forward, rolling her towards my mouth. I tore the delicate underwear in two and fell into her, the taste overwhelming my senses as she bucked in the arms of our envious collaborators.

The dull and hateful truth swam back into view. A shiver-inducing drop of sweat trickled down my back. The crowd once again counterfeited disinterest, out of spite, and even Steve seemed to have been stunned into silence.

Her eyes narrowed in consideration, her tongue darting briefly between her lips.

“Interesting,” she said and laid one elegant hand upon my shoulder. The other drifted more slowly towards my waist and she moved into me as though about to dance.

And then darkness. It was I who was pressed against some surface, my cheek and my chest flattened and held, my hips pulled back with force and her breasts against my back. One hand around my waist, lightly wrapped around my cock, lazily travelling its length, causing me to tremble in bursts so fierce as to be feared and irresistible. She leaned her weight against me, so I that I bent forward at the waist. A pause. Her breath on my neck, all warning and promise.

And then both hands on my hips as she thrust into me and I was entered, never questioning with what. Appliance or flesh, it was all one and the same. It was Her. Her taking me. Owning me. Showing me that she understood, that this was a game that we would play as equals.

Once again, the world as it was snapped back into play. Her eyes were now challenging, questioning. I grabbed Steve, who was whimpering slightly and muttering to himself, by the scruff of his neck. This was no time for doubt. This was what we had been waiting for: the One. It was what all the songs had droned on about, what all the films had misrepresented as hearts and flowers and constant, grovelling apology.

No rules. No separation. No join.

And we would not be fearful in the face of it. We would run screaming towards it, as warriors into battle. And if Steve didn’t like it, if Steve wanted to go back to fucking for fun rather than triumph, then he could, quite frankly, just fuck off.

I was certain that with Her, I could get it up just fine without him.

I think he saw my point, because when she took my arm and propelled me towards the door, he and his overheated imagination stumbled after us, anxious to keep up.

Many people, when they decide that the ordinary, antiseptic world of screwing is not for them, that they wish to embrace the other, make one tragic miscalculation. They think that, in order to do so, they must abhor all the trappings of what they consider to be normal, what they – or some book they once half-read in an airport - dismiss as being vanilla.

These are the kind of people who end up wittering on Internet forums about the best brand of gimp mask, spending their hard-earned accountancy money on well-appointed middle-class dungeons. They are so afraid to be considered deviant, that they attempt to surround themselves with others who share what they have designated their kink.

It’s a cop-out. What turns you on is never a single convenient search term that can be typed one-handed and produce the required five-minute chunks of masturbatory aid. It is a maelstrom of competing thoughts – effervescent in one moment, bestial in another.

To truly become as one with your Steve, you must accept all of these things as part of a noble whole, slick and sticky and fevered.

I held her hand as we walked towards her apartment. I thought her beautiful and drank in her words as Steve thought of her with her thighs clamped tightly around either side of his face.

I kissed her cheek as he pushed his fingers deeper, applying pressure to the walls within, willing them to tumble down like Jericho.

I told her stories of my day-to-day life, the anecdotes, both humourous and mundane, that inevitably stacked up as Steve slumbered. The trials and successes of my gainful employment, the people and places and books and films that had, continually, awakened me to a full a sense of self.  The hopes and dreams. The likes and dislikes. The usual. And she reciprocated, even as Steve held her oiled breasts firm around my cock and willed me to thrust.

There are so many truisms about delayed gratification and too often they have been coined by those who are simply trying to spoil your fun, lest a large and imaginary Sky Parent throw a hissy fit in your direction. But as we mounted the wide, stone stairs that led up to the large, ornate gate of her building, I realised that for the length of our journey I had been a true believer.

Hallelujah.

It was the most glorious agony. Would I call this patience? Would I call this waiting?

It felt as though years had passed. It had taken every atom of my self-control not to aid Steve in wrestling her to the ground, every step between that bar and here. I burned with a barely concealed rage at her clothing and its insistence on hiding her from me. That I was ever not inside her made me wish to cover myself in sackcloth and ashes, to tear at my hair and gnash my teeth.

She turned the key in the lock and the gate creaked open. Behind it lay a small, but well-kept garden, encircled by a stone path. At the garden’s centre was a small, stone fountain, unadorned but for a single symbol in the side facing me now. If I could describe it, I would, but when I try to picture it clearly, even now, it leaps away from me, bleating and laughing.

Beyond the fountain was a simple wooden door, and beyond that door our mutual satisfaction for as many hours or days or years as I could persuade her to remain.

We quickened our pace, following the left-hand side of the path. I felt a twinge of pain as we headed towards its vertex, as though we were being drawn further away from our destination. My relief was audible and uninhibited as we curved back towards the insertion of another key, the turning of another handle and the final steps during which I would be shackled in inactivity.

The door clicked into place. And Steve, who had been coiled in readiness, sprang into action in the dark of the hall. My hands, with his unerring accuracy, flew and tore at her dress, there was a dull thump as we crashed into the wall, and a drop of blood sprung from my lip as the first kiss tore at me. All was close-up and sound effects as my belt unbuckled and slid, as my zipper descended, as she grasped at and pulled me free, her fingers tracing from balls to straining head in exploration. The tattered remnants of her underwear dangled from one ankle as she wrapped her legs around me and pushed herself up the wall to slide back down and envelop me. She let loose a sound that was half-growl, half-scream as Steve urged me deeper.

Her hands grabbed at my hair, twisting and pulling. In the shadows, shapes tumbled from what I assumed to be shelves, breaking like mortar shells beneath our feet, shards snapping and stabbing at our exposed skin. And it all just urged us on. She pulled herself up along my length as high as space and strength allowed and then gave herself to gravity, drawing guttural sounds from us both.

Steve moved one of my hands to her throat briefly, exerting just enough pressure to widen her eyes, and then moved down to her shoulder, holding her against the wall. He snaked her waist with the other, controlling her rise and fall.

And then he was whispering in my ear, telling me the end was close, allowing me the chance to conjure intrusive and climax-delaying thoughts of dead grandparents or taxation appendices. But, as if she knew, she pulled herself from me, fell to her knees amidst the detritus and took me in her hand, her mouth dropping open in readiness. In steady, rhythmic movements she drew what she wanted from me, and laughed as it rained down upon her tongue, her lips and her cheeks.

I stumbled back with the force of it all and she sprang to her feet, delivering a slap across my face that sent me reeling.

I felt my eyes close as my head snapped to one side.

When I opened them again, a year had passed.

This was our house now, the broken knick-knacks on the shelves replaced with a carefully managed blend of our interests and tastes. I recognised each of them and they seemed to resonate with the weight of their acquisition. And there were more than mere souvenirs in place to mark the unseemly pace of the clock. There were memories too. We had shared many things here. Friends had dined, quiet evenings had been whiled away before the old-fashioned fireplace in the pleasantly cluttered front room and we had grown to know so much of what lay beneath our pious snarls and our most devout exhalations.

I was also alone in the hall where she had left me, still half-undressed and a fresh imprint of her hand upon my cheek.

But the moment in which that made no sense – in which both Steve and I were certain that it had been mere moments since we crashed through that front door and into each other – was brief. Her voice, full of promises, heavy with lust, was calling me, us, to bed.

We careered down the hall in our haste, took the stairs leading to the landing two at a time and burst through the bedroom door, discarding the rest of our clothes as we went.

The bedclothes lay crumpled on the floor. The bed was bare, save for a stack of pillows over which she lay draped, her knees parted either side. Even Steve took a moment to appreciate the audacity of it, before he dragged me behind her, and drove me into her, her head snapping back and up with the vigour of my coup d’état.

She bucked back against me as I took her shoulders for purchase with one hand and paid back the slap of moments or months ago with the other. Her movements grew wild and angry as she ground into my hips. I tried once more to stem the tide, to slow our movements, but she braced her hands against the headboard and pushed back faster and harder. I was plummeting towards completion and only just had the presence of mind to shove Steve out of the way and pull myself free before I came in juddering spasms along the length of her back.

A sudden chill swept through the room. The word, “No,” seemed to reverberate through the room and I lost my balance and fell backwards from the bed.

“We’ve talked about this,” I found I was saying, as I hit the floor three months later, fully-clothed and on my feet, hissing confidentially in a crowded room. We were at a party, one or two too many drinks had been taken and Steve had wandered off in search of less arctic climes.

This time, it took no more than a blink for me to remember having come to this place, already fighting. Dressing in silence, punctuated only by cold, hard looks. Cursing the obligation to show our faces and fulfil our social duties.

Our friends, who occupied the necessary space outside of cunt and cock, and whose primary purpose, for all their individually pleasing traits, was to force us to catch our breath, surrounded us.

“It’s too soon,” I continued. “Far too soon. You must see that.”

The trouble had been, I could see now, brewing for some time, but had finally peaked that evening. And it wasn’t the trouble you’d have expected. My memory told me that there had been no let-up in the frequency or savagery of our couplings, we had not descended into perfunctory thrusts or fabricated orgasms. But there was something. Something that I could see now had been in the offing from the very first moment. A growing disappointment at first, when I came across her breasts, or in her mouth, or she gave herself up to Steve’s occasional alternative preferences, turning to lay prostrate on her stomach and offering herself to me, bracing herself with submissive ferocity.

In the heat of the moment, she rose to each occasion with the same fire and spirit as previously, and in turn she countered Steve with equally creative and wide-ranging activities of her own devising. She battered and bruised and fucked us until we crowed with delight, matched every note of domination with one of her own.

But each time the moment peaked, she, at first, tried and failed to hide her disappointment when she could not persuade me to throw caution to the wind and follow Steve’s urging to trust his instincts and surrender to the inevitable, as I wanted so badly to do. I had taken to her dislike for protection with unaccustomed ease, I realized now, I had not protested as I should. The sense that she and I were destined to be one had made the use of any barrier seem almost comically unnecessary.

Then I began to feel her actively resist my attempts to retreat before the moment of no return, with a strength that felt unnaturally halved, as though she were straining at self-imposed bonds. And tonight, when I finally, barely in time, wrested myself from her grasp, she swiped at my face, the edge of her glistening fingernails missing me by a hair. I could have sworn she had bared her teeth, but my memory was telling me otherwise now.

No, of course, she hadn’t. We had talked. She had not attacked. She had opened up to me. She had told me of her desire for a child, of her need for a child. I had fulfilled her every need and desire and this one was to be no different. From now on, she would do everything she could to please me. I only needed to do this one small thing.

And I, of course, agreed.

I shook my head.

No, I hadn’t agreed. I had told her that children were not for me and that I had always said so. That first night, had we not discussed it at length? Between favourite film and meal of choice, as is its accustomed place.

I had been honest. I am always honest.

She had offered no objections.

“I’m not saying never,” I added now, “Just not now.”

No, wait. I was saying never. I didn’t want children. At all. I had always said so. We had argued about it violently since. I had used vicious and insensitive words, to boil her blood and steer her into wanton and degenerate retaliation where this foolishness could be forgotten.

But I hadn’t. How could I say such things? Impugn that holy vessel? It was impossible. I had smiled and embraced and promised her offspring beyond counting.

No. I had not. There had not yet been time.

Something broke inside me. For just a moment, I could remember all as it had been. I had been tricked, or drugged, or something.

In a flight of cosmic understatement, I found myself repeating a single sentence to myself, like an incantation.

This wasn’t right.

She stepped towards me.

I looked into her eyes and the room bent double. The friends that surrounded us had turned their backs, and seemed to be hanging their heads. The music - the soft, inoffensive pap that had been playing in the background - became a piercing loop of feedback.

I checked on Steve, but he was nowhere to be seen. He certainly was not engaged by this particular discussion, nor willing to use it for his own demented gain. In fact, I got the feeling that he may have fled.

“NO!” I shouted, suddenly filled head to toe with lead, like a doomed couple in a folk song.

“It is as it shall be,” she said, a hand shooting out to grab my balls and pull me close to her.

I tried and failed to pull away. Pain shot through my entire body. I glanced around for support, for rescue, but our friends had faded into the background. They looked suddenly unreal and unfinished, like a painted backdrop in a theatre.

My head felt heavy with drink and my limbs with panic.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked, dread furring my tongue.

And this is the point at which my trembling lips began their aforementioned game of Battleship as, in my terror, I told her in no uncertain terms what she could do with that slavering maw between her thighs.

She began to howl.

It mingled with the feedback and grew until it began to chip the edges off of the room. Our friends began to scream as they melted away, running like liquid down the canvas. The room was being ripped away, until once more we were alone in the hall, which was not a hall.

Or was a hall. A Grand Hall, bedecked in symbols that like that on the fountain would not be seen. Would not be desecrated by being described.

And she, my love, moved towards me in small, deliberate steps that froze my blood. She was naked, glistening with hunger.

YOU WERE CHOSEN.

She did not say this. But it was said.

YOU WILL BRING NEW LIFE.

This was not heard. But it was understood.

My clothes seemed to boil from my frame, scalding my skin as they vanished. I called out for Steve, as one might call out for morphine. But he was gone forever. She simply touched my arm and I was hard, as she had trained me to be.

She grabbed my face in her hands and opened my mouth with her kiss. And I screamed, giving full voice to my fear for the very last time.

As she pulled away from me, she held my tongue between her lips tenderly. Her eyes were alight with joy. Her skin was glowing and for a moment, in place of her face, in place of her body, I saw something else, something huge and terrible and unknowable. Something that lurked behind each mote of dust, yet filled the entire Hall.

I screamed again. A gurgling, incoherent sound that scattered droplets of blood across her radiant features.

My tongue lurched from her mouth into her outstretched hands. It seemed to curl against her in recognition, and then outstretched its legs – its stumbling foal-like legs – and scampered on to her shoulder playfully.

Lovingly, gently, she scooped it up and placed it on the ground. It cast a look at me, featureless though it was, and scuttled off to play in the shadows.

She turned her face to me, the light that emanated from it now blinding in its intensity. I shook and shouted as she pulled me close to her. I tried to pull away but her strength forced even my quivering muscles into stillness as she reached down and pushed me inside her, wrapping her legs around me as she had, that first and only true night, and began to move slowly up and down.

Her face buried itself into my shoulder and I felt her mouth open and her teeth against my skin. I felt the tear, felt the ligaments and the bone give way.

And then I felt nothing. Nothing but her rhythm as she fucked me, as she consumed me, freed me, piece by piece. As my crumbling body gave way and we crashed together to the floor, locked together. As, from the corner of my eye, I saw my children – the flesh of my flesh – crawl away one by one. Tiptoeing on what had once been fingers, rolling and crawling on what had once been features, creeping away on the lips that had led to their birth.

THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE FOR.

She failed to say. And then kneeled before what was left of me, one last time.

It is just us now. My offspring and I, lost in the dark together. She has fulfilled her purpose, as she will again. Now I must fulfill the remainder of mine.

My children surround me at night, nestling close for warmth. My name is lost to me, for I need it no longer. It would not fit what I have become. For I am only Father now, I need no other label.

And I love them. They are each so different, yet so reminiscent of the aspects of myself that I once held so dear. I cherish them all equally and I worry for them all in different ways.

There is one in particular, as there often is, to whom you warm most readily, but about whom you have the most anxiety, because you recognize in them the best and worst parts of yourself.

He is going to be trouble. That much is certain.

I call him Steve.

OUR CHILD

Annabeth Leong

My husband and I had given up on “trying.” Jeremy was tired of the long drive to the hospital in Worcester for expensive treatments that never produced a baby, and I couldn’t take any more itchy, hormone-fevered nights of nausea and inflated ovaries. When friends asked if we’d thought about having children, I pasted on a smile, accepted their pointless advice about charting, and waited for them to stop talking.

It was a surprise, then, to find myself walking into Dr. Young’s office and introducing myself to his placid, pale-skinned receptionist. I’d sworn never to darken the door of another OB/GYN, and yet there I was, signing forms in triplicate and combing through long checklists of possible past ailments.

Lydia had talked me into it. I’d been over at her house two weeks before, sitting side by side on her corduroy couch, watching funny videos on the tablet Jeremy had given me for Christmas—as if the extravagant gift could replace a baby.

Her baby son began to cry, and she scooped him into her arms and opened her shirt. Seconds later, a milk-swollen breast flopped out of her nursing bra, her nipple leaking cream even before she placed it in her son’s mouth. I knew better than to stare, but that time I couldn’t help myself.

Deep purple welts snaked over the entire surface of Lydia’s white breast, and the nipple was almost black. That alarmed and concerned me, of course, but I also watched what she was doing with awe and wonder. I knew, just as everyone else in town knew, that Lydia’s milk hadn’t come when her baby was born. She’d returned from the hospital lugging formula by the case.

I couldn’t decide which question to ask first. Instead, I said only, “How?”

She flipped a lock of dark hair out of her face and grinned. “Dr. Young. He just moved here. He’s amazing.”

“He did that to you?”

She frowned. “Yes. I mean, he treated me for it.”

“The bruises... Are they part of the treatment? Do they hurt?”

Lydia eased her son away from her nipple. He protested with howls, but she ignored him. Instead, she peered down at her breast as if she’d never seen it before. Tucking her son against the side of her body with one hand, she stroked the surface of her breast with the other, tracing the lines her injuries made, prodding at them.

She pinched her blackened nipple, and it squirted a few drops of milk onto the back of my hand. They trembled on my skin, so warm that I half-expected them to pulse with a rhythmic heartbeat.

An odd reflex made me lift the hand to my lips and lick the drop of Lydia’s milk away. It tasted earthy and dank, as if she had been eating nothing but mushrooms, but it was undeniably milk. The fat of it filled my mouth, and for a moment I saw myself with fresh eyes: a collection of hungry mouths. My eye-mouths drank in the sight of Lydia’s child, my finger-mouths longed to claim something as fully as she could claim her baby, and my cunt-mouth longed to be filled with a child of my own.

Shaking myself free of the strange imagery, I realized what I had done and blushed. It was too late to stop myself from swallowing that bit of fluid that had come from Lydia, but I felt it travel down to my stomach with a distinct awareness of the intimacy of the act.

Lydia only smiled. “They hurt, I guess, but it doesn’t matter. It’s worth it. Look what I can do!” She returned her son to her breast. He was wearing a blue cap that I had knitted for him.

I agreed with her. We had often talked about how we felt once our bodies had proven reluctant to do the things that women’s bodies are supposed to do. As if we weren’t really women. Now, feeding her son, Lydia’s femininity was supreme and undeniable. I would have given anything to lay a hand on a swelling belly with the sort of nonchalant assurance she was using to cradle the back of her son’s head.

She barely needed to say anything else to me, but as she rocked her son, she completed the thought. “You should go see Dr. Young. He can help you. I promise he won’t do the same stuff that all the other doctors have done.”

Dr. Young was a quick and nervous man, but somehow his presence calmed me. I found myself answering his rambling questions in my most reassuring tones. Someone watching us interact might have thought it was my job to help him and set him at ease, not the other way around.

He chomped his teeth as he spoke, and often chewed on his lower lip. His shiny black shoes clomped like hooves on the tile floor of his office. His equipment was older than what I’d seen in the hospital at Worcester. The examining table I sat on creaked as I settled myself onto it, and devices I couldn’t identify gleamed in rows on the counter, many of them apparently quite sharp.

And yet, I trusted him. He warmed his stethoscope in the palm of his hand before opening my paper gown and placing it on my sternum. His big black eyes were soft and tender when he held my tongue down with a depressor and peered into my throat.

So when he asked, I told him my deepest, darkest secret. The one that not even Jeremy knew. I told him about the thing—I could not consider it a child—that had begun to grow in me when I was 14, discovered in the aftermath of a summer evening under the bleachers of the local baseball diamond with a college boy visiting our hometown for the very last time. I told him what it had looked like after I took as much ulcer medication as I could afford to buy, the misshapen clumps that had emerged from my body and into my bathtub, and how I had gagged as I had forced them down the drain and washed them away. I admitted that I often worried whether I had permanently injured myself by doing that, and that in my wilder moments I was afraid that my infertility was a divine, not merely physical, punishment.

Dr. Young nodded seriously, as if he’d expected to hear exactly this. He pressed his hand to my lower belly, and I could have sworn my uterus moved in response. “This can be fixed,” he told me.

I believed him.

When he slid his hand farther down to cup my mound, I spread my legs wider for him, welcoming anything he wanted to do to me. Dr. Young eased me onto my back and placed my feet in the stirrups at the base of his examination table. His crisp, white shirt shifted in the process, and I thought I saw dark tattoos through the thin fabric, tangling over each other like ropes. I closed my eyes and lifted my hips as he spread my labia apart. He wasn’t wearing gloves, but I didn’t care to question him.

He pinched my clit and squeezed until there was a white flash behind my eyelids. I cried out, and he clamped a hand over my mouth. “Look at me, Amber,” he said. “Just keep your eyes on me. Don’t look at anything else, no matter what you think you see.”

I knew that I ought to be afraid, but I wasn’t. The pain in my clit pierced through my entire body, lancing up from between my legs and into my brain. He squeezed harder than seemed possible, so hard that I couldn’t believe there was any room left for my flesh between his thumb and forefinger. I writhed, but with his hands at my body’s two major entrance points, mouth and cunt, he held me down easily.

Pain sang up and down my nerves. Something burst open in my brain, accompanied by a similar frisson in the depths of my cunt. Unbearable pleasure rocked me, fogging my vision, shattering my control over my limbs. My feet pointed until my legs cramped. My hands fisted. Thick, white slime drooled onto my thighs.

Giving up on trying meant that, for the most part, Jeremy and I had given up on sex as well. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fucked him.

The night after I visited Lydia, I woke up and he was on top of me, fumbling between my legs, his hard cock hot against my inner thigh.

“What the—” My mouth was almost too thick with sleep to pronounce the words.

“You were moaning,” he said. “Moaning like you were getting fucked hard. Amber, it was so hot. I’m sorry. I can’t wait.”

He pushed into me. I expected it to hurt, but I was wetter than I’d ever been. The surprise of being suddenly full made me gasp, but Jeremy barely seemed to notice. He grabbed my hips and fucked me as if he were masturbating with my body, his motions full of an urgency that seemed frighteningly private.

I couldn’t gather my wits, and couldn’t decide whether I wanted to move with him and try to get some pleasure for myself or simply lie back and endure it.

Then I remembered my dream. Mouths and nipples. Open cunts and dripping cream. The cries of a thousand throats, the sound so cacophonous that it was impossible to say whether they were driven by terror or ecstasy. A cloudy, slimy mass of fuck-fluids covering me, seeping into my nostrils, sealing my eyes shut. And the inside of my uterus, wet and raw and red with wanting. Buds growing from its inner walls, dividing and replicating. Festering, partial.

I shivered. Why had I been moaning? I tried to shove Jeremy off me, but he was already coming, his cock pulsing inside me. He kissed my neck, then rolled away. For the first time, the image of his seed quickening in my womb made me feel dread rather than excitement.

Dr. Young did not let go of my clit. If I expected my release to buy my freedom, I was mistaken. I felt my fluids drying tackily against my inner thigh. He stared into my eyes, but it seemed as if he looked beyond me.

He released my mouth and made a rapid gesture in the air above my head.

“What—”

“Shh,” he said. The way he squeezed me made me either want to come again or punch him. I bucked in his grasp, and he gripped even harder until I subsided.

The air around us was thickening. Dragging it into my lungs had become an effort.

“She will not harm you,” Dr. Young whispered. “You have already tasted her milk. She knows that you are one of her children. She has accepted you.”

I have a confession. There was more to my visit with Lydia. There was a point at which we gave up talking.

She had put her son down in his crib, then returned to me on the couch. Long ago, we had both lost interest in the tablet. I could not take my eyes off her breasts. “Does it feel like you thought it would? To have milk?”

“Better,” Lydia said.

Neither of us breathed for a moment. We had kissed once, the night of my bachelorette party, but we’d both pretended that it had never happened. Still, that memory hung in the air between us as she opened her shirt again, this time without the necessity of her son’s hunger as an excuse, and loosened the nursing bra.

“May I?”

She nodded, and I took her breast in the palm of my hand, feeling its weight. Though it had not been long since she fed her son, it had already grown taut again. I could feel the milk inside her breast as if it strained toward me.

“Do you want to—”

Before she could finish the question, my lips closed around her blackened nipple. I expected it to feel chipped or damaged, but instead it was soft. I sucked, and her strange, pungent milk filled my mouth again. It felt furry against the insides of my cheeks, and the more I swallowed of it, the more I wanted to do that forever.

Lydia moaned and pulled me into her lap. I bent awkwardly at the neck and drank from her, and as I did, I realized that her hand was moving underneath me. Opening one eye, I saw that she had let her head fall onto the couch pillow behind her, arching her back toward me. Her hips rolled upward. I realized she was going to come just before her breast gushed into my mouth, releasing more than I could swallow. It dribbled down my chin, onto my neck, into my hair.

I jumped off her lap. “That was... that was...”

Lydia blinked up at me. She removed her hand from her pants and returned her breast to the inside of her nursing bra. “That was what you needed,” she said calmly.

I opened my mouth to argue or call her crazy, but before I could speak, I realized that she was right. There had been an emptiness inside me for many years, something as barren as my womb. It was so much a part of me that I would never have thought to mention it to any doctor. Though I knew I was not yet pregnant, I pressed my palm to my stomach, on the other side of my skin from her milk. My body was expecting something.

“The beginnings of it are already inside you,” Dr. Young told me.

“It?”

“Of our child.”

I didn’t question his pronoun. His body seemed to have changed, his muscles becoming ropy and gnarled. I blinked at him. I wasn’t horrified. I knew about the odd parts that make up a person. I had seen them in the bathtub on that terrible day long ago, and I had glimpsed them more recently in my dreams. It seemed like a wonder that anyone held together at all.

“How do we finish it?” I asked him.

Dr. Young was taking out his cock, a thick tree root of flesh that emerged from the front of his pressed, professional trousers. “She wants a sacrifice.”

I thought of Lydia and realized that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen her husband. He had always worked long hours, but could she have offered him up to whatever was around me in the air? Slime dripped onto the end of my nose and the tops of my breasts. I was aware of breath everywhere, humid and ragged. There were teeth, glinting from within holes edged with pubic hair.

I opened wider for Dr. Young. My cunt-mouth was ready to drink him down just as my face-mouth had drunk Lydia’s milk. I was ready to be filled with the ecstatic fact of burgeoning life.

He pushed inside me, his cock stretching my entrance almost to the point of pain. It was knobby and twisted, and the imperfection of it felt delicious against my inner walls. I cooed as I took him, and the thing buzzing at the edge of my consciousness echoed the noises I made.

I knew what he expected. Anyone could tell, probably, that my feelings for Jeremy had cooled over the years. A thousand petty grievances had grown up between us, dampening our zeal for each other and making us, more often than not, fall silent at the dinner table. And I should have been grateful to Dr. Young for what he was doing for me, for the world that he was unveiling for me.

He fucked me, and I fucked him back, and I looked into his dark eyes and knew that he would never hurt me, that he trusted me as I trusted him. I pulled my feet from the stirrups and wrapped my legs around him, digging my heels into his ass to urge his cock deeper into me.

The thing in the air understood what he did not. She knew the true loyalties of family. She asked only for a sacrifice, a life for a life. She would lose a priest, and I would give her a new one, the first fruit of my womb.

I felt the moment that the pleasure of fucking me turned to pain for him. I could tell the instant he realized the truth that had been dawning on me since my first taste of Lydia’s milk. No person is complete. We are hideous amalgamations of haphazard parts. Only She is whole.

I am and was a mouth.

My cunt-mouth began to drink from Dr. Young.

He screamed and gushed. He was delicious, filling me up more completely than Jeremy ever had, more even than Lydia’s life-giving fluids. Mine was not the only mouth that tasted him. She had been looking forward to that moment for quite some time.

I brought my fingers to my clit, and it was like wiping crumbs from the corners of my mouth after the most decadent meal. I came until I ran out of breath, and then She gave me her breath so that I could come some more.

I let myself into my house, shaky as a newborn. Jeremy looked up at the sound of the door, then ran to me.

“There was some sort of accident at that new clinic,” he said. “The police are looking into it. I’ve been worried sick about you, trying to call your phone.”

“Sorry,” I told him. “I’ve been driving around for hours. I had to clear my head.”

It hadn’t been pretty at the end, but as Lydia had said, it was worth it. I placed the flat of my palm against my belly, and he caught the gesture and raised an eyebrow at me.

I smiled. “Yeah, I canceled my appointment. I guess we got lucky a couple weeks ago.”

Jeremy lifted me up and spun me around. “Our child,” he said.

And it was ours. His and mine and Lydia’s and Dr. Young’s and Hers. I could understand that multiplicity now, even if he could not. I was a mouth, but my hunger was sated for the moment, my stomach growing full with child.

“I wonder what he’ll grow up to be,” I said.

BOY

Don Webb

He touched Us in the schoolyard. He was thinking of death and touched Us, and that is the human equivalent of what We used to do and so it begins.

His face is male, red, white, gray. Pock marks and busted capillaries around his nose and eyes caused from years of alcohol and little protein. Unshaven, although no beard grows on the corrugations of scar on the right cheek. He holds Us in his hands, or rather a gleaming part of Us, a trap from another time. He’ll do to carry on the sacred priesthood. We are polished obsidian Aztec exactitude.

The last week had been hard on the old man. The woman below, a pastel witch in bag lady training school, left, taking her radio which played too loud and brought him free beautiful music for two years. Now there’s just the heat, it being too late in the month for any money for booze. There’s very little left of the old man: a demon of air sucked away his name. The pawn shop converted his mirror into muscatel so he no longer knows what he looks like. Because of this and a thousand other things the old man found Us. And brought Us home, his lucky day. We had been on the streets after our last rite, maybe last year, maybe ten years ago, We don’t know.

He sleeps holding Us in his left hand.

Night comes and the temperature drops twenty degrees. A breeze awakens the old man who at first feels naked despite his caked mission clothes. Something’s missing and with what remains of surprise he realizes it’s the pain in his joints. Since it’s not drunkenness, he considers dreaming or death. Pretty sure it’s not either. Maybe it’s a black glass blade that he picked up in the schoolyard, thinking of slitting his veins.

He rises, slips Us into a greasy pants pocket. He stretches, and goes down the hall to piss.

He finds two dollars in the bathroom where someone’s crumpled garment has imitated the fairy tale goose, laying a golden egg. Maybe even the young woman down the hall. Nice to share a facility with her; intimacy is hard to come by when all your low-rent friends are dead. He sniffs hopefully at the wad of money.

With this newfound wealth and the small horde of sticky quarters in his room he’ll be able to buy a poached egg, toast, a slice of bacon, orange juice at the corner cafe. And have enough to buy a bottle of T-bird afterward.

Later on a cement bench he watches middle-aged Puerto Rican men playing a game with balls on long sandy alleys. He doesn’t understand the game but enjoys the hoots and boasts of virility in a foreign tongue. A paper-coated bottle of candy-sweet wine blooms in his mouth when the breeze cools too much. The cop that comes by every two hours isn’t going to care. It’s been too long for enough available energy for drunk and disorderly.

When he’s halfway through the bottle, a pack of four stalks into the park. Two boys, a girl, another of indeterminate sex. All wearing leather jackets. They skirt the Puerto Ricans, seeking easier prey. A pair of lovers, embracing on the grass behind the old man’s bench, leave swiftly, brushing grass from jeans and skirt.

One of the boys points at the old man. Laughter from the group. The figure of indeterminate sex is now revealed by the park light to be a boy of delicate features. Thick lips. Cruel green eyes. He pantomimes drinking from a bottle, making loud pig noises.

The group laughs again. Their conversation doesn’t quite carry to the old man, who hears only rising noise and laughter. Generals at a strategy session, they point at the old man. The girl scans the park, perhaps looking for the bluecoat.

The biggest boy sticks his thick finger in the chest of Green Eyes. A jerking motion with thumb to the old man. Talk stops. They turn toward the old man, smiling and expectant.

Green Eyes approaches. His cheeks, also unshaven but due to little age rather than too much, flush pink. His smiling teeth, sharp.

Shame to waste good wine on rotted bones.

No shame in age. Boy.

Why dontcha be a nice old bum? Give us the wine, huh?

Green Eyes sits with the old man. Close to him so he could punch him, and no one could tell. Close like a grandson. Where is his real grandson. The Boy is smiling and feral. The Boy is Our grandson, heir to what We brought this world. We didn’t mean to bring it, We were trapped. We hate you.

You can take the wine. Just let an old man enjoy the evening.

But what if it’s not enough, old man? Gonna give us some money? Be a sweet old fart.

The old man pulls out a quarter, his index finger stroking Us. He thinks he can cut the Boy. We help the old man.

Fuckin’ quarter?

Rob three other poor old men and you can buy another bottle of T-bird.

Hey, old man, we’re not robbing you, see. (The Boy jabs to the old man ribs. Green Eyes is wearing brass knuckles.) You’re giving it to us, see? (Another jab.)

The old man replies, his voice an octave higher and broken.

Right. Take anything you want.

The Boy collects bottle and quarter, frisks the old man’s pockets. The stiff, dirt-encrusted fabric hides Us. The old man touches Us and We reveal the Great Secret to him. The old man asks the Boy the Question.

What would you want if you could have anything you want?

Whatcha mean?

Well, what do you want most right now?

To fuck Julie in the ass.

That her back with the ga-- your friends?

Yah. She’s Rolo’s girl.

The old man yells. Julie!

The girl runs over. Green Eyes starts to punch the old man’s jaw. Then stops, confused and expectant.

Julie. I want you to fuck -- what’s your name?

Andrew.

Andrew tonight. You’ll take care of it, won’t you?

The girl, hair bleached white to a shade not found in nature, slowly nods, puzzled at her affirmation.

I want you to let him fuck you up the ass. Do you let Rollo fuck you up the ass?

On Sundays because Mom says you’re not supposed to fuck the pussy on Sundays because of Jesus.

That’s right. You be a good girl and remember Jesus. Let’s pretend tonight is Sunday. You ever eat Rollo’s asshole?

No.

Well you be sure and eat Andrew’s, he’s Our special Boy now.

I will. (She sounds like a six year old promising teacher.)

Good girl. Now run on back.

Andrew jerks in indecision. No one knows what to do in the presence of their dreams. Desires are holy and terrible things, they are Our trembling mystery. There will be other dreams soon.

Andrew, go take care of her tonight. Enjoy the wine and the quarter. You be nice to her Andrew, use grease. Come and talk to me here tomorrow.

You’re a creepy old fuck! I’ll never see your ass again.

Tomorrow, Andrew.

Andrew runs back to the gang and they stalk into the night. Spray painting NATAS and other minor league antinomianism, but the inner alchemy has already begun in Andrew. He’ll begin to transform himself into a god a thousand times older than Satan. As if gods were an important thing to make.

For a year Andrew will live as Tezcatlipoca, God who Hides Mysteries in the Darkness. All his stupid dreams will come to him. Your Earth will circle around to here. Then the old man will have his reward. He will lead flute-playing Andrew, painted thick black with crushed scorpions and magic mushrooms, up the steps of the courthouse. Then he will cut out Andrews steaming heart. Then he will offer the red cactus fruit to the sun, and We will make sure that the old man has what he needs after that.

We don’t know why We do it. It was the way We did things before this world. It made sense in that place We came from. After this world is gone it will make sense again, and We will forget the time We had human hosts.

PIECES (2) for STRING OCTET

Copper Sloane Levy

-----Original Message-----

From: “Giovanna Vitali” <gio.vitali@outlook.com>

Sent: 8 December 2014 9:37 PM

To: “Francesca Vitali” fran.vitali@outlook.com

Subject: Ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.

-----Compose Message-----

Socrates said, “I know one thing: that I know nothing.” On my sixteenth birthday, mother and father wrote this Latin proverb in a blank birthday card accompanying the sheer white dress and powder blue shawl I would later gift to you to wear at your high school graduation party. (If you look carefully, you’ll find those very words scrawled along a scrap of white linen on one of the inner seams.) The quote is a paradox, leading one around in a proverbial circle, but this only occurs if the mind is a restless and fearful one, as most are. To be at peace within is to know simplicity in those words, that indeed the only thing one can ever truly know is that she knows no thing at all. These useless effects around us, these artifacts of ages sifting by, are materials with a basis in natural resources, but where do these resources come from, why are they here, and what purpose do they serve? In the past few years I’ve become enslaved to ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat, my dearest, and nothing, even now, seems to quell the sense of futility that grows within me. That last word, that nothing, has become my axis of late, my center of being, and tonight, here in this hotel suite, it has taken on distinct new context. We are nothing, my love, for there are unfathomable things crosshatching unnoticed within the fibers of our reality all the time, things possessing levels of intelligence we could scarcely measure, let alone comprehend. Would that I could send you away from this existential clusterfuck of empty motivations left in the wake of these revelations, this encroaching night of nights, but no one else would give weight to what I have to say here, and the purity of our love assures me that you will make use of this information, for the time will come when you or your future loved ones will need it.

There are so many things I need to say here, but more importantly, there are elements of a metaphysical nature I need to express. To do this with words will be a challenge, for as you know, music is my first language. Would that I could record a final piece for you, of the improvisational ilk you so enjoy, but my cello now lies in some far corner of this place, taunting me with dark, twisted interpretations of the very works I have worked so hard to master. I wonder what the Lady Stradivari would think if she saw what her beloved creation has become?

I don’t know how much time I have left, but right at this moment it hardly seems to matter, for in establishing this link (I’ve managed to activate my phone as an LTE hotspot), I feel connected to you. You were always better at these things, Francesca, and I thank goodness I was actually listening when you would go on at length, for somehow now there is no corner in this hotel suite that allows me a connection to whatever satellite lets us indulge in these profane technologies. I’ll explain to you why, but first I should provide you with some preliminary information.

First, the warnings. Don’t call me. Don’t reply to this e-mail. And if you receive a call or e-mail from my phone or laptop after this particular communiqué, believe me when I say that it is not your sister trying to connect with you, no matter what the contents are. There are things it will say or write, having reached far into our collective memories (and perhaps you have felt its presence of late), that will convince you of some level of truth, but it won’t be me, Francesca, this I swear. If I make it out of my study, into which I have barricaded myself at this moment, to find you, you will know by the look in my eyes and the sound of my voice, that your sister stands before you, and then, by all means, embrace me. Yes, embrace me, kiss me, and I will fall apart in your arms, finally at an oasis in the desolation that has folded around me and held me firmly in its grip, squeezing, like a vice, the last ribbons of sanity from me. If you can call attention to the hotel suite, which is, again for your immediate reference, 1206 in the Cristal De Matteo on the Rue Saint Paul Ouest, do so, but realize that those who venture up to the suite itself are not likely to find me, nor are they likely to find Niccolo. Niccolo is dead, in a manner of speaking, or never was. I still don’t know. Also to be considered is the very real possibility that whoever sets foot inside the suite may never again emerge. I’ll leave this decision up to you, but please, don’t come here yourself. Not for some time.

Second, a revelation. Dearest sister, by now you are old enough to realize certain dynamics that come with the emotional territories of a family as influential as ours, and it is for this reason that I hope that what I have to tell you does not come as much of a shock. Think back for a moment to our parents’ working hours, so perfectly alternating as they were. Do you remember how late at night they would often arrive, mother in a dress, and father in a three-piece suit? Do you remember how often they stayed out all night, only to arrive the next evening, offering no explanation as to their absence? Only a family such as ours could call such a life normal, and given that we had Melinda and Marcella, it was indeed normal for you and I, but at the age of thirteen, I stumbled upon the reason for our parents’ continual, collective absence. It was at thirteen that I found father’s name tag, and I was fourteen when I found mother’s. They were simple enough, white, laminated, with a clip on the back. It was the title under the names that I found puzzling, and it took no more than a Google search to lead me to the truth: the Consortium of Aramaic and Hebrew Translators was a secret society.

The day after my discovery, I was approached by mother and father when you were at a friend’s house and they sat down with their usual serene expressions and told me that not only had they left those name tags where I would see them…they had woven the Internet links into my path on the web for that day alone…such was their influence. As you can imagine, this was hard to accept. A child never imagines their parents can be so exact, so crafty, and here they were explaining to me that they knew I would find the name tags and the Internet links through my usual avenues of scholarly investigation; that this was something they had pondered for some time, revealing their involvements to me, and through much deliberation it was decided that it would benefit the family for me to know.

The Consortium, they said, was like a family. Mommy and Daddy’s company is one part of the family, they said, and other companies made up other parts. Together, the family pursued goals, such as the translation of ancient stories, found through time by archaeologists in the ruins of places where great and mysterious things happened. As each book is found, it is submitted to the Consortium, and as the book is translated, the details go into a master volume to collect the tales and beliefs of that particular region. Most of them are never pored over by mere historians, they said. Most of them are kept by the Consortium in a number of vaults spanning the globe. In the following months, they took me to three of those vaults. One in Florence, one in Caen, and one here in Montreal. The vault here was last, and upon my arrival, the Consortium entire awaited me. I was charmed easily by mother and father, and by the council of which they were part, convinced that the custodianship they shared was a gift we should pass down from one generation to the next, within each family.

I wanted you to be one such person, but they maintained that you were too young at the time, and very likely might always be too young at heart to carry such a burden. They feared that one day you might resent them for placing so studious a burden on your shoulders, but offered the possibility to me that if I deemed upon your passing into adulthood that you were suited to become a custodian, I could, after reciting a weighty disclaimer and last chance to back out, offer you the knowledge. To fulfill your acquisition and claim your title as custodian, Francesca, you have but to go to the chateau in Caen and sit or stand on the north-facing battlement where we picnicked on your birthday. Go there, and for eleven consecutive days face north for at least an hour and you will receive an invitation to a gathering in one of the three vault locations. I can’t tell you what will await you at the gathering. The Consortium’s ceremonies are indeed different, I’ve been told. But you can expect to see certain people who have been part of our lives since childhood. Indeed, neighbours, so-called cousins, and the help; among them, Melinda and Marcella, who raised us. If you plan to make contact with them, know this: They aim to translate ancient texts chronicling the creation and subsequent exploits of angels heralded by God or fallen from His grace. The Consortium is accomplished in angelology, but it is an alliance and little more. You might well be intrigued enough there to quell your curiosities as a socialite prone to boredom. To move up the proverbial ladder within a secret sect, however, one must branch off into one of the yet darker conglomerates, so after my fifth year under the tutelage of mother, father, and the council, I was referred to a group known as Exham Priory.

The priory was an actual place, a ruined place undergoing reconstruction, but in the time that it took to complete renovations of the priory proper, as well as the expansive underground municipality, several sects had broken away from the unnamed worshipping body. In the name of cohesion, the savant leader of the sect to which I would transfer, Winifred Brinton, proposed that the body should be simply named Exham Priory, or, for purposes of general reference, the Priory. Our group was accomplished in its field, but Winny Brinton had become distracted of late with certain new findings; namely, deities one of her ancestors had catalogued in great detail in his commonplace books, found among trunks entrusted to her by her cousin’s lawyers who had become frustrated with the heiress’s lack of interest in her ancestor’s prior dealings.

As for the matter at hand, it became that I should be locked in this study because something is stalking me, and to express what that thing is in a mere word or even a sentence would be next to impossible. Instead, bear witness to the following recollection of events and know that I’ve done my utmost to illustrate the threat, as it shall be heretofore known, and the distorted reality it thrusts upon all whom it chooses to make contact with.

It began yesterday in the early afternoon. Because previous holiday schedules were so hard on us, Niccolo and I were on somewhat of a sabbatical, the purpose of which was to facilitate a refocusing on our resolutions for the coming symphonies. Niccolo had been intent for many years to transpose the cello solo of Frank Zappa’s largo assai into a customized rendering of the entire work. I was opposed to this, of course. It was an ambitious endeavour, but there are better, less-recognized pieces by lesser-known composers that should see the stage, and I had presented a fourth quarter plan to honor these composers and Gustav was thrilled with this. But Niccolo’s influence on Gustav and indeed the entire orchestra was unmatched. Knowing full well that my proposition had been accepted and the rehearsals were being scheduled, he addressed the orchestra entire at a breakfast meet-and-greet at Bar Mercurio and presented the new largo assai he had himself composed in honor, he claimed, of Zappa himself.

Francesca, I was mortified. This wasn’t an off-handed mention of something he had been working on. He had been fully prepared to make a full presentation of his completed adaptation and initiated several running explanations as to why his homage to Zappa would make for a better fourth quarter line-up. I watched him as he went around the room, pointing out certain highlights in each section, but drawing emphasis to the new and unprecedented role of the cello throughout. Gustav was ecstatic, although sympathetic to me, making eye contact with me several times, then mentioning toward the end of Niccolo’s clearly successful diatribe that he had already expressed “great interest” in my own proposal. “Well,” said Niccolo, then spared me a faux loving smile. “We’ll have our talk later. But I think we all agree here that Zappa encompasses the spirit of our collective.” To this there were nods and smiles and a toast was made to Niccolo for a job well done. No other standing member of the orchestra had an adaptation to their name, and certainly none of them had the fucking balls to rearrange Zappa.

We took transit home, and I purposefully waited for him to get on one subway car before I beelined for the one behind it, just so I wouldn’t have to be in his presence for a thirty-minute commute. Back at the suite, I tried to avoid him, but he confronted me when I emerged from the shower.

“You’re fuming, I can see it.”

I said nothing.

“Babe, it’s better for the group, you know that.”

Still, I said nothing.

“Works by obscure Polish composers who emulate the cinema, Gio, really? Who do you think we’re playing for? John Williams? This isn’t some Hollywood chop-up; fourth quarter symphonies are attended by governors and senators. Just two years ago, the president attended Swan Lake with his family. These are the pieces they enjoy, Gio, these are the works they recognize, and that makes them all the more valuable. Ticket sales for the last Zappa symphony were very solid, and an adaptation by a member only gives us more credibility. People will be curious, and despite whether or not they hate it in the end, they’ll appreciate the ingenuity.”

I exploded. “Just who do you play for, Niccolo? I’d rather play for John-fucking-Williams and his emulators than Niccolo-fucking-Vitali! This is about you as always, you self-loving prick, and you can go fuck yourself with it; your asshole is puckered tight enough to feel some friction with that pencil-dick anyway, so go for it!”

His face was turning red from holding in laughter, and when finally he let it out, I shoved past him and went to the bedroom, slamming the door behind me and locking it. I’d exhausted myself with emotion, and wound up taking a long afternoon nap, still wrapped in a towel.

It must have been three or four hours later as the sun had only begun to set, that I woke to the sound of his playing. Sitting up in bed, I recalled on the cusp of wakefulness feeling the towel wrapped around my hair coming slowly unraveled; a minor detail at the time that would later prompt gooseflesh on my arms and legs when I realized why this had happened, and why it was so curious. If I could have seen myself from the ceiling, I would have seen my own black locks evenly splayed on either side of the pillow as if hands had indeed tended to them, arranging them this way. I switched on the lamp on my night table, sat up in bed and reflected on the breakfast debacle as that horrible truth again resurfaced in the murk of my mind.

That black morass, as we’ve called it, that undeniable, unavoidable rage, weighing us down in our own desire to be free of those bonds into which we were born as women. Mere minutes later I was overcome by it, neck-deep in it, and that film had descended over my eyes, the fog, and it won, Francesca, and I was lost, hearing his music, his playing, and slowly and surely the horror of my present predicament was festooned in the room; I had to get out. But along with this panic came the unmistakable reality of my failed marriage – I was trapped in it. There would be no way out, ever, not even through the mercy of his leaving me, for indeed, he seemed to thrive on making a fool of me, and thrive on the reputation and influence of our family, although he wouldn’t say this, it had become very clear in the nine months of our legal binding what I was good for in his eyes. His love for me had fallen away over the course of a week, revealing the diabolical parasite beneath, and like many women I had chalked this up to fundamental gender differences. But I was so wrong, piccolo fiore. And they will prey on you, too, with their mischievous eyes and impish smiles. There will be no ideal mate for you or I emerging from the heterosexual coil, so perhaps it was a great mercy that we share what we do; though pulled away by the empty obligations of our farcical lives, we come together again to melt into each other. Would that I could be inside you always.

I was standing. Trembling. And I hadn’t known I was standing until my arms were alighted by the will to find something, a thing that was not known to me consciously until I had found it, as if in a dream, and beheld it. His rendition of the largo assai was an undulating expression of a whole spectrum of emotions in complete disarray. It was a preposterous adaptation, and I was sickened more by it than the abominable creations of those violinists who accept rock star status in some pathetic bid to change the way we have been perceived by listeners for all time.

I emerged from the bedroom with the black marble paperweight held discreetly in my right hand while the left hand hovered out in front of me like the bowsprit of a ship, and when I came upon the sliding glass doors leading to the balcony, the sheer white drapes reached out for me like a ghostly cradle of arms, ushering me onto the balcony where he played with his back to me; always on the balcony at this busy time of day, always playing for the city entire, playing for admiration, encouraged by the unremitting praise of our neighbours, and our neighbours’ neighbours. Not for a moment did it occur to me that he might sense my presence and turn to face me, such was the fortitude of my trance. If he had turned, he would have looked up and recoiled at the sight of my wide eyes and terrible grin, chin slick with drool coaxed by the incessant grinding of my teeth, and perhaps he would have raised an elbow to parry an otherwise fatal blow, but this did not occur.

Instead, through a stark realization that the new largo assai was not a discordant mess, but a true revelation, a truly rather pristine example of Zappa’s very intent as a musical genius, I became so horrified by the depth of my own jealousy and the embarrassment of having married the spiteful imp before me that the paperweight had been raised over my head in both hands and was already coming down before that strangled girlish cry of frustration issued from my throat, accenting the dull crunching sound of the top of his cranium caving in, yet muffled by the insulation of his scalp and hair, the paperweight sticking to the concave wound with the resultant force of liquid suction belching out of him before I had to wrench it out with some effort. These moments were a blur now as the paperweight came crunching down again and again, and as he had somehow turned with the inertia of my blows, I saw for a moment his face before I crushed it away, and he had been smiling, Francesca, smiling, and it was of that same knowing sort which would accompany “What’s the matter, babe?” followed by that repugnant, self-satisfied smirk and an impish chuckle.

I only regained some control of my actions when there was so much of his blood on my face that it was dripping along the curve of my eye sockets into my eyes. I dropped the paperweight and watched in a blood-slaked blur as it rolled away from me, under the gap between the balcony and the guard rail, plummeting to the busy downtown street twelve storeys below. I pondered for a moment the strange, infinite result of it then crushing the skull of a passer-by, and wondered if in some echoed ripple through dimensions it might be repeated again and again, as in a Mandelbrot set, making slime-blood nests out of craniums for all time.

I loosened the towel around me and sponged the blood away from my eyes with the ends of it, then I dropped this brilliantly-stained white Egyptian cotton over my husband’s ruined, smirking face as if in some manner of respect, but the truth is, I covered the top half of his body because I didn’t want to see it; nor did I want to see the last seconds of life manifest in his twitching fingers and toes, so I looked away. Even on the precipice of death he disgusted me.

And then the power went out. I heard the city gasp.

Looking out over the cityscape, I watched as every light in Montreal was touched by a rolling consummation of darkness. Then, a few emergency lights came on in certain establishments. A group of teens began to shout far below in the streets, proclaiming the end. Our seasonal neighbour two balconies to the right, Louis, called out to his wife that the candles were on the top shelf of the armoire. While she got those, he would get the flashlight, he said. And then he called out to me: “Hey, Giovanna, lights out there, too?” I replied that yes, they were, and my voice was shockingly calm. Nonchalant. “We have more than enough candles,” I said. “Stocked up on them at a pre-holiday sale last month. Niccolo swears I buy too much junk, but I just like being prepared, you know?”

“Yeah, I give the wife no end of shit about that, too. But you think ahead, and that’s why we can’t live without you,” he said with a chuckle. “Let us know if you need anything!”

“I will,” I said, and looked down at Niccolo one last time.

Here, piccolo fiore, try to understand my new state of mind. I had killed my husband, yes, and the resulting blitz of emotions was rather disconcerting, but I was a slave to it. I stood there at the sliding doors for some time, feeling a certain need swell inside me, and this gesticulating new essence was alighting every corner of my body, willing me not just to move, but to fall to my knees and cry out in appreciation of this fresh sense of freedom and a nexus with something altogether consummate and nurturing. Something was trying to throw me down there on the balcony floor, and I knew unmistakably that if I gave in to it, I’d likely not want to get up. So I took a few steps backward, into the suite proper, turned and re-familiarized myself with the layout while my eyes acclimated to the dark. I found a candle and lit it and placed it in a crystal holder on a small table by the open balcony, then lit two more, putting one in the kitchen, and holding the other with a steady, blood-caked hand.

Performing these motions was labouring. It seemed with each step away from the balcony that I took, my body weighed more. I turned back toward it, looking out past the fluttering curtains at my husband’s concealed corpse and felt a moist pocket of heat well up inside my cunt. At first it was puzzling. Was I feeling new attraction to him as he lay there, his lifeblood and all sense of the world bleeding out of him? Then I knew the truth: I was feeling it for you. Suddenly I wanted you there, and I could all but see you descend upon the balcony in that white teddy with the patterned lace, your pixie hair tossed by the wind, shining, overlapping sickles of black framing your face; your almond-shaped blue eyes, your ample lips. You came to me with your arms outstretched, feet barely touching the floor, and as I reached out to receive you, you only melted into me and passed out of this reality…

I turned to catch a glimpse of you, my heart palpitating, my cunt pulsing, but you weren’t there, and I did fall to my knees now, hair covering my face, dipping a trembling hand between my legs. It seemed the sensible thing to do, Francesca. I would bring myself off, just as I did every night you weren’t with me, but something was wrong.

The hotel suite was watching me.

There were eyes, somewhere there were eyes, and though I couldn’t see them, I could feel them blinking, moving, scanning me. And then I looked up and around me, noting the atmospheric changes. The air was thick with something I can scarcely describe except to say that I was now swimming in an intent that was not mine. Indeed, I could have told you with all conviction at the time that this intent was not human, but in my state at the time, it hardly seemed to matter. It was curious, of course, but it seemed a fitting environmental transition for a woman who had only moments ago slain her husband. Part of me somehow believed I had lost my mind in one furious act of rebellion, but we never have believed in that, have we, my love? Have we ever believed in sanity or insanity? Have we ever surrendered to any civilized convention without knowing full well that it was just fucking wrong?

I found the pocket radio we kept for emergencies, set it on the table by the balcony with the candle, and tuned in to a number of news stations. All were issuing variations of the same report: the blackout was citywide, and there was no ETA on restoration, but the hydro companies were doing everything they could. Then commercials. Home insurance, car insurance, life insurance, medication for blood pressure with a tome’s worth of possible serious side effects, including blindness and sudden death, infection, dry mouth, ringing in the ears, nausea, shortness of breath—

Restlessness in the dark, eyes wide.

Get the Stradivarius; play for everyone, play for the night.

So I did. I went to my study and reached out to take the Stradivarius, but it occurred to me rather suddenly that the white Cremonese Baroque I had purchased from a curio shop in Bristol should sing tonight. For the first time since it was rescued from a burning farmhouse in the Chilterns, it would sing, but what would we hear? On top of my usual pile of sheet music selections was an untitled white folder that had been found inside the Cremonese case, and inside was a handwritten copy of what I immediately recognized as Shostakovich’s Pieces for double string quartet.

I took a small chair out to the sliding doors, along with a foldable music stand, and sat facing the balcony where my husband’s body lay under the blood-stained white towel and a light sheen of drizzle. I set the music folder on the stand and clutched the Baroque instrument between my legs. The bow hovered at eye-level before me, and I realized I couldn’t feel it, it was so light. I turned pages of Shostakovich’s Pieces to begin in medias res, and brought the bow down to the strings. At first, I wasn’t sure I could hear myself playing, but soon I realized that the sound was not confined to the hotel suite. It was flowing out through the balcony and through the walls, only coming back to me as the pre-storm night winds descended upon the balcony and moved through the suite, rustling curtains, a pile of napkins, pages in books.

Minutes later, Louis was calling out to me: “Beautiful, Giovanna, just beautiful!” His wife, Chloe, whistled and began to clap excitedly. “We know it’s you,” she said, “and not Niccolo. Your playing has always been more expressive, girl, show ‘em how it’s done!”

And I did. I dove into Pieces with great fervor, adding subtle traces of a new rendition just as Shostakovich had when he returned to the work after his own sabbatical. It was originally a piece for a double string quartet, with a prelude and a fugue, but this was now my own expression, my vehicle. There were no movements, no boundaries, no limitations as to the method of delivery. Enthusiasm was gone, intent had departed. I was one with the instrument, playing at the mercy of some primal urge sweeping up my new and macabre accomplishment and lust for you in multiple eddies of swirling passion, clutching my legs ever tighter as it raged. I flirted with hints of the proper scherzo for the sake of recognition, doubling back to remind the city that this was an old work, an accomplished work, perhaps not even legally mine, but it was mine, this was my performance, and though by this point I was nothing more than a receptacle for the peculiar presence with the countless fluttering eyes (rapid fluttering indeed, for I could feel the air move, heavy as it was, fanned by its lashes), this was a moment in time that I had been anticipating for as long as I could remember. It was alien, this moment, but it was wholly desired. And I could feel you, and I could feel it. Amid the music pouring from the antique ivory instrument, washing over the city before returning to me as a strange dissonance, some queer interpretation of the very idea of harmony set in dark stone, I could feel it shift and flex, pressing out against my thighs, and I clutched ever harder, not of my own volition, but as if there were hands, many hands, pressing my legs together now as the shadow of a phallic appendage twisted itself into reality somewhere beneath me, then entered me, the unmistakable, smooth mushroom head parting my labia, already well lubricated with the secretions of my desire for you, to see you now, here, marveling at the corpse of that devil made flesh adorning my balcony, and subsequently smashing our bodies together until the lust drove us mad — but is it a blooming madness when I am with you, truly, or is this the way that things were meant to be? Are you my forever? What is it we feel for each other? Is it love or is it madness by proxy as we crave watching each other in the moment; watching you watching me in those masturbatory interludes as we catch our breath?

It was inside me now, fully inside me. And growing, Francesca, it was growing.

Large as it was, and intimidating, alarming, really, it grew yet still, touching every corner of my pulsing canal. Indeed we are carnally built to accommodate a human fetus in transit, but this thing was three times the size of the most impressive fetus you’ve ever seen, emerging in a rush of clinging membrane, water, and blood. I was frozen, but my arms were still moving, still sawing Shostakovich’s bloody brainchild into the air, and my thighs were now imbued with a searing heat made more and more pleasurable the hotter it became, prompting me to grin and to drool, the slick heat dripping off my chin to my naked breasts and erect nipples. Here, I blacked out. And when I came to, though I knew I remained in the chair, back arched, playing the Pieces, I saw a reflection of myself, a double, a doppelgänger on the hardwood floor before me, clutching the albino cello between my thighs until they were blackish purple on the inner flesh with bruises, and the instrument was no longer smooth and perfect, but ridged and cracked and leathery, pocked with what appeared to be an assortment of imperfections suggestive of a purely biological effect, suggestive of living tissue, of blood, of pumping life beneath the surface.

Francesca, the Cremonese was fucking me, and I held on to it, fingers digging deep into the ridges for a good grip as it moved, grafted to the floor now by two pairs of thin, chalky legs tipped with nimble, serrated hooves. My double was crying out now, and from its throat there issued yet another layer of Shostakovich’s message, a darker message, perhaps the one he would play now, today, to herald whatever new era was sure to come, now that whatever had me in its brutal, androgynous grip was clear in its intent. Would that everyone could know such pleasure; to be themselves taken by… the name… it came to me now from below the floorboards in a rolling blackness not unlike the blanket of stillness holding the city hostage…

Sh’bub…

Sh’bub N’grrthl…

Sh’bub N’g Urr’a…

…and that rolling ‘R’ of an octave no instrument could ever replicate, shaking the very foundation of the hotel as no act of any miserable conventional god or goddess ever could, with the mere pronunciation of its name…

SHUB—

NIGGURATH.

SHUB—

NIGGURATH.

I was playing, and I was watching wide-eyed as it fucked me. There was no measure of civilized humanity in the eyes of the double. I was not there in any fashion. I was lust, I was madness, and Shub-Niggurath had found me and clutched me, milking me of the juices I only ever gave to you.

But then, amid the low chanting of its name, that low boom, there was a new presence. Numerous, calculating. These were inhuman minds, yet there was something new about them, some membranous thing stretched out between them and whatever, whoever, they used to be.

“Hey, babe.”

Amid the low light of the candles were eleven shapes, all human, and Niccolo stepped forward now, his smile lit up brighter than the rest of him. The others were all people I recognized immediately, but only a few were people I knew personally. They were of Exham Priory and the shadow council of the Consortium, a select group who had only showed their faces to members once, at a gathering in London. I looked for mother and father, any family members, or family friends, but they were not there. The shadow council was a separate entity. They did what they did for purposes that would remain unknown to anyone but their own ranks and who they dealt with.

My raging double on the floor had departed, although the cello, hooves twitching and tapping the floor, remained clenched between my legs. The bow hung limp in my hands, which had regained all feeling.

Niccolo sighed. “I love you.”

With a stuttering, trembling voice I told him it was all bullshit. I told him what he was, a devil, as if he didn’t know, and I told him where he was from, hell, or some undocumented place, and he smiled and laughed and shook his head. I think I asked him what this was. What had happened. Where was I, who was he, who had he been, had he ever been my husband?

“My name isn’t Niccolo Vitali. It’s Hadrian Delapore, and the Priory belongs to me.”

Too much for me. Too much for my unraveling mind. He said that what happened would remain ultimately beyond my limited understanding, but when the “fateful encounter” was underway, when I was mere moments away from death, I just might know intimately what this was all about.

I asked him what this encounter entailed. I asked him how it was that he stood here before me. Amid tears I demanded he answer me now, that he had some obligation to do this.

He ignored the second question. By sunrise, he said, I would bear offspring of the Black Goat with a Thousand Young and there would be no stopping it.

“Embrace it,” he said. “Gio, embrace it.”

I flew into a panic.

The gravity of the situation was suddenly too much to bear. Quickly I studied each of them for intent, for threat, then pushed off and stumbled down the hallway toward my study. I locked myself in and barricaded the door with the bedframe, an armoire, and an armchair. Niccolo came to the door and spoke to me. He told me again that he loved me, but then he laughed, like a child who could not bear his own jubilee. He told me he had always known about you, and he told me never to contact you, that if I loved you I would never tell you about this, what he had done. And after a time they took their leave, but I heard the goat, my albino lover pacing around the suite, the sound of those deft little hooves…

those deft little hooves
and the angles in here, now, my love, my piccolo fiore,
they’re all wrong
they’re just so
wrong

The WHISPERER in the VAGINA

Shon Richards

Jesus fucking Christ on his goddamn stick, how is a man supposed to get any quality jacking off time at home when he has to report for work at nine in the evening? The hours in this job were fucking insane. I had worked some shitty clinical trial jobs but this was the only one where I had to be on call in case one of our trial subjects wanted to report some hiccups.

I unlocked the door and let myself in. It was a tiny rented office in a strip mall. I didn’t know much about Akashic Pharmaceutical but they liked to do things cheap. I had no assistant, next to no furniture and plenty of insane paperwork.

Still I guess I was lucky to have any job after what happened at the hospital. Shit, that teenager came on to me and I’m a grown-ass man, what was I supposed to do? Turn down a blowjob from an actual fucking cheerleader? My asshole bosses at the hospital were just jealous.

Akashic Pharmaceutical didn’t blink at that, which to be honest, is kind of weird when you consider that they’re doing test trials for Shubium, the new arousal drug for women. These ladies are hopped up on a drug that should make their pussies tingly and they put me in charge of answering their questions? Akashic Pharmaceutical just didn’t give a fuck.

I had just sat down in the receptionist’s chair when the door swung open. A busty Hispanic lady came in with her eyes wide open and wild. She had dressed down in sandals, sweatpants, and a baggy greet t-shirt that couldn’t hide her giant tits or the sharp points of her nipples underneath. I made a snap assessment that the drug wasn’t doing shit for her sexual appetite.

“What the fuck is in Shubium?” the lady yelled.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, that is a trade secret,” I said. It wasn’t like they told me anyway but this made me sound more important. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me what you are experiencing. If you tell me your name, I can pull up your file?”

She growled at me and started to pace the small reception room. “My name is Teresa Gonzales,” she snapped.

I typed her name into the computer. She was forty, had no children, worked as a manager at a restaurant and had been diagnosed with vaginismus.

Well, that killed my boner. Vaginismus is an involuntary tightening of the vaginal muscles. It made intercourse extremely difficult and painful for all parties involved. She was perfect for our study but the best I could hope for from her was a blowjob.

I looked again at her big tits and decided I’d rather have a tit job.

She stopped in her pacing and stared at me. I lifted my eyes from her tits and looked her in the face. There was a flush to her dark brown skin.

“Maybe you could tell me the symptoms you are experiencing?” I asked.

“My skin feels warm, like I’ve been drinking,” she said. “My mouth is wet all the time and my head itches.”

Out of the blue, Teresa grabbed one of her breasts and squeezed. Her fingers dug into the material of her t-shirt as she squeezed her tit incredibly hard. She winced but she didn’t let go.

I kept my face as neutral as possible as she did this. I wasn’t sure if she even knew she was doing it.

“What about, uh, in your pelvic area?” I said.

She reached down with her other hand and cupped her sex from the outside of her pants. “There is a fire there,” she said. “I’m sweating all the time between my thighs and my pussy is hot to the touch.”

I just watched as she stroked her sex and squeezed her tit, thinking all the while that Akashic might have a hit on their hands after all.

“And when did you first notice these symptoms?”

“The second night of taking the drug,” Teresa said. “After I had the dream about the Cosmic Vagina.”

“I’m sorry, the what?” I said.

“The Cosmic Vagina,” Teresa said. She let go of her breast and both hands went to her sex. She plunged both hands under her sweatpants and rubbed herself furiously.

“It was huge, as big as a mountain. Rivers flowed from it, pussy hair as tall as trees surrounded it. It quivered and pulsed and desired to be filled. It whispered things to me.”

“Hmm,” I said in my best medical expert voice. Dementia was definitely going to hurt the profit margins on Shubium.

Teresa stopped rubbing herself suddenly. She pulled her hands out of her pants and held them in front of her like she didn’t recognize them. They glistened with her juices. I could smell them from across the room.

A new blush bloomed on her face. Her lips contorted in anger and her eyes disappeared under a furious brow. She ran around the side of the receptionist desk and raised her hands to hit me.

“Don’t hit me!” I said. My hands went up to protect myself and I curled defensively in my chair. I made a mental note about her sudden mood swing for documentation later.

“What is in this drug?” Teresa yelled. She grabbed the back of my head and yanked it back.

“Ahh! I don’t know!”

She slapped me. My head spun around. Stars bloomed around the edges of my vision. My cheek was wet from her pussy juices.

“I don’t know!” I yelled again. “It’s experimental! They don’t tell me shit!”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her sample bottle. I rubbed my cheek where she had slapped me. The pussy juice was sweet smelling and I had to resist the urge to taste it.

Teresa held a pill in front of me. “What is this symbol?” she asked.

I squinted. It was a weird mix between the number four and a V. It was over-stylized, which always confused me because trial runs don’t bother to use fancy copyrighted trademarks. “I have no idea.”

She punched me this time. My head snapped and I tried to stand up. She punched me again and I sat back down. My left eye was killing me. I was going to bruise up, I knew it.

“Jesus Christ, lady! What is your problem?”

Teresa pulled off her shirt. Big brown breasts flopped out. They were as perky as a teenager’s.

“Look at them,” she said. “I’m forty years old. My tits used to be the same age! But now they’ve changed. Something isn’t right with them. Look! They’re firm and perky!”

“Uhhh,” I said. “They look fine to me.”

She raised her hand and I flinched. Thankfully she just reached for my hand and placed it on her left tit. “Feel for yourself,” she said.

I did. My fingers squeezed that perky plumpness. My finger brushed over her hard nipple. I used my other hand to grab her other tit. I squeezed both of them gently and tried not to sigh. They were the best tits I had ever groped.

“I don’t feel a problem,” I said.

That is when something moved under the skin of her right tit.

“Jesus Christ!” I yelled. I tried to pull my hands back but Teresa grabbed both of my wrists and kept them pinned to her tits. She was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked.

Something moved under the skin of her left tit, then. I may have whimpered a bit.

“Tell me what you know about Akashic Pharmaceutical!” Teresa yelled. “I couldn’t find anything on them on the internet!”

“Shit, shit!” I yelled as more things moved under her tits. She let go of my wrists and slapped me again. Bright lights filled my vision. A stinging pain blossomed on my cheek.

“They’re a new company,” I said. My hands were around my eyes to protect them. “They’re based in West Virginia, somewhere in the mountains. I’ve never been there!”

“Fuck,” she said. It was almost a whisper.

I peeked between my fingers. She sat on my desk. The anger was gone. Her whole body was slumped as if she were on the verge of tears.

“I keep having the same dream,” Teresa whispered. “I see the Cosmic Vagina and it whispers things. It tells me that my mother has a thousand daughters and a thousand sons. It tells me that I will give birth to wonders. It tells me that my pussy is the path to salvation.”

Teresa’s legs were open. The front of her sweatpants were soaked. I could smell her pussy and it was a musky mixture of earth and twat. I was afraid of her pussy but I was also licking my lips.

“I’m sorry that you are having such an adverse reaction,” I said. She didn’t look at me. She just kept staring at the wet spot on her pants.

“I recommend you cease taking the drug right away,” I said. “We’ll write up a report on your, uh… your side effects and see if there is anything Akashic can do.”

Teresa slipped a hand under her sweat pants. She stroked herself and the wet sounds of her pussy were unbelievably loud.

“Just curious though, have you had any increase in sexual appetite?” I asked.

Teresa didn’t answer me. Squish, squish, squish went her stroking fingers in her pussy.

I licked my lips. I had forgotten about whatever I had felt in her tits. The smell of her pussy was all around me and the sound of how wet she was made my boner come back to life.

“Maybe I should take a look before we start the report,” I said.

She looked at me. Her hand kept going. Squish, squish, squish.

“You know, so we can be accurate about the side effects,” I said.

She kept staring at me. Squish, squish, squish.

“I am a doctor,” I lied. “I might be able to help.”

“Yes,” Teresa moaned. She got off the desk. When she took her hand out of her pussy, it was soaking wet.

She grabbed the waist of her sweat pants with both hands and pulled them down, then stepped out of them and stood up straight. I was still sitting and eye level with her pussy.

Jesus Christ, there was a mess of pubic hair. It was like a small shrub on her sex. Drops of her juices decorated her pubic hair like little jewels.

“Take a look,” Teresa whispered. “Don’t be afraid to touch.”

The bruised area around my eye flared with pain but shit, she didn’t look like she was going to hit me this time. I reached out and pushed my way through her wet pubic hair. My fingers found the ridges of her labia and gently pulled them open.

The skin of her pussy was pitch black and glistening and wet as fuck. I slid my finger across her pussy lips in what I hoped she would interpret as a professional manner. They were slick to the touch.

“Yes,” she moaned.

My boner throbbed. I thought about how awesome it would be to plunge my cock into this wet hole. Then I remembered how I had thought the same thing about that cheerleader’s mouth and look where that got me.

“Touch me more,” Teresa moaned. She grabbed one of her tits and squeezed. Her plump flesh spilled through her clenching fingers.

I knew better… but my boner didn’t. I placed my thumb inside her pussy lips and gave her a small stroke.

Teresa trembled from head to toe. “Fuck,” she whispered. “More.”

My index finger slipped inside her. It was ridiculously wet inside her and wonderfully tight. I remembered her vaginismus and wondered if that was still a problem. As a doctor, I decided to check it out. For science.

I slipped a second finger inside her. Damn, she was tight but her pussy took my second finger easily. A third finger joined the fun. The walls of her pussy clenched and pulsed around my fingers but there was no unusual tightness here.

Squish, squish, squish went my finger.

“Wait,” Teresa moaned. “I need to sit down.” She pushed my hand out of her pussy. My fingers were soaked in her juices. She returned to my desk and sat on it, her thighs spread before me to reveal her pussy in all its hairy glory.

The wheels of my chair squeaked as I rolled closer to her. Her brown thighs were a canyon that led to the treasure of her pussy. The smell was incredible and I felt drool fall from my lips.

“Taste me,” Teresa commanded.

I thought about the teenage cheerleader. “Fuck my mouth,” she’d said. Was I willing to lose another job just because a woman told me I could use them?

Shit, yeah I was. Plus, I could always argue that I was just testing the drug’s reaction.

I dived in. I rubbed my face against her wet furry pussy and opened my mouth. My tongue plunged in and I took one long satisfying lick.

“Yes!” Teresa hollered Her hands grabbed the back of my head and pinned me to her pussy.

Oh yeah, this drug was a success! I kept licking. I never tasted pussy juice so delicious. It was sweet and salty and spicy and a little sour. My tongue went deeper and deeper as I tried to find more flavors.

She was so wet that my entire face was soaking. My head was slipping and sliding between her dripping thighs as my mouth went deeper into her.

My boner throbbed inside my pants. It wanted in. It wanted to be free and inside this impossibly wet pussy. I thought about undoing my pants but then I would taste something new and I would forget. Eating her pussy was more exciting.

That was when something inside her pussy licked back. My tongue tried to recoil but something wet and strong grabbed it. Something had my tongue and wouldn’t let go!

“Ahhh!” I screamed, for without my tongue, I couldn’t scream anything else.

“Yes!” Teresa growled and she held my head tighter. Her pussy shook and something moved against my face. I opened my eyes to see her pussy expanding! It was ballooning around my face as wet pussy skin slipped over my eyes, under my chin and around my ears.

My head was inside her fucked up vagina.

I tried to use my hands. I pushed against her thighs but I was powerless. I tried to stand but my knees were shaking too hard. My boner throbbed uselessly between my legs as the pussy throbbed around my head. The thing that had my tongue squeezed tighter. A flood of pussy juice filled my mouth and went down my throat. I choked down swallow after swallow.

Teresa moaned and it sounded like something, like words, but I couldn’t understand any of it. It was more like a chant, and she moaned it over and over again.

Her pussy tightened around my head. My skull felt like it was about to crack. The pressure on my eyes was intense and I saw stars bursting in front of me. I couldn’t breathe inside her pussy and my chest was about to burst.

Squish, squish, squish went my head inside her vagina.

And that is when I saw it. Teresa Gonzales was right about her pussy: there was a mountain in there.
It was hairy and a waterfall fell from a gushing cleft in its side. Giants ran up and down the mountain and I knew they were her children, her lovers and her worshipers.

The mountain, the Cosmic Vagina, shuddered. The wind carried its whispered words to me.

It told me to come.

Suddenly the vision was gone. I was trapped back inside Teresa’s damned pussy. The thing that had my tongue pulled harder and the walls around my head squeezed tighter.

My body shook. My balls ached and my chest was vibrating. I was trying to throw up and it hurt. It really fucking hurt.

The pussy didn’t care. It just squeezed tighter and tighter around my head.

I gagged and suddenly my mouth was full of semen. I gagged again and shot it from my throat. The pussy pulsed furiously around my head as I gagged more and more semen from my throat.

The pussy let go of my tongue. I yanked my head back and fell off my chair. I gagged and choked on the endless pussy juice that was inside me.

“I feel better,” Teresa said from the desk. Her thighs were open and her pussy looked normal again.

“Stay the fuck away from me!” I shrieked.

I don’t think she heard me. She got off the desk and headed for the door. I watched her bare ass walk away from me. I stared at her until she was out the door and out of sight, half-naked into the night. I was terrified that she would turn around and I would see that abominable pussy again.

I gagged some more. My throat burned. My balls felt weird and empty. My boner was long gone, now just a limp noodle between my legs.

I looked at the computer and went back to her file. There had to be something there I’d missed. There had to be something to explain what the fuck made me come in my own mouth. There had to be some goddamn thing to explain that giant fucking mountain pussy… thing.

That was when I saw it. I screamed and screamed and checked it again before screaming some more.

Teresa Gonzales was in the control group.

OBSIDIAN CAPRA AEGAGRUS

Christopher Slatsky

How much again?

Listen friend, ah’m gonna hep ya. The obsidian capra aegagrus, well it’s the expensive shit- $500 a gram. Outrageous I know I know. But I’m a reasonable man, I want to see this through. For you, bein’ as you’re my new customah an’ all, $300. His difficult to place but vaguely Southern drawl gave his voice a warmth that his words turned to ice.

It was early afternoon- how much heroin had I mainlined already? Two grams? I could stand a lot more. I’d anticipated and funded this drug acquisition over a period of months by selling several boxes of my beloved vinyl collection topped off by a handful of drug deals where I illicitly chalked up the product to inflate the price. But $300 for a gram of heroin was unheard of even if it was the legendary La Chiva. I only had $260 to my name but my resistance to traditional heroin made everything else boring, I had to up the ante. I could no longer even come close to the waves of euphoria a few mgs of smack had swelled under my skin back in the day. I’d been looking for this obsidian’ musk for months, never accepting that the legendary heroin the most erudite junkies and most subversive poets spoke of with reverence was an urban legend.

You ready to touch the yella’ hem of the KING’s robe? His features were odd, long oval face, flat nosed like a boxer who had lost too many bouts, high cheekbones that seemed to collapse his beady eyes deeper into his taut skin, an unruly wisp of a goatee the same pale straw color as his thin-haired scalp.

What’s that?

Ya know, Chase the Ochre Dragon? Crank up?

I was so nervous about the mysterious heroin I was about to buy and insert into my veins I could only respond with a stuttering reference to the strange swirling symbols and the number 238 tattooed on the back of the thoroughbred’s hands. He idly played with a gaudy pinky ring ascribed with the skull of a goat.

Like the ring? I get ya one ok? Ya be one a the Thousand too. Heh hah. But first ya gotta buy then ya slam then we talk.

Of course I handed over the $260. The dealer frowned, considered the missing money, shrugged, pushed the wad of bills into his pocket and removed a bindle in its place.

A’right, good enough fah now. You pay the rest back latuh, ‘k? He dangled the small intricately folded envelope between a thumb and forefinger so long they appeared to have too many knuckles. I nodded, he tossed me the heroin.

I cooked the shit up with the dealer sitting right there the whole time watching me with that bovid-shaped face of his. I filled the syringe, dark brown liquor strained through the cotton ball, found an intact vein, spiked it, slipped the tip deeper, pulled the plunger back and welcomed the pink swirl of my blood floating freely inside- this was my cue to push the syringe down slowly and gently like an artist methodically stippling the shading in a drawing.

When I joy-popped that ‘capra aegagrus for the first time it gave me the familiar sensation of a soothing heat throughout my entire body, a visceral sleeping-in-front-of-the-campfire nodding off warmth. But there was also the novel introduction of an unidentifiable odor so vivid I was certain it was emanating from something sitting in front of me, scrutinizing me as my head bobbed, my mind nodding off into a euphoric dream sleep where everything was perfect. This heroin was different. Special. I was suffused with the good sick, far better than the usual tar, no comparison, a starless night compared to one animated with swirling novas and a kaleidoscopic panorama of galaxies forming and dissipating against a deep sky.

When my neuropomp escorted me to the chemical side I heard the twittering of a woodwind spinning in the air accompanied by a voice that stirred atavistic memories of spectral landscapes.

I felt...

...the din of a church bell’s tremor in my sternum. My hands a complexity of whorls and skin, blood spiked under my palms. I am made of LIGHT.

I woke up groggy, clutching a bizarre white flower unlike any specimen I’d ever seen. It was slick with my forearms’ blood. The texture of the petals was unusual; I ran my thumb across the pistil and realized it was actually an origami paper flower. I pushed the petals aside and saw a phone number with the name KHEIRON printed there. I opened the origami flower, flattened it out then, folded it into a square so the business card would fit into my wallet. Judging by how dark it was Kheiron had probably left hours before. I was grateful he had thought to lock the door behind him.

But that heroin! There was sheer joy and unadulterated bliss to be had by lifting this humdrum veil, a veil that reminded me of my daily degeneration into a worthless creature, addict or not, simply subjecting myself to the repetitive motions of tiresome existence. All it took was a small taste of obsidian capra aegagrus to open that curtain and allow myself to be dragged through the Star Filled Woods by the Black Goat, whisked away into a tantalizingly ceaseless cosmos. I’d found transcendence.

The next day at work all I could think about was getting home and shooting up. I filed my reports, made idle chit-chat with co-workers who seemed overly concerned with how haggard I appeared, talked about last night’s TV shows while all the while I only cared about filling my veins with that amniotic-fluid comfort again. On the way home on the subway I could have sworn I saw Kheiron in the car ahead of me but when he turned to exit the car I noticed that this commuter had long dark hair. The stranger stood on the platform staring at my train as it started to move. I couldn’t be sure since the lights in the station were flickering but as the man moved his head to look towards the stairs leading to the street I thought his features suggested the same flat nose and goatish eyes as Kheiron.

I walked the six blocks to my dingy apartment and didn’t even bother changing into casual clothes before I mainlined the remaining ‘capra aegagrus. Heroin took the weight of the world off my shoulders, plunged me into a pristine pool of tranquility, a kind of cocoon-like apathetic contentedness. But this drug did more, it relieved me of any vestige of pain, let loose the anxiety of dwelling on how irrelevant I was in this World, an insignificant speck of dull color on the canvas of the universe. This angst over how nothing ever mattered and never would dissipated in my bloodstream, replaced with a chemical lassitude, the comfort of not one care in the cosmos much less this sick planet.

A psychic string connecting my bloodstream and brain tense-snapped. I let the heroin taste settle all honey-thick with my blood getting heavier than my bones which were filled with air bubbles and I was feeling calm and composed. Music. A choir of leaves rustling, bass driven clopclop of hooves, the usual heroin tranquility where everything is pristine, floating on a gently undulating peacefulness seeping into everywhere, supporting me limply as the ichor-light from drab crumbling stars further lull me into drugged perfection.

Then.

When that semen-thick tar filled my blood-

…I dreamt of the Black Essence for the first time.

Whisked away to another world, a lush forest, hyacinth shrubs sprouting from the fertile loam of my drugged imagination. I walked through fields of lilies and tulips brightening the landscape, moved amongst sleeping poppies swaying in the caress of the Hypnos-moon’s illumination. Heroin wasn’t a psychoactive, I had no idea what was in the obsidian’ that was making me hallucinate but I felt physically present as I passed through tangled herbage, the scent of purple verbena intoxicatingly strong. Nothing sentient stirred here, only the torpid drift of lotus blossoms and the low thrum of mushroom gills vibrating under the moonbeam’s light touch. I was in Morpheus’ garden- but if he had once been attending this place he had left long ago to let it flourish on its own.

Once again I heard the music of that woodwind and voice. I sought the source of the fioritura with dogged determination. As I parted the thick overgrowth of a maidenhair plant I found myself standing before a dilapidated wall whose cracked foundation littered the ground like monstrous children’s toy blocks. The curious music came from beyond this barrier. I explored the wall’s span searching for an opening. Finding the shadowy maw of a collapsed portion I entered the darkness and stepped down into a sunken garden.

A thin stream of water trickled between a pair of malachite boulders and fed into a scented pool. I walked past a marble naiad thigh deep in the water and three dryads carved from chrysoprase dancing beneath the branches of a crape myrtle tree. But I was horrified to see the face of the satyr leering with argillite eyes from his cloak of vines, lifelike yet perpetually frozen in the posture its creator had sculpted it. My heroin calm was agitated, jangled by the sight of the satyr’s presence. So intent was I on that foreboding statue I was startled to realize the garden was cloaked in abject silence. Then I saw what had been making the music.

I have no words to adequately describe my initial encounter save that the undefinable Black Essence stepped from the encompassing shadows of the boulders. My imagination is far too mundane to elucidate the Presence sufficiently; my memory only retains the suggestion of an ominous cloud, a fog bank hiding something malevolent. The Essence hinted at an androgynous beauty, not merely the absence of gender but a figure pulsing with sexuality, the ousia of addiction. Tendrils of mist wavered above it like radiant beams from Helios’ halo. Its eyes were sorrel in the light but became darker when its black-as-the-ocean-floor ram’s horns cast a shadow across what may have been Its face. It held a stone flute, the pilfered property of the satyr, and gestured with the wind instrument towards a small plot of earth. A single strange flower grew there, not quite a hyacinth nor an iris, something whose petals were clasped in an odd manner suggesting the bud’s interior was distorted. The alien flower was the sole red object I’d encountered in the narcotic dream. The Essence smiled revealing small alabaster teeth. When I noticed the shape and color of Its lips I awoke disturbed.

I was obsessed with the Essence. During the following week I attempted to dream of the garden again but failed; the Entity shyly avoided my persistent enquiries into dream no matter how much heroin or how potent the hallucinogens I imbibed. I didn’t want to waste my remaining obsidian capra aegagrus so I relied on less expensive substances usually pilfered off of friends. I spent more time at clubs and drug dens to meet up with old acquaintances I hadn’t seen in years- they seemed vaguely familiar but had aged into the oddly shaped faces of strangers. I became quite the social butterfly, attending as many parties as I could accommodate to make potential connections with any dealers who were selling ‘capra aegagrus. But I had no luck. I was obsessed with reconciliation with the Essence but days of drugged explorations and nights of dreamless sleep passed with no success. I jealously guarded the remaining milligrams of ‘obsidian I had left.

But I could only hold out for so long; my willpower was limited. In desperation I finally broke down and mainlined the remaining drug and drifted on that flow of a perpetual cosmic flood, everything poetic perfection, washed up onto the edge of the garden. My dream still prospered with vegetation, though now of a terrible sort: disease, pestilence, a nightmare of bloated insects feasted on the substance of my narco-dream. Dying leaves furred with mold polluted the once rich soil; the very earth was saturated with weird fungi and weedy stalks twitching in the phantasmal half-light.

The beauteous song which formerly moved me was now a shriek that haunted as I searched for the Essence. My passage through the garden was hindered by the protrusion of gluttonous roots feeding on foul subterranean nutrients. I parted the maidenhair growth and it dissolved into sticky decay at my touch. When I reached the wall I found it once again towered before me; masonry stacked with uncanny precision, the rubble having mysteriously rebuilt itself. Wandering around the armor of the inner garden I found the structure impenetrable. Incited by frustration I scaled the wall with fanatical strength and allowed myself to fall into the darkness below.

The dim moonlight revealed a much changed sunken garden. Naiads and dryads no longer pranced in stasis but writhed in frozen agony, the satyr choked under a knot of puffy vines. The waters ran oily and foul, filling the air with a fetid stench, unsavory nourishment for the ivy encumbered trees drooping sullenly under the weight of their parasitic cargo.

That embodiment of lust, the Black Essence itself exited the shadows. It pointed the stone flute at the weird flower- the color had deepened to a rich incarnadine hue, the bud slightly parting its petals in prelude to bloom. Strangely, this flower’s birth terrified me. The vines twining about the satyr quivered, the statue’s head moved with a dreamy slowness until its gaze was locked onto mine. I awoke just in time to make it to the kitchen where I vomited into the sink until a trickle of water was all that my stomach could expel.

I was now completely broke, I’d sold all my possessions to maintain another month’s rent. Two, three weeks had passed before I realized I had forgotten to show up for work. I assumed I had been fired though I never heard from any of my former employers. Nothing mattered anymore. I dragged myself to the bathroom and looked in the mirror like an actor in a movie playing an addict. My lower lip was torn, a blackened eye’s purple stain overflowing onto my upper cheek, a thread of broken capillaries mapping out the last few weeks worth of trauma. I didn’t remember if I’d been beaten up or fallen down. I didn’t care about anything except experiencing the ride again.

The holes in my forearm skin stung from the application of wadded toilet paper sopping wet with rubbing alcohol. In my bedroom I slumped on the floor at the foot of the bed. I was inert sinew, arms a ruin of collapsed vein runnels and abscessed tissue. The rest of the world was also inert meat but they had never run through the darkest part of the woods on the path that my consciousness had travelled. I was painfully thin and still in that limbo of sludge-sleep and awareness, the drug still muddying up my brain. My used syringes protruded from a glass filled with a pink tinged liquid like an artist’s paint brushes soaking in soapy water. I could still hear the delicate, almost fussy cloven-hoofed steps on the wood floors and some atavistic clump in my R-complex reeled and plucked the string, brushed cotton candy tipped fingers against the sky, stars as viscous as artery blood dribbled light and AWE cavorted in my head like ancient things dancing in deep grottoes.

I had to go back. Mainstream drugs were long ineffective; I had grown completely immune to the banality of this world’s opioids. Only the obsidian capra aegagrus could transport me but I was completely dry. No matter, the Essence was all I craved, all I could think about. He cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

It was just past 1 a.m. I visited the usual copping zones but nobody had any tips on how to get my hands on some obsidian’. Nobody at Bona Deas had any crank or shub-tar much less the mystery heroin- neither did any of the other clubs in the area. As a last resort I set out for the outskirts of town, crawled through holes in wire mesh fences, wandered down alleys where kicked syringes rattled, skulked across the empty lots of industrial areas. With so few people around the night seemed abandoned, a vacuous empty space. I walked to the edge of the city through a construction site that had ceased work months ago. The few houses that had been partially built had been vandalized, their broken windows and doors grafittied with swirling patterns and horned goats.

The forest was all I had left. I knew that in the woods there were vagrants camped out in ripped tents and torn plastic tarps, a community of junkies and dealers living off each other symbiotically. My viscera squirmed with withdrawal symptoms like insects burrowing under bark. I was all but a walking corpse. The forest was my last hope.

I trudged along a gravel path past piles of clothes and fast food wrappers where transients had camped out. Another ten minutes of walking and the path dissolved into the forest floor. Just ahead, contrasted against the night sky, I saw what looked like human figures dangling from the trees, ghostly shapes whose limbs fluttered weightlessly as a slight wind stirred the branches.

As I approached the area I saw that the trees were decorated with plastic clothes hangers hooked on the lower branches, some with long sleeved shirts and pants still drying in the cool night air. I came upon the encampment just 30 feet or so deeper. The tent city was small but gave the impression of a massive forest animal trying to blend into its surroundings. I looked into several shelters but there was nobody around. I was aching for a hit, sweating, withdrawal nausea curdling in my stomach. I lifted the flaps of a few more tents and kicked some soiled mattresses in frustration before I decided to call it quits. I made it as far as the beginning of the gravel path when a powerful stench assailed me. I reeled at the sensation and spun around at the sound of branches snapping.

The Black Essence stood before me. It was majestic, the unfettered expression of wanton lust and desire/addiction. My sludge-sleep had dreamt itself into reality, the Essence, the very Being that made my addiction a poetic expression and each chemical manipulation a symphony of color and mood was here! My trackmarks burned, spread wider, thin rivulets of blood began to seep from the holes as if in preparation of foreplay. The Black Goat leaned towards me out of a gray cloud shuddering with tentacles of mist, a thing with eyes of azure embers, cochlea shaped horns curling high into the night air. It snorted the stench of opium into my face and open mouth, its rows of bloated teats glistening in the starlight. It moved fast.

Its impact was tremendous, a monstrous weight like a planet’s gravity pressing me against the earth. I was dragged across the forest floor towards the tents. I heard ribs break. The Goat tore into me, raped and clawed its lust in profound gashes across my skin, threw gobbets of bloody muscle across the forest as it neared orgasm. I was drenched in my blood and our shared perspiration. I was sweating semen.

The Black Goat withdrew and ejaculated a stream of tobacco-spit black heroin onto the dirt. The forest stank of festering wounds and a vinegar burn in the back of the mouth after shooting up. I was in a world of sour sweat and stained mattresses, floating calmly into Oblivion. The Goat embraced me, smothered me in its bosom. I tasted colostrum, entered my decaying dream. My mind sluiced through the foul arteries of a dying universe, the stink of moldering stars floating in the blackness. I swam down a tranquil passage through gray waters that coursed into the dream garden where rot gnawed the corpses of flowers and trees dark with loathsome hues. I trod upon strange pods that burst and spewed mephitic gas, vomited exhalations of air from an emptied stomach.  More disturbing than the previous song of dissonance was the absolute silence of that wicked flute. Arriving at the wall I was shocked to discover the stone blocks scattered in greater disarray than when I first confronted the monolithic structure. I scrambled over the chaos of stonework into the inner arbor where I prayed the Essence still waited for me.

But the sculpted figures had crumbled into powder, the remains of a stone arm here, a stone chunk of face there. The once pleasant waters no longer flowed, stilled by the shifting of the boulders due to an odd spasm of the earth. Trees had decomposed into compost. I waited for the Black Essence to acknowledge its presence but the darkness hid only silence. Its absence was but the first of the assaults on my psyche for when I turned my gaze to that mound of soil and its inexplicably horrific flower I saw it was fully bloomed, a blood red spill on the shadowy garden. The stone flute lay half buried by the contaminated dirt. Overcome with fear and despair I was disgorged from reverie back into the forest where I collapsed onto a piss soaked mattress, rolled into a fetal position, my blood gushing, soaking into the fabric.

My sweet sweet boy. I have so much more to experience from you. The Black
Goat’s voice was the sound of tree trunks snapping in a windstorm. As It towered over me I realized the Goat was lactating a dark brown liquid. The Goat snorted, dipped Its horned scalp towards me and loped back into the Woods with graceful strength. I watched Its progress until I could no longer hear It crashing through the foliage. My body was shaking uncontrollably from withdrawal pain and blood loss.

First time is always the killuh. Worse ‘en the cotton fever. Kheiron unzipped a tent’s entrance and stepped out.

Yeah? You been there the whole time?

Ah’m always near, mah junkie friend.

Then you got somethin’ to help me with the pain?

Kheiron smiled a big toothed smile, his thick gray tongue moistened his thin lower lip. He grabbed my wrist forcefully, I didn’t have much strength left and his grip was inhuman. He turned my hand palm up and pried my fingers open as easily as if he were unfolding a piece of origami art. He dropped a handful of what felt like small smooth pebbles onto my palm and forced my fingers closed around them.

These’ll save ya. Stop the blood, stop the pain, stop everything.

What about the Essence?

The Black Goat of the Woods? She be out there a’right. I call her “She” though she ain’t what you’d call sex specific the way we understand it. “Black Essence”? Heh hah. She is and all that. No need to worry ‘bout Her so long ya does what She Wills. He patted me on the shoulder and turned to leave.

My ring. I want it.

Kheiron froze. Looked me up and down with a sly smile, his eyes flashing emerald in the starlight. Well then welcome aboard m’friend. He reached into a breast pocket and tossed a goat-skull ring to me. I caught it and put it on.

The Black Goat welcomes ya. When ya Desire more ya know how to find one uh the Thousand of Us. We’ll talk about the tattoos next time. He pointed at the 238 and ornate symbols on the back of his left hand then gave a wave with the other. He disappeared along the gravel path back into the city.

If I were a poet I’d say that heroin mocks me with its resplendency; beauty’s true nature exposed from every blossoming injection like a dissected fruit exposing the worm within. If I were more eloquent I’d say that I now recognize the true identity of obsidian capra aegagrus- it engages in incestuous revelry with Hypnos and Nyx and beneath its allure hides dear old familiar Thanatos. Heh ha!

But I’m no poet and I sure as hell have no regrets. I had no choice but to return to the garden, to taste the Black Essence and float on its warm currents. I want nothing more than to shirk off this diseased skin and abandon everything that anchors me here. The Goat and Kheiron and the obsidian capra aegagrus will fulfill my wish, allow me one last chance to unspool my mind from this cesspool of existence. I no longer care about much of anything; I willingly relinquish my ownership of this skin, muscle blood and bone. Everything I was and am belongs to the Black Goat now. It has free reign to mold my flesh into whatever It Desires.

I will escape this finite existence into infinite dream. I rattle the objects in the palm of my closed fist, pop one into my mouth and dry swallow Kheiron’s pill without even looking at it. The drug takes effect immediately: my blood flow clots, bones knit together, skin seals shut. I wear a pallid mask as I coast into drugged dreams. I study the mound of pills on my palm. Each tablet is delicately stamped with the image of my strange dream flower and hand painted with the blood red letters ai ai.

The nickel-sized needle wounds on my arms gape, open and close their mouths in unison. Hungry for ceaseless currents.

DIRTYMAG

Jonas Moth

Churl was an adult magazine that had a short and undistinguished publishing run in the early ‘80s. After releasing its final issue in 1983, Churl’s headquarters, located in an old riverfront shipping office, was shuttered and remained without a legal tenant until a developer purchased the entire district. Before demolition began, a few salvaged items found their way to local auction. Among them was a bundle of letters intended for one of the magazine’s explicit features. The following is one of those letters…

Dear Churl,

I don’t know who else to tell this story to, but here goes. I work in the refreshment stand at the public pool in my neighborhood. I’m 19. It’s not busy yet because summer break hasn’t really started and the college kids are still away. But it’s hot, so the pool is open. I’ve worked here for three years now, and now is the best time to work, but this year, something really weird is going on.

Half the time I work with this old guy, Bert, but the other half, I work with Mary. Mary is cool. She’s a little short and skinny, but super, super slutty. And what she can do with her mouth, I’m telling you — she can really liven up a boring day of schlepping sno-cones. I mean, she could suck the orange out of a carrot.

I should probably also say that the counter in the stand is pretty high up, and nobody can tell what goes on underneath, which is good because I don’t want to freak anybody out. The trick is to keep a good poker face, especially when some little kid comes over with his mom to buy a hotdog.

So, last Monday, Mary is on the rag or something and wants to argue. She’s like, “Why can’t you eat my pussy sometime?” And I’m like, “Mary, we’re just friends.” So, Mary was still kinda mad when she started going down on me later, and it took me a little while to get into it. And that’s when I first saw the new girl.

I didn’t see her come in, but she was all by herself. She only had on some old cut-offs and a nice bikini top. She had this kinda gross hippy hair, but the rest of her was a total “10”. I saw my friend Lifeguard Mike checking her out from up in his chair. He saw me too and smiled, and suddenly I’m so hard I can’t believe it. Neither can Mary.

OK, the new girl comes over and sits in the grass near the stand, pretty far from everyone else and starts going through this ratty little duffle bag she has. She takes out a towel and some lotion and I think, “This is going to be good.” She kneels on her towel facing my direction and, not noticing me in my dark little box, she begins to rub down her arms and legs. I don’t want to cum yet so I tell Mary to ease up, but when I look back, the new girl is working on her chest and neck, and it’s almost too much to take. I must have made a noise then, because the girl finally notices me, and when she looked at me with those dark eyes of hers I felt a cold shiver all over.

OK, this is where it starts to get weird. The girl does not stop. She doesn’t even look embarrassed. Instead, and I’m not even lying, she gives me this creepy smile and pulls her top just over her perfect titties so that only I can see — and she keeps rubbing. I look back over at Mike across the pool and he’s leaning out of his chair for a better look, his tanned swimmer’s body stretched to the limit. He blows his whistle the same second that I give Mary the biggest dose she’s ever had.

I only wish that my story ended here, but it gets way weirder.

Mary goes home early feeling sick to her stomach. And that’s fine because it starts to look like rain and people are leaving. After a while, it’s pretty much just Mike and the girl hanging out at the other end of the pool, flirting like a couple of tards. I say that because when she raises her voice I can tell that she doesn’t speak right, like a foreigner — a pollock, or something. Mike keeps laughing but I know he doesn’t understand a word she’s saying. But she seems to understand him just fine — I do too. I can tell from where they’re pointing into the woods that they’re planning to fuck.

Way back in the woods outside the fence is what everyone calls “The Clubhouse.” It’s basically a junk fort some kids built so they could get high and look at porno mags. Some of the older kids also use it as a fuckpad. It’s got this nasty old mattress that makes you wanna barf. I only used it once.

The pool closes at six like usual and I watch the girl take the little dirt path around the fence and up into the trees. Mike calls his mom on the payphone to say that I’m driving him home later and asks if I can stay for dinner. A small bribe, I guess, but Mike knows I would do almost anything for him anyway. All I have to do is wait in my car for an hour and read the latest copy of Churl. (My step-dad has a subscription.)

An hour later, he’s a no-show. After another fifteen minutes I decide to go into the woods to get him before his mom comes looking. It’s starting to get dark, but that’s fine because I know exactly where I’m going. After a while, I only have to follow the noise.

When I get near, the Clubhouse is like I remember — pallets tied to the trees and a tarp for a roof. Inside, I can hear them still going at it, moaning, rusty springs creaking. I call Mike’s name and I nearly shit myself when a family of deer or something scatters away from the place and into the dark woods. I didn’t notice them at first and I know it sounds weird but I think they were peeping.

If Mike or the girl hears me, they don’t seem to care. And they don’t show any sign of slowing down even after I knock. Through a gap in the slats I can see just about everything. She’s on top, bucking and writhing like crazy. Both of them are shining with sweat, two perfect bodies fused at the groin. I can’t help myself, so I go down on my knees and rub one out in the dirt as I watch.

When she climaxes, I’m busy cleaning myself off with some leaves. The sounds she makes I will never forget, and I will never be able to describe them. The only thing that sounds human is her screams. Over and over, I hear her scream, “Eee-ya! EEEE-YAAA!!!”

Not knowing what to do and not wanting to make things more awkward, I wander back to the car — a plan that obviously backfires when Mike’s mom sees me coming out of the woods. She yells at me and forces me to take her to find Mike. A few minutes later we find him wandering down the path, dirty and naked, his raw red wang swinging between his thighs. He was still in a daze when his mom dragged him away and she was cursing my name all the way back to their car.

The next day the pool closes early because a thunderstorm is moving in. Also, Mike’s mom calls the office to curse me out again. She even threatened to sue the pool. Apparently, Mike suffered some kind of mild stroke. I plead ignorance.

Curious, and with some time on my hands, I take Mary into the woods. She wants to see where it happened. When we get to the Clubhouse, we are both surprised to find the girl still there. She’s sleeping on the mattress with a sheet pulled up to her chest. In the daylight, it’s clear that she’s living there. There’s a full suitcase open beside her and there are weeks of Styrofoam fast-food containers stacked everywhere — some are holding burning candles.

I can tell that Mary feels bad for her. She sits beside her on the mattress and starts picking the tangles out of her hair. Weirdly, the girl does not wake up. “I think she might be sick,” Mary says as she peels back the sheet, then follows with, “Oh, shit!”

“What?!” I say.

Mary looks at me all surprised and tells me, “She’s like eight months pregnant!”

I look closer and the girl’s stomach is all stretched-out and veiny. It’s so huge that it almost looks like it’s growing as I watch. When I look a little closer, I can also just make out a dark solid shape move a little under her thin skin.

Mary then makes me run to call an ambulance while she stays with the girl. But, by the time I return with the paramedics a half hour or so later there’s only Mary to treat. The paramedics say she’s in shock.

Later, I’m not allowed in when I try to visit Mary at the hospital and the police can only tell me as much as I can tell them, which is nothing. But a day or so later I get a letter.

What Mary tells me doesn’t make a whole lotta sense, but she says that in the time that I was gone, she watched the girl give birth. She called it “beautiful,” and “a revelation.” And she says that she will never ever forget the sight of the girl walking off naked into the woods and “holding her small black bundle to her breast.”

The pool is closed the next day but opens a week later when the college kids return. Lifeguard Mike is still recovering but I doubt I’ll ever see him back here. I don’t get fired like I’m expecting, but Mary quits. It’s just me and old Bert in the refreshment stand now. I keep an eye out for the girl too but she never shows. That is, until one evening, I see her in the park as I’m going to my car. For some fucked-up reason, she’s got this baby goat on a dog chain that a bunch of kids are petting.

She’s there again the next day, then the next.

She was there again yesterday. And when I finally got brave enough to wave at her, she gave me the same creepy sexy smile I saw before. Then she walked off back into the woods.

Today, I have the day off and I’m writing this letter. Tomorrow though, if I see her again, I think I might follow her.

WITH HONEY DRIPPING

Christine Morgan

Between the snow-capped mountain peaks and the dense dark-timbered woods, above the smooth and glassy ribbons of the deepest blue fjords, in a green and mossy meadow where the wildflowers grew, grazed the Goat-Girl’s shaggy herds under a pale spring sun.

She herself, the Goat-Girl, tune-whistled as she walked. Her broad hips swayed with every step. Her legs were long and strong and bare; likewise were her arms. A simple kirtle of spun wool, dyed butternut and brown, hung halfway down her thighs. Brooches made from bronze and polished goat-horn pinned the garment closed over her full, heavy breasts. On her feet were low, laced leather slippers. On her head, a knotted kerchief bound her hair.

Goat-Girl, they called her, and had since she was in fact a girl, a mere tot of a child, chasing bow-legged and tousle-headed after her father and brothers. Those times were, of course, by now long gone. So too were the father and the brothers … all but one.

Only Hafrvid remained, and only he alone, sometimes called her still by her birth-given name. Heidrun, the herdsman and his wife had named their only daughter, born with a cap of soft yellow curls. Heidrun, for the golden she-goat of the gods.

“She stands atop Odin’s feasting-hall, shield-shingled Valhalla,” the Goat-Girl’s mother had often told her. “She eats of the tree Leradr’s leaves, ever-fresh and eternal. Her udders swell with honey-mead, which drips copiously from her teats to fill a vat. And, though each night the Valkyries and their chosen slain drink as much as they can hold, the vat will never be depleted.”

Their own goats gave milk, not mead. Milk and wool, horn and hide. They roved the mossy meadow, grazing at the grass. Most of the she-goats sported pregnant, bulging bellies. Yearlings frisked and frolicked. Young bucks head-butted in mock battles, practice for autumn’s mating contests.

The largest, strongest and oldest buck braced his cloven hooves against a slab of stone. His wool was greyish, coarse and dark. A bearded tuft wagged from his chin. His horns curved thick and majestic. He flicked an alert ear, long-pupiled amber eyes watching over the rest of the herd.

When a particularly foolish brown buck whose ambitions were too big for his horns attempted a prancing charge, the older male butted him so hard that the challenger was flipped onto his back with all four legs sticking up. He lay there with a stunned look as the grey buck sauntered over and drenched him with a stream of odiferous piss. Duly chastened, shamed in the sights of the does, the would-be contender then staggered to regain his footing, and trotted off to the other side of the meadow.

As the Goat-Girl moved among the herd, she ceaselessly gathered up the shed wisps and clumps of wool. These, she tucked into a bag hung at her belt. The other women of the farm-stead – her brother’s wife and daughters, his mother-in-law, their female slaves – would see to the brushing and carding of it, the spinning, the weaving. They would also see to the milking, the making of butter and cheese, and other such tasks from which the Goat-Girl was exempted.

Hers were other duties.

“Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said, turning her face into the breeze that blew up from the dark-timbered woods.

It wafted cool but pungent, its scent overripe, fruity and meaty, redolent of loam and rich soil, of sweat and of musk, a rut-scent, a fuck-scent, both sickening and arousing. Lust kindled a slippery heat in the Goat-Girl’s loins even as her stomach seemed to roil and churn.

“Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said again. “Praise and fear the great Goat-Mother! From whose fecund, fertile womb sprung Heidrun, my name-sake! From whose wet and bloodied cleft burst forth Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir, the tooth-grinder and tooth-barer, war-goats of Asgard!”

The sky was clear, fair-blue, cloudless above her. Yet nonetheless it seemed that she heard the far-distant crack and rumble of thunder, as if Thor’s chariot-pullers acknowledged her words.

She carried also a sturdy stave, gnarled and twisted but worn smooth, using this to nudge the goats along or disrupt the inevitable squabbles that broke out among them. At its upper end was knobbed black bark whorled with wood of white, in rounded bumps and knots and contours. This, the Goat-Girl rubbed with one hand, while with the other she fondled the fullness of her breasts through the kirtle’s wool. Her nipples throbbed stiff against the cloth, seeping slow trickles of moisture to match that dampening between her thighs.

Around her, the she-goats bleated. The large buck snorted, tossing his horns. Cloven hooves pawed at the sod. The breeze blew stronger, warmer. Some of the young bucks and yearlings left off their playful frolicks and mock-battles, imitating clumsy efforts at mating, attempting to mount one another, hairy haunches humping.

The Goat-Girl unpinned her brooches, lowering the top of her kirtle to bare her breasts and touch them, hefting their weight, rolling her large berry-red nubbed nipples with forefinger and thumb. Sinking onto the lush green grass, she pulled the kirtle’s hem to her waist. Her hands roved her body like those of any lover. She delved to stroke the fleecy mound at her loins, parted her flesh-folds, probed the slick cleft revealed.

“We honor the Goat-Mother,” she said in a husky murmur as she dipped slow fingers into the ready channel of her sex. Her hips and buttocks squirmed. Her breath caught. Her tongue slid wetly over her lips. She gazed with eyes half-lidded at the melting-butter sunlight on the trees.

Sweet fluid seeped from her breasts; she smeared the honey-milk nectar over the end of her goat-herd’s stave until the knobbed wood glistened. Then she slid it down her belly and guided it to her cleft, the knots and bulges rubbing in lewd, enticing ways. She did not sink its bulbous wooden girth into herself, but teased at the outer lips and massaged her bud of pleasure with it until the delicious seizures overwhelmed her writhing, gasping body.

The gravid she-goats looked on approvingly. The large buck snorted again, his own arousal evident. The younger goats continued capering in their antics until he charged into their midst, butting aside several to single out a plump yearling doe. He nudged his nose under her tail, sniffing and huffing, nuzzling with exploratory licks. The young doe squealed, hind legs braced wide as he roughly mounted her.

Watching their urgent coupling, the Goat-Girl clasped her thighs tight around the stave so that its smooth shaft rested snug along her furrow. She flexed her loins against it in a rhythmic, quickening motion. With one hand she squeezed more of the sweet and milky nectar from her breasts; with the other she tugged at her lower fleece-curls as the sensations again approached their peak.

“Ia Sib-Njurath!” she cried aloud, this time working the stave’s knobbed end into her sex, pushing it deep and drawing it out in purposeful strokes. She rotated it slowly, twisting it within her this way and that, so that the contours found hidden sensitive spots and elicited surge after pulsing surge of ecstasy.

After, spent and sated, she lay sprawled a while in the meadow sunshine, thinking of the dusk and musk of the dark forest grove. Of what awaited there, what awakened there. Of what stirred, what summoned, rousing the rich earth, fertile and potent.

Soon. It would be soon, very soon.

Once she felt her legs might again hold her, she rose to her feet. She adjusted her kirtle, re-pinned her brooches, and gathered the herd. This brought as it always did much blatting and goatish indignation, but she led them back to the farm-stead nonetheless.

At the goat-byre, she gave the goats over for milking. Ulfhilde supervised, her brother’s wife, red-haired, with hips like ale-barrels and a healthy babe a few months old cradled in a woven sling on her back.

A glance at the Goat-Girl, and another at the she-goats, was enough to inform Ulfhilde that the time was at hand.

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” the Goat-Girl replied.

“Have you told Sigride?”

“Not yet. I will do so after I speak with Hafrvid.”

Ulfhilde nodded. Whispers passed among the other women, many of whom also had given birth during the long cold winter. Some rushed to share the news with the men in the fields and work-sheds. Word quickly spread throughout the farm-stead.

The Goat-Girl paused at the log-walled and thatch-roofed hall to empty her wool-bag into the large basket in the weaving-room. Even the littlest girls helped their sisters with the sorting, under the guidance of spindle-aunts and grandmothers. The smaller boys ground grain at stone querns, tended the hearth-fires, and watched attentively as white-bearded Geitr scraped a stretched goat-hide.

She next sought out Hafrvid, her brother and their chieftain, up by the smoke-houses. Or, rather, behind the smoke-houses as it happened … she followed the sounds of raised voices and saw Hafrvid standing in arguing confrontation with Brusir, while a group of other young men and boys looked on.

“— instead of treating me like a child!”

Brusir was one of their nephews, the grown son of Haurgrim, their dead elder brother. Although Brusir had his father’s bushy blond hair, blue eyes and pugnacious manner, he as of yet lacked Haurgrim’s full stature or strength. This did not stop him from resenting what he felt was his unfair lot, and this was by no means the first time he and Hafrvid had disputed.

It was, however, the first time – in the Goat-Girl’s knowledge, at least – that Brusir so lost his temper as to swing a fist. The blow caught Hafrvid on the jaw, and it was hard to say which of them, or the onlookers, was the more surprised.

Surprised, Hafrvid might have been, but not for long. His big hands shot out, seizing the youth’s upper arms and jerking him forward. He slammed his forehead into Brusir’s face, that solid curve of bone head-butting him as well as any he-goat might have done. There was a hard crunch, blood bursting from Brusir’s nose.

Brusir yelped with pain, then staggered and fell sprawling when Hafrvid shoved him square in the chest. The other young men and boys flinched back a step or two, grimacing.

“You are still a child,” Hafrvid said. “And I am still chieftain here. You would do well, nephew, to keep that in mind.”

Then he unlaced his breeches, hauled out his prick, and hammered home the lesson with a hot yellow stream. It soaked Brusir’s tunic, splashing his skin and his sparse-growing beard.

The Goat-Girl knocked her stave’s knotted upper end against the nearest smoke-house’s plank wall. They all glanced around at her, Brusir with sullen humiliation, the others with varying levels of apprehension and lust. Hafrvid raised his eyebrows as he tucked his prick away.

“Make ready your goat-skins,” she said. “Those of you who are of age.”

Eager grins greeted these words. So did a few disappointed grumbles, these from the boys who would have to wait yet another year.

“Go,” Hafrvid told them, dismissing them with a gesture. “The rest of you, see that the axe-blades and knives are well-sharpened. We will have much work in the morning, at the slaughter-yard.”

They went at a run, laughing and capering, whooping war-cries to one another. Brusir got up, wincing as he wiped blood from his nose, wincing again as he wrung Hafrvid’s piss from his clothes. He cast one last surly look at his uncle over his shoulder as he left.

“What was that about?” asked the Goat-Girl.

Hafrvid snorted. “What wasn’t it about? Insolent dung-clot. He might make a fine chieftain some day, if sufficient respect ever gets drummed into that thick skull of his.”

“As our own father said of you.”

“It was just as true then.” He stretched. “So. She calls again from the dark-timbered woods.”

“She does.”

“Sigride?”

“Unless you object.”

“No.” Hafrvid placed a large hand over each of the Goat-Girl’s breasts, her nipples poking stiff against his palms, their dampness seeping through the wool of her kirtle. “Ia Sib-Njurath.”

“Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said, firmly cupping the bulge of his groin.

Then she went to find Sigride, the eldest of Hafrvid’s and Ulfhilde’s daughters. Flaxen-haired Sigride, beautiful, and of a ripe age. The girl was at the bread-ovens, turning the loaves so that they would bake evenly, when the Goat-Girl approached.

“Is it … is it time?” asked Sigride, not without some trepidation.

“Tomorrow at dusk,” said the Goat-Girl. “The first new moon of spring. You are ready? You know what is expected?”

She gulped, and smiled nervously. “Yes. I think so.”

“It is a great honor.”

“I know.”

“Your parents will be very proud.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Only for a moment, if even that.” The Goat-Girl embraced her with affection, brushed a smudge of flour from Sigride’s nose, then kissed her fair brow.

Sigride clung to her for a bit longer, glancing up through lowered lashes with a manner of shyness and slyness together in her blue eyes. “Could I …?”

The words went unfinished, but their question continued in the tentative brush of her fingertips along the heavy undercurve of one of the Goat-Girl’s breasts.

The Goat-Girl kissed her again, on the mouth, their lips sealing moist and soft. “But be quick,” she said, once more unpinning her brooches. “You mustn’t let the bread burn.”

“I won’t,” promised Sigride, with an admiring sigh as the top of the Goat-Girl’s kirtle fell away.

Her touch, unhindered by cloth, grew more bold. She caressed the smooth skin, thumbed the distended nipples, gently squeezed them until they issued forth their honeyed, milky nectar.

“Taste of it,” murmured the Goat-Girl, guiding Sigride’s head to her bosom.

Not that Sigride needed any further encouragement. She flicked her tongue at first one nipple and then the other, licking at the trickling flow, darting back and forth like a bee unable to choose between equally succulent blooms.

With a whimper, she latched onto one, sucking, suckling, drawing the sweet fluid as greedily as any hungry babe. But, unlike a babe, she moved the lower half of her body so that their loins rubbed together. Continuing to whimper, breathlessly, low in her throat, Sigride rocked up and down, side to side.

The Goat-Girl cupped and gripped tight with both hands Sigride’s firm young buttocks. Though her cleft still tingled from what she’d enjoyed in the meadow, arousal swiftly warmed her anew. “Harder,” she said. “Suck harder, yes, good, ah, good.”

Moaning around a mouthful of breast-flesh, Sigride did so. She fumbled her skirt to her waist, wedged one of the Goat-Girl’s thighs between her own, and began riding against it, twitching her hips with increasing urgency. The Goat-Girl wetted her fingers and pushed them down to Sigride’s loins, sliding in circular pressure over the firm little nub tucked into the dewy folds.

Sigride quaked in a sudden rush of release, voicing muffled cries that trailed off into tremulous gasps. She half-collapsed into the Goat-Girl’s arms, head cradled in the valley of the breasts she’d been lavishing with her tongue.

The Goat-Girl held her like that until Sigride regained her breath, then set her on her feet.

“Mustn’t let the bread burn,” the Goat-Girl reminded her, smiling.

With that, she kissed her brow again and left her to tend the loaves in the oven.

Soon, the day’s labors were over, the chores done, the livestock tended, the hall’s door shut and barred against the coming darkness. A mood of excitement and anticipation hung over the folk of Hafrvid’s farm-stead as they sat around the long tables for their evening meal.

It was no feast, of course. The following evening, they knew, they would enjoy a great feast of meats both roasted and boiled, with hearty stews and cakes served with berries in sweetened cream.

But there was bread fresh-baked, with butter fresh-churned. There was a soup of lentils and vegetables seasoned with herbs. There were dried fruits and hard cheeses, and to drink there was barley-beer.

As they ate, white-bearded Geitr’s mother, Gerte Half-Sighted – who had been the Goat-Girl herself, in years now far lost and distant – took a place on a comfortable chair by the fire to tell stories and sagas kept treasured in her ancient memory. Including that one which was a great favorite on such occasions as this, for it was the story of how their family came to be.

Once it was that Thor and Loki set out traveling from Asgard

In the thunder-chariot drawn by Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir,

Thor’s strong and mighty war-goats, brothers of golden Heidrun

Who stands atop Valhalla, udders dripping the sweet honey-mead;

These three firstborn of Sib-Njurath, Mother of a Thousand Young.

The gods sought their night’s lodging with a poor peasant and his wife

Thor slew his goats, skinned and slaughtered them for the cook-pot.

Immortal, they would spring up whole again by the next morning.

But the peasant’s son cracked a thigh-bone to reach the rich marrow,

So that one of the goats healed lame-legged, and Thor was in a rage.

The peasants, cowering in terror, offered compensation for the insult.

Thor agreed to take their son and daughter to be his servants;

Thjalfi was the boy’s name, and Roskva his pretty sister.

The gods made frequent lusty use of her, Thor and Loki alike,

Parting her plump thighs and thrilling her loins with pleasure.

When the rut-mood came over Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir,

Thor bade Roskva service them as well, but she hesitated.

Frightened of the fierce war-goats, she prayed to Sib-Njurath

Who transformed her to a she-goat, that she might flip her tail,

Able, and soon eager, to be mounted by them both in turn.

This went on for some time in their travels, thoroughly and often,

Roskva gloriously god-fucked and goat-fucked night after night

Until it was no wonder she should find her womb over-filled.

Some of her sons and daughters no different from any other babe

But some born with horns and hooves, or goatish hindquarters.

And of that lineage, of course, their own line had through many generations descended. Favored by the Great Goat-Mother, who was older by eons than the gods of Asgard, who would be eternal long after Ragnarok’s final battle … Ia Sib-Njurath.

By the next afternoon, all was in readiness. Those who would not take part in the ceremony itself – elders and children and slaves – remained at the hall to prepare the feast. The rest gathered outside as dusk approached.

The men wore shaggy goat-skins draped over their shoulders, their heads crowned with goat-horns, their bodies and faces daubed black with charcoal and soot. The women, barefoot and bare-headed, wore plain shifts of linen and garlands of mistletoe. The babies the new mothers carried in their arms, seven of them this year, had been painted with a mixture of clay and red ochre. They fussed at the unfamiliar itchiness of the caked, drying substance against their tender, naked skin.

Sigride, her blonde hair unbound, rode nude astride the large buck with the grey chin-tuft. Younger men and women, those of adult age but as yet unmarried, led the pregnant she-goats in a line.

The Goat-Girl went at the head of the procession, clad only in a cloak of snow-white goat-skin tied at the throat. In one hand she held her stave, in the other a tallow lantern. Hafrvid, alone among them armed and armored, brought up the rear. That enemies from neighboring lands, or those who did not share their faith, might seek to disrupt this ceremony was a remote risk … but a risk nonetheless.

In the deep grove of the dark-timbered forest, they came to a place where cairns of moss-covered stones held unlit torches. These, the Goat-Girl touched with the lantern’s flame until they sputtered with wild pagan light.

Jugs of drink passed hand to hand, mead mixed with fermented goat’s milk, foul-tasting but powerfully strong. Each of the folk partook of it, even the babes having a droplet spilled upon their little tongues.

A wide pit had been dug from the earth, its bottom strewn with straw, a bramble-gated sloping trench leading down at one end. The she-goats were herded into it, rotund and waddling, fluids already leaking from the swollen nether lips of their hindquarters.

No sooner had the bramble-gate been shut behind them than the birthing pangs began. The she-goats strained and bleated. With wet squishing sounds and meaty plops, the slimy birth-sacks squeezed forth to drop into the straw. The small, struggling shapes within kicked their way to first breath’s freedom. They tottered upright on unsteady legs. The grey buck, their sire, bawled a loud and proud cry.

The Goat-Girl untied and spread her cloak of snow-white goat-skin upon the dark forest soil. Standing naked upon it, she lifted her engorged breasts in both hands, holding them out. One by one, the seven mothers brought their babes to suckle on the sweet honey-nectar oozing from her nipples. The same was done with the newborn kids, carried squalling and protesting up from the birthing-pit.

Sigride, still astride the buck, went slowly around the inside of the ring. She held in her slim hands a vessel made from the skull of an enormous goat, gripping it by the twisted curves of horn.

The nursing mothers milked their own breasts into this bone bowl as Sigride stopped before them. The other women made offerings of their moon-blood or pierced their thumbs with ivory needles. The men likewise pierced blood from their thumbs, or took their pricks in hand to coax forth spurts of seed. The fluids dripped and dribbled, flooded and flowed, mingling pale and crimson together.

When each had made his or her contribution, Sigride climbed down from the grey buck’s back and brought the bowl to the Goat-Girl, who raised it aloft.

“Ia Sib-Njurath!” cried the Goat-Girl. “Great Goat-Mother, we honor you with blood-letting and with birth!”

“Ia Sib-Njurath!” the rest answered in chorus.

The Goat-Girl tipped the bowl, letting its life-warm contents pour onto her face. Some of it, she caught in her mouth and swallowed. The rest coursed down her neck, over her breasts and belly, along her thighs and legs.

Spasms seized her body. A heat that was not quite pain, a dull forge-iron glow, spread through her. She felt her bones shift and move, her flesh re-shape.

From the waist up, she was for the most part unchanged … but for the horns that protruded with gristle-crackling noises from her temples, the narrowing elongation of her pupils, and the wispy tufts of dark wool curling along her jawline and chin.

From the waist down was another matter altogether.

The joints of her knees creaked as they bent back. Her toes curled under and merged, hardening, splitting, each foot becoming a cloven hoof. Her skin bristled as coarse black hair grew in sudden profusion from hips to ankles. A short, up-curving goat’s tail sprouted from between her buttocks. A large, up-curving goat’s prick sprouted from between her legs, rising turgid and pink. A pendulous leathery scrotum hung heavy against her thighs.

“Ia Sib-Njurath!” the Goat-Girl called, in a voice made resonant and unearthly.

The others went into a frenzy of stomping, swaying, and chanting. “Ia Sib-Njurath! The Black Goat of the Woods!”

The large grey buck shrieked a challenge, gouging the ground with a forehoof, snorting. He lowered his horned head. His shoulders bunched with menacing power.

The transformed figure of the Goat-Girl crouched, lowering her own horned head, her new eyes shedding an eerie, eldritch, marshfire radiance.

They leaped at each other in a sudden lunging charge. Their bone-plated skulls met with a terrible crack, the sound like that of a thunderclap violently shaking the sky. Both reeled back, dazed, then charged again.

The second crack was louder, earth-splitting, as of boulders and mountains rent asunder. The grey buck crumpled, falling senseless in a shaggy heap. The Goat-Girl stepped toward him, nudged him with a cloven hoof, and lowered her prick to unleash a steaming torrent of goat’s piss to douse him.

Tossing her horns with triumph, the Goat-Girl turned then to face Sigride, her strange form looming, casting shapeless shadows in the torchlight.

Sigride fell to her knees. The slim young hands that had held the bone bowl wrapped eagerly around the jutting prick. She deftly stroked it back to full erection. The Goat-Girl groaned with pleasure, pumping between Sigride’s palms and fingers.

“Your mouth,” said the Goat-Girl, in that unearthly voice.

The girl obliged instantly, parting her lips to engulf the erection, slathering her tongue up and down the thick shaft, taking the tip as far into her throat as she could without choking. The Goat-Girl held a loose fistful of Sigride’s fine flaxen-blonde hair.

The Goat-Girl, in a guttural growl, spoke again. “Your cunt.”

Sigride turned, going to all fours with her white buttocks in the air, presenting the gold-fleeced cleft of her young sex, its delicate folds plump and pouting, moist with need.

Uttering a lusty grunt, the Goat-Girl hunkered behind Sigride, grasped the girl’s hips, and mounted her with a deep, forceful thrust. They commenced at once a crude and fast rutting, Sigride wailing far more in passion than pain, driven to increasing convulsions of ecstasy with every stroke.

The Goat-Girl groaned as her fleshy hardness plunged in and out of that snug, clasping channel. Her teeth clenched, grinding in her jaw until they nearly shattered from the strain. Her heavy breasts bounced on her chest, raining their milky honey in spatters on Sigride’s bare back.

All around them, the onlookers gave in to their own urges. They fucked in every possible position and permutation … some that might have seemed impossible … in pairs and in groups … tangles of limbs, the wet slapping and smacking and squelching of skin and of sex … moans and groans, gasps and screams … the air redolent of musky sweat, of juices and exertion … each of them no sooner finished with one act or partner or orifice than turning to another …

With a howl such that the dark-timbered forest seemed to shudder, the transformed Goat-Girl emptied into Sigride a hot and copious flood. It overflowed Sigride’s womb and cunt; it ran in rivers down her thighs to soak the dark soil beneath them.

The rite went on, the fuck-lust orgy of fecundity and fertility, potency and pregnancy. It went on all that long spring night, fraught and teeming with the rich, rutting abundance of the Great Goat-Mother.

Dripping with seed and blood and milk and honey.

Ia Sib-Njurath!

IN THE DOWN DEEP DOWN

Jacqueline Sweet

Listen. Do you hear that?

That cheering sound, those shouts of “Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” coming through the door?

That adulation was meant for me.

If only Donny Worster hadn’t fucked it all up.

In the subterranean palace below my high school is a room. The room is carved of an odd stone that weeps viscous sap when touched by living flesh. Inside that room is a table, knee-high and longer than a bed, the slab is made of some blackened wood that appears burnt but has no odor at all. Inside the room, on that table, lies a book. The book is old, bound in mottled leather, the pages sing under your fingertips when you read it.

Donny and I picked the room with the blackened table as the perfect place to screw for our first time. When a girl’s going to lose her virginity, she wants it to be special. And what’s more special than the antediluvian sepulcher all the girls whisper about in the restroom?

Everyone knew about the subterranean palace, about the not-so-secret passage behind the painting of the first graduating class of Goatswood High in the hallway. That portrait with all the girls looking worried and all the boys already showing the telltale signs of old Goatswood heritage: the balding heads, the bulging eyes, the slouching posture. Everyone knew already that the key to opening the hoary, ice-girdled door behind the picture was your own blood. C’mon, we weren’t babies.

Donny insisted on waiting until we were eighteen to make the beast with a thousand backs together on account of his dad being the mayor. Donny, that traitorous coward, never wanted to embarrass his dad with any whiff of scandal. He was always the good son and such a bad boyfriend.

We opened the entrance to the subterranean palace with our mingled blood. The icy doorknob stuck to my warm hand like an animal bite, tearing away the topmost layers of skin as I turned and opened the portal. Before us stretched that gulf of nothing, the darkness-passage all the kids talked about. Bricks, larger than normal, formed first a short hallway and then a thin arcing bridge. We still had our torches from Home Ec that morning, so we lit them and set out.

The excitement was too much for me and right there, on that cyclopean bridge with nothing but darkness above and below, I got Donny to eat me out.

The oppressive weight of nothingness just really gets me going, y’know?

Donny was being a chickenshit, like usual, so I tied his hands behind his back and tripped him to get him in position. Maybe he almost fell off the side of the bridge, but if he hadn’t been so reluctant I wouldn’t have had to do that, would I? My panties were already so damp by then—crushing void and all—I just whipped them off and hurled them off the bridge. Then I knelt over his face, grabbed his ears and made him tell me he loved me in that special way that involved his long thick tongue working its way up my cunt.

To spice things up and add a little urgency I whispered to him all the terrible things I could think of. He couldn’t see, what with my skirt covering his eyes, so he had to take my word for it.

“A minotaur is here at the edge of our torchlight,” I said, “with a cock like a baseball bat. He’s shuffling closer and gesturing towards your ass.”

Donny wriggled his tongue faster.

“A carpet of spiders is creeping towards us, on the underside of the bridge. I can hear them. They’re going to surround us and then skitter up your pant legs, down your shirt collar. They’re going to lay eggs in your ball sack.”

Donny kicked his legs out.

“Your mom is here, Donny. She was in the special room with my dad. She’s naked and dripping with the come of a thousand horny beasts. My dad has her on a leash and she’s crawling, slipping in the pools of spunk, laughing to herself like a maniac. She’s coming for you next, Donny. She can’t see your face, just that stiff boner of yours. Oh what’s she going to do, Donny?”

Donny whimpered and writhed in that familiar way. There’d be a wet spot in his boxer briefs and when he finally peeled them off he’d reek like a goat. His come would be matted into his hairy legs.

Donny always got off to dirty talk.

And then I got off, too.

We may have been virgins, but we weren’t inexperienced.

The bridge yawned in front of us. Walking half-bent over, Donny lead the way over the span, the rank smell of his fluids clinging to him like a birthmark. The torchlight strained feebly at the darkness and then, rising out of nowhere, was the palace. It was as if a gigantic skull had been scrimshawed into a glorious sprawling mansion. Doors shaped like teardrops stretched before us, taller than houses. Above them bulbous, pored windows blossomed from the bone-white stone. The edifice was smooth to the touch and no seams revealed the trick of its building.

“I don’t want to go in there,” Donny said, his wispy goatee all a-quiver.

But then I reminded him of my promise to him. “My V-card is in there, D. Don’t you want to find my hot, wet, tight V?”

Donny gulped that double-swallow he always does and pushed the door. The door—which looked like corrugated bone—swung smoothly open. Our torches guttered in the stale air, popped as bits of hair singed in the flames. You ever see one of those cat ladies downtown, the ones dressed all in black who have dozens of white cats at home? The way their clothes looked is how the inside of the palace looked: fur everywhere.

Coarse hanks of fur clumped on the bleached stone floor. Bloody matts of fiber stuck to the walls in obscene piles. The thick air was clouded with the stuff. The palace, so regal on the outside, smelled like a goddamn barn.

Donny didn’t mind the disgusting room; he grew up on a goat farm.

Showing initiative for once in his life, he grasped my hand and lead me deeper into the structure. Rooms and tunnels extended in all directions, haphazardly, as if the place had been carved by ants or worms. There were no windows, no doors, no furniture inside the palace, just endless spaces lumped on top of each other like bubbles in a bath. Tunnels peeled off to the right or left, through the ceiling, dipping into the floor. Run a fire-hose in there and you’d have a perfect water slide, except for all that hair.

In one cavity, puckered ovals large as a man dotted the floor. In another, a pyramid of the same spotless white stone hung from the ceiling on a thread. Yet another was ridged with thin trenches that vibrated as we walked.

“It’s funny,” Donny’s voice was dreamy, “but I feel like I know this place. It’s like that old game we used to play, back in kiddie school, do you remember the one?”

Unlike Donny, I didn’t grow up in Goatswood. My family moved in when I was ten. Eight years and people around town still called us the new family. But when roots go back as far as they do in this town, eight years might as well be a day.

“It was this pretend game. Ms. Forsall used to teach it to us on rainy days when we couldn’t have the usual recess. She called it Down Deep Down. It’s funny, I hadn’t remembered that game at all until now.”

Donny pulled me deeper into the palace. Down one tunnel and up the next. Then sliding through a hole in the floor of one room and slithering on our bellies through a carpet of animal hair into a tube hardly larger than us. We went down, deep down for sure.

“We’d all of us sit in the dark, with our backs to the classroom windows, in one big line. Ms. Forsall would turn off the lights and tell us to close our eyes. And she always knew when someone was peeking.” Donny laughed, surprised at his own memories. “Then she’d talk us through this story about a child who falls through a hole in the world and ends up in a funny house made of bones. She said the house was the old head of a powerful friend who’d given it to us so we’d never be lonely or sick or scared. The house went on forever because it was also our friend’s memories and dreams and dreams never end.”

“In my primary school, we just played Duck Duck Goose,” I said.

Then I dropped my torch after slipping down a fur-covered embankment. The light plopped down a hole in the floor, twinkled out of sight. From the light of Donny’s torch I saw that the stone walls were no longer white. Sand-colored stones, mottled with brown splotches, dripping with some odorless wetness, closed in around us.

“She’d describe a room to us so vividly I could see it in my head. A room just like this one. And then she’d ask us which way we’d go. All the kids would shout out the answer but if you chose the wrong way you had to turn and look out the window. Those kids—the turners, the window-lookers—they had to be quiet for all the rest of the day.”

After walking for hours, we found a room. The room. The right room. Perfectly cubed, it floated inches off the floor in the middle of an enormous chamber. The walls and ceiling of the surrounding gloom drifted away into darkness. Our one last dying torch couldn’t paint that far. If it went out, what would happen to us at the heart of this labyrinth? How could we possibly retrace our steps?

The crushing darkness weighed on me like a yoke. I got so fucking wet.

“Thing is,” Donny continued, pulling me towards that room, “I never had to turn. When Ms. Forsall played Down Deep Down I always knew which way to go. Like she was having me walk the inside of my own body. I can’t believe I forgot all that.”

Donny’s hand slipped away as I pushed open the door to the room. This door was person-sized, carved from some blackened pebbly wood. A brass doorknob shaped like a giant pecker hung obscenely from the door. The pecker was warm in my hand. If Donny hadn’t been there I would surely have knelt and licked that thing, just to see what would happen. And then I might have hitched up my skirt and slid myself back onto it. But with D there I wasn’t about to lose my virginity to a godforsaken door.

Inside the room, a long low table carved from the same blasted wood as the door filled the space. Donny found a sconce in the wall and jammed the torch into it roughly. I envied that sconce. This room, unlike all the others, was devoid of that bestial fur. It was clean, apart from the slime that dripped from the walls.

Donny found the book first. I was busy taking off my skirt and didn’t see him peering under the wooden table. Badly cured skin, scarred and thick with animal hair, covered the book. The pages within were black, drawn upon with silvered ink.

“Look at this,” he said, and handed me the book. It was mine then, all mine.

Outside, a rumbling crunch. Stones shifting with muted thunder.

I didn’t notice. I was reading the book.

The squiggles and scratches of the text resembled the old words carved on the monolith outside the Goatswood town hall. No one can read them; they say the markings predate the native peoples. But as I stared at that book, flipping through the pages, admiring the drawings, a pinched feeling came over my eyes. Then a pressing, pushing sensation, like tiny invisible worms piercing my irises before squirming and twisting back into my brain.

And then I could read the book just fine.

And so could Donny.

“How did the Down Deep Down game end?” I asked him.

In a sing-song voice, he said, “In the room that is not a room there is a book that is more than a book and great reward and eternal life await those who find the room that is not a room and read the book that is not a book and the room will rise and the book will read itself and born again will our lord be, the great Shub-Niggurath, Mother in the Darkness, Mother of a Thousand Young, Mother Goat, Mother.”

The room shook around us. Was that a rising feeling?

Behind me, Donny’s thick cock nudged at my wetness. When had he released it? My cunt throbbed for him. He wanted my virginity and I wanted his, but the book said that was a bad idea. I didn’t know how I knew the book said that. But I did. I needed to keep my virginity for now.

There was no way we were leaving that room without fucking. Neither of us could let that happen. The air vibrated with our desire. I rubbed my hand across the wall, gathering up a fistful of that odorless slime. Reaching back I rubbed it all up and down Donny’s shaft. His cock felt bigger now, and not just because he was hard. I’d jerked him off a hundred times before—and now he was longer and thicker and harder than he’d ever been. I smeared the goo down his length to the base, and then wiped my hands on the thick carpet of hair that covered his legs.

I told him where I wanted him. He was eager to comply.

Donny squatted behind me, as that room lifted up into the darkness; he spread my ass cheeks apart and tongued my puckered hole with his sloppy tongue. He’d never done that before and I didn’t expect it to feel so unutterably great. I collapsed onto the table from the sensation, kneeling on that blistered wood, bracing myself with my elbows, my face jammed into the crevice of the book like it was a third lover I was eating out. The book spread its pages before me and as Donny licked my asshole the words of that black book crawled off the page and into my eyes, like silver ants hunting for sweet food they walked in a thin line to my mind.

The room rose quicker now, scraping across stone outside. Donny kicked my feet apart and stuffed his oozing meat up my dark passage. The room scraped upwards, Donny sawed his cock in and out of me, and I screamed.

Donny bleated as he came, spraying that musky junk up my insides. At first I felt all disappointed, like there was all that build-up and I still didn’t get to finish? But his cock kept jerking and spunking inside me, he whimpered and pawed at my back in desperation, trying to pull himself out, but it was no use. He was stuck fast. Pulse after viscous pulse flooded my colon and his cock swelled even larger. How much was he coming inside me? How was it even possible? Donny begged forgiveness, started crying, his forehead pressed to my back. And still he kept ejaculating. And I realized, with each load I felt an exhilaration spread through me like reaching tendrils, like joyous perverse tunnels being carved through my body. Each burst of his goaty seed took me one step closer to that precipice of orgasm. And then I was there, falling, screaming words I never knew, as my ass released its vice grip on Donny’s cock and he fell to the floor in a writhing heap.

“Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

As long as I kept shouting the pleasure kept reverberating within my body. I was an ecstatic bell ringing and ringing into the welcoming darkness.

The room rose slower then, crunched into place with a shudder than would have thrown us onto our backs if we hadn’t already been there. Our torch bounced from the wall sconce, extinguished itself on the pooling juices leaking from the both of us. Absolute darkness greeted us, held us close with smothering arms. Donny called my name but I was still screaming in that alien tongue, my orgasm ripping me apart and building me anew, over and over, with every raw holler.

The door opened then, and stars, baleful and radiant in their hatred, hung in the skies like frozen warheads. Every star above possessed a name and a face that were known to the book and so known to me now.

Rough men, faces covered with wrapped seeping bandages, exploded into the room. They took Donny and hefted him aloft, chanting his name as if he was a quarterback superstar. Donny, pants about his ankles, giant cock flopping below him, looked back at me with an expression unreadable in the gloom. Another man, slower, more careful, held the book aloft and turned its pages with a licked finger.

“The book is gone,” he said. “She is the book.”

“The book is gone; she is the book,” the crowd of men replied in song.

“Prepare her,” he commanded, tucking the book back under the wooden table.

Strong hands lifted me, bound me to the table with pinching twine. Still I yelled, “Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” until one man, the last to leave the room, spun on his heels and dove on top of me. I feared he would rape me then, that the smell of my drooling ass or my hungry cunt would be all too much invitation for these strangers. But no, he did something worse; he pressed his hand over my mouth with such force that he bruised my lips against my teeth and he cut off my cries of prayer mid-sentence. I was like a candle snuffed out between uncaring fingers. The joy that had sung from every chunk of my flesh receded and dripped away.

“You don’t deserve to say her name, newcomer. Not now, not ever.” The man spat the words at me then fled the room, locking the door behind him.

Outside the door the cry rose up, “Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” Men chanted Donny’s name then too. Promises of eternal life, of greatness revealed echoed in the night air. I raised my head as far as I could off the table, my neck straining, and saw a hill. It was the old Goatswood hill, the one at the edge of town near the abandoned cider mill, the one that stuck out from the ground like a festering blister. As the men chanted—Donny’s voice joining them, uncertainly—the hill shook and a door opened in the side of it. A massive writhing form dragged itself free of the dirt, larger than the hill itself, the thing looked like it’d been formed of castoff flesh. White and mottled, it possessed a bulbous body held aloft on three impossibly thin spurs of bone. Where a head should be the creature had a writhing mass of jellyfish-like appendages.

“Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” The men hollered, while Donny screeched like the chickenshit he was. Blubbering and bawling and trying to get away.

The thing—the goddess—dove forward in a blink and swallowed Donny whole. Dimly I could see his dark form sluicing down through the translucent neck of the goddess. And though I couldn’t make out what was happening from my distance, the book knew and the silvered words marching across the flesh of my brain, nestling into the whorls and folds of my gray matter, chewed into my mind and showed me in glorious bursts of color what was happening.

Donny was being remade like all the men of Goatswood were remade, becoming ever more beast like, his flesh rippling and splitting open as his knees forced themselves backwards, his muscles found new configurations. His skull crunching and sliding as it took on a caprine angle. His cock swelled and dropped, hanging from his groin like an extra arm. The book showed me Donny basking in the eldritch fluids of Shub-Niggurath’s cunt, transforming into some barbaric goat man and all I could think was it should have been me.

Fuck you, Donny Worster. You don’t even love the goddess. Not like I do.

The crowd whooped and hollered then as the great goddess, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, squatted and bellowed with a terrible force, her vagina splitting open like a rotten avocado dropped to the floor, to reveal Donny, reborn.

Footsteps approached then.

The door opened.

The ropes sawed at my wrists, warm blood ran down my fingers.

Donny—only Donny—stood silhouetted in the door.

His breath exploded in steaming animalistic grunts.

He watched from the doorway, his horrific cock hardening as he smelled my flowing pussy.

The ropes just wouldn’t give, wouldn’t release me.

Donny’s three-fingered hands spread my thighs apart, lifted my ankles to my ears.

His pupils were rectangular slits now, blazing with animal appetites.

The book told me this was important. The transformed avatar needed a corrupted virgin to sacrifice to complete the ritual.

Donny’s tongue was long and flat, rough like hewn wood. He lapped at my cunt, bleating with lust.

Then he lay his cock upon me; it nearly reached my chin.

It was so important that I be a virgin.

He pulled back, lined up the apple-sized head of his meat with my quivering quim.

It was so important that Donny be my first.

But not like this.

THE SCARLET SCRIPTURE

Ambrosius Grimes

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” she sang as her body rode up and down. Her breasts glistened beneath the moon, ebony globes of abundance in the light of a pale orb. Her every movement was a moist ecstasy. I gasped and thrust upward. She growled and ground down against me as her eyes roamed the heavens.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” she cried and her hands caressed my chest. Delicate fingers traced intricate patterns while her undulations never ceased.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” she gasped. Her moist core tightened around me. Her eyes dropped to mine. Her body shuddered. Every part of her seemed to burn with lust and terrible need, demanding my tribute to her, requiring my seed.

And she had it.

Torn from me.

In one moment that stretched into eternity.

There was blackness and light all around me as her wet envelopment demanded everything. I think I screamed and fought to be free, away from the terrible pleasure that would not end.

And then it did.

Perhaps I passed out or lost my way in the moment but when I could think again she was no longer above me. My eyes dropped from the moon to find hers smiling back at me, her mouth hot around me. She was moving slowly now. Her head bobbed up and down while her eyes looked into mine. I felt her giggle more than heard it and she increased her pace slightly. Her suction increased as well. My hips moved with a will of their own and I could feel her swallowing. She seemed to savor it.

She murmured as she lay on top of me again, her wet lips brushing my ear. “We taste wonderful together. I want you to taste it too.”

With that she kissed me. It was long and deep, a mingling of passion and our mixed juices. It was new and forbidden. It was intoxicating. When she broke that kiss, she looked into my eyes again and asked, “Is this really your first time?”

“Yes,” I panted. “But I want to do it again.”

“What do you want to do?”

“All of it. Anything. I don’t care.”

“Then say the words.”

“What words?”

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” she breathed. I could smell our ecstasy on her breath.

“Why?”

“Because they’re funny words. Say them.”

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

“Again. Say them again and you’ll get fucked,” she giggled.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

“One more time. Come on,” she said as her hand worked its way down between out bodies. “You know what they say. The third time is the charm.”

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

As soon as the words had left my lips she giggled once more and rolled away.

“Oh! You are going to get so fucked,” she said with joy and then she was running away, the words “Follow me!” trailing after her

And I did, without a second thought, naked as the day of my birth, chasing the promise of what was to come through a midnight forest. I had waited so long for this night, never thinking that there would be a woman willing to give herself to me, let alone a woman like this. A woman that begged me to take her. A woman that pulled me into her with frantic need and breathless joy. She promised such things.

“Follow me,” she called again and her voice came from a cleft between two massive stones.

I sprinted across the duff and passed between the hard pillars. There should have been deeper darkness beyond but instead there was light and a stairway leading down into a bottomless pit. I stared at it in astonishment, following its spiral with my eyes until it was lost from sight below. The shaft itself looked ancient beyond words; the very stone walls seemed rotten with age, eaten away by the moss and lichen that encrusted them. Further down, where no light of day would ever penetrate, the moss was replaced by a thick skin of algae. It was wet and slick. Obscenely, I was reminded of another passage I had only lately taken.

The stairs remained clear, worn and burnished by long and constant use. Anna was a little ways below me, her skin the colour of deep bronze in the firelight. Her body was covered in a sheen of sweat and there was a moist flow down the inside of her thighs. She saw me staring and giggled once more. Catching my gaze she held it while her hand slid down her belly and two fingers delved between her legs. She moaned a little, her eyes half closing as the fingers worked their way between the folds and then came out again, dripping wet. She sucked them clean, slowly and enticingly, reminding me of what her mouth had done minutes before and, I fervently hoped, would do again.

“We taste so good together,” she whispered. “I want more.”

“What is this place?”

“Don’t worry about that. You’re in Cornwall, tourist boy. There are old places like this all over. It’s an old temple. But only a few of us know about it and this is where we come to fuck,” she said, then pouted her lips. “You do want to fuck me again, don’t you?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

She skipped up the five steps that separated us and wrapped her hand around me. With her body pressed against me and her lips again at my ear she asked, “Where do you want to fuck me?”

“In your... well you know... in your...” I could not say the word. It seemed wrong.

“It’s a cunt,” she whispered back and then tightened her grip. “And this is a cock. Do you want to put your cock in my cunt?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How many times,” she giggled.

“I don’t know. I mean, a lot.”

She giggled again and asked, “This really is your first time, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” I admitted, a little ashamed.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. I will show you so many things and you can enjoy me so many ways.” There was a smile in her face and a breathless invitation. “And you can have me any time you want. Me and my friends.”

“Friends.”

“Like I said, this is our private place. We like to party. Do you know what I mean by party?” Her hand moved up and down in slow seduction. “Follow me.”

She led me down without releasing her hold, down the spiral of stone steps into an unimaginable depth. All the while scents rose from below. There was incense and sweat and the damp smell that came from the stones themselves. Those stones grew larger as they went down until each block was as tall as a man and twice that in length. Many now had symbols cut into them, a writing I could not decipher, along with scenes of interwoven bodies. Even though the light from the torches twisted and distorted the figures, it was clear what they about. As silly as it seemed, I blushed even though I was being lead along naked by a woman gripping my most private parts. A woman with whom I most earnestly hope to do the very acts depicted.

She noticed my interest in the walls and asked, “See anything you want to try?”

“What is this place?”

“I told you,” she said. “It’s an old fucking temple or maybe it’s an old temple for fucking. Do you care? As long as there is fucking? People have come here for as long as anyone can remember, not everyone, just special people. You do want to be special, don’t you?”

She led me down a few more stairs and I managed to say, “Yes. I suppose so.”

I was getting hard in her hand and the smell of her surrounded me, pulling me after her as surely as the hand that gripped me. This place was touching something deep inside me. As though sensing my fear she stepped close to me again and pointed to a carving. As she pressed her body against mine, she asked, “Do you see what they’re doing? We haven’t tried that yet. You want to put your cock there? I want you to.”

“But that’s your...”

“I know. And when we get to the temple down there I will show you how good it feels. Just come down with me.”

She pulled me down another step.

“That’s good, baby. Come on.”

A step more.

“Come with me. I want you.”

And so we progressed down, my reluctance and growing fear overcome by lust and the skill of her hands. Her touch held such promise and her body betrayed such a need for me that I could no more break free than cut away that part that she held. If this was magic then it was a common magic uncommonly conjured. I followed her down and around and down and all the way to the edge of release, held there by her skillful manipulations.

All the while she cooed and ran her free hand across the face of the wall. Her fingers traced the outlines of the figures that grew larger, more deeply cut and more detailed as we descended.

And at the bottom the stairway opened out into a chamber that seemed to have been cut from the living rock. The carvings continued here but larger and more frenzied than on the stairway walls. Here they covered every surface so that we seemed to walk across writhing bodies, beneath depictions of the most obscene copulations. All about us heaved an orgy in stone. Now the figures seemed to leap into the free air, cut nearly in the round and so like life that I expected them to gasp their passion as we passed.

Within these carnal carvings were four figure that did have breath. Two men and two women lay on the only undecorated surface in the room, a dome of rock that rose from the center of the floor. A fire burned at the center of this and the four naked lovers lay beside it lost in their rapture.

I paused, suddenly ashamed of my naked state and not wanting to intrude but Anna stopped abruptly, turned and dropped to her knees. Her mouth engulfed me as before and I could say not a word to object. Indeed, I do not know if I could have objected. With hungry eyes watching, I felt the velvet glide of her lips. I felt my response and a moment later I thrust forward as I released. Even so she continued to work on me, causing me to gasp and beg her to stop, to plead that she never would, and then shake in silence as she drove me mad. When it ended at length I was too weak to complain or resist. I could do nothing but follow her across the floor.

The others had paused in their passionate labors and were watching us approach. Anna kissed each. These were long, deep kisses and as each parted I saw threads of my seed stretched between wet tongues. I realized she had been sharing with them what she had taken from me.

“He tastes fine,” said one of the men, eying me hungrily. He was tall and lean with the face of a satyr. His member twitched as he spoke.

“Yes,” his companion agreed. “First milked tonight. All that need. I can taste it.”

“Oh yes,” said the other man and his companion smiled.

I began to back away as prey does before the wolf but Anna stepped behind me and ran hands down my back. She cooed in my ear and urged me forward. One hand reached around to caress me while the other slid between my cheeks. The pressure of one finger caused me to gasp.

“It’s going to be fun,” she whispered like someone sharing a great secret. “We are going to do such wonderful things to your body. What I did to you up in the forest is nothing compared to what we are going to do to you now. You’re never going to forget this.”

There, in the heat of flame, beneath the gaze of those obscene sculptures and upon that smooth stone, they did as she had promised. Every lewdness, every perversion and every bestial act was visited on my flesh and I gloried in it. I howled and panted and begged for it to continue forever. A madness had come over me so that the world seemed both dimly distant and painfully immediate. All around the carvings seemed to move as we did, animated by the flickering of the flames. The air was filled with moaning and the smells of our released passion.

At some point, I became aware that Anna had separated from us and was kneeling before the flame. Her body, like mine, was soaked in the sweat and juices of our orgy so that she glistened and shone. One arm was raised high while she reached between her legs with the other. I could see her fingers work as she swayed back and forth, head and eyes closed. She seemed to be in an ecstatic trance. All the while she chanted as she had when we had first made love.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” rang through the chamber.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” filled my ears as the others took up the call.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

The woman who sat upon my mouth sang it as I lapped at her wet center. The man between my legs intoned it even as he filled me. The couple milking my seed droned in chorus and in time with their strokes. All became faster, more frenzied in their need. We shook. We grasped at slick skin with fevered hands. We came to the moment of release together and Anna began to scream.

Her hips bucked wildly. One hand still thrust and probed between her legs while the other gripped and twisted a breast. As the tempo of her gyrations increased, so did the volume and pitch of her screams until the entire chamber seemed to reverberate. The man inside me emptied himself with a gasping grunt and the woman above me suddenly gripped my head between her thighs as a rush of joy flooded out of her and I tasted all her evening’s lust. Overwhelmed, I felt myself burst forth for a final time in a fountain that spattered my chest.

And then I was lying alone. The world spun around me and I could scarcely move any part of me. All my strength was gone, all my passion sated. All I could do was lie and watch Anna as she continued in the lurid trance. Her screams had become gasps as though she were trying to draw back in all of the air that she had expelled.

It was then that I first saw the black mist. It flowed from the carved figures all around me. It came from every orifice, an inky excretion that drifted upward to circle the flame.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” the others cried.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” came from my own lips unbidden.

The mist thickened into a black maelstrom that boiled at the center of the chamber.

“See! Shub-Niggurath has come!” Anna said, her voice full of wonder. “We greet you, Shub-Niggurath. I greet you. Fill your servant so that I might bring your words to the world.”

With that Anna opened her mouth wide once again and drew in a deep breath. Then she stiffened as the black mist drove down into her, the inky air forcing its way into her mouth and through her nose and flowing down her body to enter her from below. For a moment she was almost lost from view. Then she was lying on the ground in a fit. Every part of her convulsed without pattern. I wanted to go to her, to sooth her, to save her from the black mist, however that might be done. I wanted to do something but I could only lie on the stone. I seemed held in place by the very juices that had been poured over me as though they were some viscous tar that bound me in place.

All I could do was watch her as she began to change. Her hair grew course and wild and a black ridge of it began to extend down her spine. She shook and shivered as it spread further. The beautiful features of her face twisted and stretched. Her jaw pushed out and became narrow. The lovely nose flattened into it until she had a snout from which a long tongue lolled. Her eyes changed, too, the irises drawing up into slits. A mat of short hairs covered all her features. Gasps and moans became bleatings and when she struggled to her knees at last, her naked body still glorious by the light of the fire, beautiful Anna had the head of a goat and a mantle of wild, black hair.

She came towards me on all fours. I tried to back away from her but found that I could not. As though understanding my desire, which I had not the strength to put into force, the other four circled me and gripped my limbs. The women held my arms and the men each took a leg. These they pulled back towards my shoulders but wide so that my bottom was obscenely exposed and for the first time I saw the state of my violated anus. It was red and frothy with a whitish brown foam. The remnants of earlier fornications were crusted around it and across my thighs.

As I watched, the goat who had once been Anna crawled up behind me, that terrible snout projected over my most intimate places. It sniffed my violated hole. Then with a long and nimble tongue, it began to lap.

“Behold the goat of Shub-Niggurath!” one of the men said. “Behold the goat that will bear the Thousand Young.”

The tongue burned like a flame. I tried to find the strength to struggle but failed. It was not even within me to object. Rather, I could only submit to the terrible ministrations of that burning member as it first circled and then delved into my nether gate. As it lapped, the countenance of the goat began to change again. Swellings appeared on the forehead. They grew and pushed outwards, spiraling back on either side of the head. Their expansion ended with a creak, as a tree might make in the wind and at that moment Anna reared up.

I saw her transformed body all at once and any joy I might have had at being delivered from that tormenting tongue vanished when I say how my beautiful lover had been remade. Full breasts still swelled about a taught belly but beneath that belly now protruded a dark and twisted cock, for there was no other word less obscene for that foul projection. It seemed as long and thick as an arm. Juices wetted its tip and dripped from it.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Behold the ram of Shub-Niggurath!” To my shock those words came from my own lips and further horrors were to escape them, for I then proclaimed, “I am your yew. I am the goat that will bear the Thousand Young. I am yours. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

I wanted to scream against it, to struggle, but as I pleaded, I heard myself begging for the violation of that dark column that would split me. I offered myself and anything I could give to receive the seed. I do not know where the words came from or why they came or how I could stop them. They went on and on. In the end, as a piteous summary, I could only whimper a pathetic, “Fuck me, please.”

And it did.

The head pierced me and the shaft drove in deep with a single thrust. I saw the beginning of the stroke but not the end because my eyes were closed as I issued the shriek I had sought to release earlier. If the tongue had been living flame, this hellish cock was incandescent. I felt that my bowels would boil as it drove in and out of me. The force of each thrust should have driven me across the stone floor but the others held me fast, forcing me to take the full force of each blow. Like a fist driving into my depths. Over and over again. Without end.

I could not say how long it lasted. I know only that my screams never stopped. Neither could I escape by fainting away. My entire being seemed mounted upon a molten shaft of agony.

I do know that when it was over, I found my self chained to the stone floor. My arms and legs were pulled taught and wide. A flow of blood trailed away from me. All I could do then was stare upwards at the hideous faces carved into the stone above me as they leered down.

Even then, I think I knew that it was only the beginning. Despite the pain from what had been, there were now the first stirrings of what was to come. Anna knelt between my legs, once more the beautiful woman who had coaxed me into a midnight forest. The others knelt on either side of me. All had returned to their infernal hymn but now I felt it answered by something inside me.

This fresh horror began as an uncertain feeling, an unease in the flesh below my ribs. But then the vague discomfort spread and resolved itself into needles of torment that began to spread. I raised my head to look down at my chest and began to scream once again as a thousand tiny things began to crawl beneath my skin. Neither were these movements random. Rather, the fearful progress of each, their passage a searing transit marking my soul as deeply as my flesh, scribed characters in a bloody script. Neither would the agonizing transcription halt or slow or speed but continued at a terrible pace that made the writing of each line an eternity. I wept and pleaded for it to stop. Bile rose in my throat and I spat it out in despair but all my entreaties went unnoticed by my chanting captors.

My sanity should have fled but like my mind, it remained so focused upon my torture as to double my suffering. No sense dimmed or failed to repent any detail of what I suffered. Neither would my memory later fail to recall any element of terror. Through it all I had been consoled only by the thought that even this must have an end, perhaps by blessed death that brings final peace. And yet even this was not to be.

At the end of eternity, when my body had been marked from shoulder to groin with the scarlet scribings and the four who lived in the temple were busily recording each line on scrolls of parchment with scarlet ink, Anna kissed my brow and said, “Now, my love, you are the Scarlet Scripture and the Thousand write the words of Shub-Niggurath upon your flesh. Be still now. It is time to heal so that the Thousand may write again, for they have much to write and they shall write it upon you for years and years to come. And they shall write all though it takes a thousand years.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

WITHIN YOUR UNHOLY PIT OF SHOGGOTHS

Wilum H. Pugmire

Leaning against the brick wall, I sucked at my exotic cigarette and then blew perfumed smoke at the orange moon. But Doris would not be silent, and I was growing annoyed. To entertain myself, I sucked again at my cylinder of narcotia and exhaled; and the cloud of smoke that poured from my mouth shaped itself outlandishly, suggestively. I moved my eyes to see if she had noticed my feat of subtle wizardry, but her own orbs were glued to the leaves of her little book. I spat, and hurled the butt of my fag to the ground and crushed it beneath my heavy boot. “You read like one entranced,” I complained.

“It’s the secret poems that he wrote during his marriage. They were found behind a false wall in the Crowninshield place when it was undergoing restoration two years ago. The style is so different compared to the poems in Azathoth and Other Horrors, and there is a kind of fearful timidity in the expression of dark wonders, as if he were writing of forbidden things. Why are you sneering at me?”

“Not at you – at your gullibility. You are the victim of an elaborate hoax, I fear. Why would anyone want to publish the poetry of a forgotten poet, who is only remembered by some few occultists in this dreary town? Who is this publisher, and why haven’t they published an accompanying volume of Edward Pickman Derby’s finest work? No, this is a jest played upon your little coven.”

She leaned against my shoulder and turned the pages of her silly book. “These were written during his marriage to the priestess. Some of them express a crazy kind of eroticism. I think Asenath introduced him to lots of sex magick.”

Rudely, I snatched the book from her and flipped through its leaves. “It’s not even poetry in places. Look here, pages of prose.”

“That’s his prose-poem sequence, ‘Pit of Shoggoths.’ It concerns an area near Chesuncook Village in Northern Maine. Read it carefully, Simon. It describes the roads he traveled on, the places stopped at. A casual reader would think it little more than a series of Nature vignettes, celebrating beautiful landscape. Actually, it’s a kind of poetic road map that tells the way to a sacred spot hidden deep within the woods there. I’m thinking of inviting some of the others to drive with me and find the spot, do a little ritual there in memory of the poet. Why don’t you come?”

“With your dreary little band of cultists? No thank you. I find Arkham witches too pretentious. My one reason for coming to this boring town was to investigate the book sale at Miskatonic Library. I have found some few fascinating old volumes, and now I will depart.”

“Well, if the idea of being with the others annoys you, we could go there alone.” She reached for the book and I surrendered it to her. “It’s a haunt you’ve never visited, right? Who knows what traces of necromancy we may find there?”

I feigned boredom; but I actually did feel a kernel of interest, inspired by some queer passages from what purported to be Derby’s prose-poems. Perhaps I had been overly hasty in my dismissal of the little book, inspired by my dislike of Arkham and its clique of modern occultists, who could not compare with the delicious madness that had corrupted Arkham decades ago, when it was indeed an authentic witch-town. And so I agreed to meet Doris in early morning mist, and I read portions of the book of poems aloud as she drove to Maine.

Riding in cars always made me drowsy, and eventually I shut the book and closed my eyes. I do not dream as mortals do, but the imagery of the poetry played in my mind. I beheld the Cyclopean ruins sequestered in a deeply wooded realm, as described in what purported to be the ‘secret’ poetry of a doomed Arkham soul. I descended the vast steps that led down to abysses of nightmare, into vaults where the walls were strangely angled and embossed with alien design. In flowing darkness, I beheld the pale thing that stretched along an altar stone and mewed to a memory of moonlight. And then the car bounced violently, and when I opened my eyes I saw that we traversed through densely wooded terrain on a road of dirt and sand and rocks. The sky was white with mid-level clouds, and my companion studied both sky and forest with anxious eyes. I sensed the occult instincts that guided her, and that were a source of my attraction to her. Her heritage was rooted in Arkham sorcery, and her power, although not potent, was genuine.

She stopped the car. “We’ll walk from here. It won’t be far. I can feel the oddity of the air. Do you feel it, on your eyes?” I nodded. “I love the sense of neglect and abandonment. It’s like this region has protected itself from prying human eyes.”

I nodded again. “There are places that so cloaked themselves, in which elements of the Outside are evident, in the earth, on the aether. I have devoted my time on this mortal plane to locating such hidden corners. How delightful to come across one so unexpectedly.”

Doris laughed softly. “I’m happy to be your eldritch compass. Come on.”

We vacated the vehicle and sauntered into the wooded territory, walking for quite a while before I noticed the climatic shift. Pausing, I knelt onto the ground and clawed at the earth, then brought particles of sod to my snout. I sighed, then worked at removing my boots. As we resumed our way through woodland, I could feel the arcane properties of the ground on my naked feet. Doris, too, could feel the alchemy all ‘round, and began to run. Not in the mood to chase her, I kept my steady pace, stopping only when we came to the area that was clear of trees, the dark green vicinity where prehistoric dolmens tilted against one another. The young woman smoothed her hands against one pillar of antique stone, and then she began to undress. I went to her, and reached to the ground so as to dig my hands into the dirt, and then I bathed her naked flesh with earth’s debris. Grabbing my hands, she guided them to her loins and moaned as I coated her pubic hair with dirt. Quickly, she pushed from me, fell to the ground and began to crawl to a place inside the gigantic structure of olden stones, and I watched as, creeping into some earthen pit, she sank from view.

I entered beneath the stones and began to descend the firm clay steps that led below ground, into a lean tunnel that, turning, led to more steps that took me into an expanding cavern of rocks and sand. Phosphorescent smears on the rough walls helped to give the pit a dim illumination, so that I could vaguely see the altar and its pale occupant. Doris, still on hands and knees, dragged her nude form to the altar and reached to touch the hand of the thing that reclined thereon.

“Come,” rasped the creature wrapped in filthy rags, “and suckle my witch’s tit. Moisten my nipple with your anxious tongue, and I will teach it rare language. Come.”

The creature held out a claw, into which Doris placed her hand. The young sorceress raised herself onto the altar stone and touched her mouth to the flaccid sack that was the other’s breast. Turning from the sight, I rested my hand against one of the shimmering patches with which the wall nearest me was stained.

A cracked voice spoke. “They leave their mark, the indestructible shoggoths. Ah, they have shifted through the ground to the womb of earth. But they will return, to melt into each other and feast upon the airy tissue of my lunatic dreams. Oh, my dreams are dim, dying like the light that once frolicked in my eyes. I have fed the elder ones for decades, and my essence is almost used.” Her hands reached for the woman who bit into her breast, and she wound her talons into the younger woman’s hair. Thus guided, Doris moved over the woman’s form until their mouths met. Pushing away from the wall, I glided to the altar and kissed my friend’s firm buttocks. She rocked to and fro, and then she rolled over so as to help the wretched hag mount her. Above us, I heard a moan of windsong.

The antique creature cackled as she grinded her loins against the other woman’s flesh. “Ho, it awakens, the immemorial seraph of the woods! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Take my hand, inhuman thing—my time as servant here is at an end.”

I did as she commanded, and she stumbled on the ground. Doris writhed on the altar stone, her pale flesh shimmering in the light of the phosphorescent stains that were the markings of shoggoths, those things that would return and feed anew on her uncanny dreams. Clutching to the Antient One, I guided her up the earthen steps, out of the pit. We stepped past the tilting dolmens, into moonlight.

“Oh, the sick moon,” the creature chortled. “How long it’s been since I have felt its dead light reflected on my eyes. Ah, this evening air. Let me expel my final breath into it, and serve as sacrifice to the Black Goat of the Woods.” So saying, she exhaled violently, and I watched as her arcane breath spilled from her as unholy mist that shaped itself grotesquely as it drifted skyward. The violent gale assailing us tugged at her rags, shreds of which lifted behind her like daemonic wings. I watched, as her eyes sank, replaced by ebony pits. I whistled, as her flesh melted and her brittle bones broke apart as dust and ash that was swept away by storm.

I looked again toward the moon and the cloud of mist that drifted to it. I smelled the stench that rose from the pit beneath the dolmens, and heard the maddening shrieks, and knew that the shoggoths had returned so as to feast upon the psyche of my friend. I felt the cloud that cloaked the moonlight, and knew that it was a manifestation of the Outer God known as Shub-Niggurath. I raised my wide hand to the dimming image of the moon and made unto it the Elder Sign.

BLOSSOM

Rose Banks

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life, on Earth.

Alex Frazer sat back at his living room desk, and considered. Maybe a subtitle: How the Limits of Life on Earth Inform the Search for Life Elsewhere—no, the article’s title was still too easy to misinterpret. Public engagement, Bob Collinson had demanded at his last departmental pep talk, not sensationalism.

In fairness, it was wise to dial it down, especially for public consumption. Though if there was so much as a chemical fossil on Mars, then out in the immensity of space there could be anything. One of the SETI projects could turn up a signal tomorrow. Alex still believed that. It could happen.

In his dreams. That was his problem—he was indulging in too many fantasies altogether, these days. He closed the browser; it was too much of a temptation. No need to be reminded he was only a few clicks away from the big blue eyes and stiff pink nipples of his new favourite girl.

Focus. This next section, on halophilic microbes, and salt mines as testbeds for future exploration of the subsurface of Mars—tricky—he could get away with citing two of his own papers, maybe three. The main thing to avoid in any review was being seen as overly self-promotional.

Actually, no. The main thing to avoid right now, apart from drifting into another jerk-off session, was thinking yet again about how he had tried to bring the roof of a salt mine down on his head, the how, why, and what-the-fuck.

Two days trapped in the dark, half a mile down, and no memory of it. What the hell had he been doing? Wandering off on his own like that—he would most likely have his fieldwork down there terminated. And he had been hauled over the coals by Collinson. And of course he could have died.

And now he had just reopened the browser. Fuck.

Ever since the accident his cock had been ruling his life. All the XXX websites he had discovered. All those girls he had barely noticed before. At work it was impossible; he was barely functional beyond finding new reasons to go back to his office and new ways to conceal the bulge in his pants.

It was like being fifteen again. He glanced back toward the kitchen, where he had left Michelle’s dog with its snout buried in a bowl of that horrible mystery meat. No, it was worse, because getting a boner while opening a can of dog food was a whole new dimension of humiliation.

Blossom, anyhow. What kind of a name for a dog was that?

Thursday night, his sister had turned up, with that huge, smelly barrel of a dog. Some convoluted story about Stuart and the kids, and their holiday, and Stuart’s mother—he had just come out of the meeting with Collinson and was without the strength to argue. Fine, Mickey, he had told her. It was fine.

It was not. It had been a nightmare. The smell, for one thing. The whole room smelled of dog, and Blossom smelled too, ripe and strong; it amazed him Michelle could live with it.

Hell. His hand had found its way to his swollen member. Well, he would get nothing else done otherwise. And there she was. Those big, blue, startled eyes. Lacy panties slipped halfway down her thighs. Mouth open in a pretty little O of surprise at the sight of his massively engorged prick.

Jesus. He cupped his hand over his cock, but the oncoming rush was choked off by a savage pinch somewhere inside of him, and he slid to the floor, as helpless as an insect squirming on a pin, vision darkening, speckled with stars.

Helpless in the dark. But not alone. There had been a shadow, there in the absolute darkness of deep underground. He had felt it watching him. He had heard it, whispering.

On your knees.

He was crawling up behind her, catching her by the panties tangled round her ankles, pulling on her collar, pressing the head of his cock against her hot little hole while she gasped and moaned and growled and butted up against his belly, her fluffy tail in his face—no. No—

Obey me.

She was towering above him, as tall as the sky, her foot, claws, cloven hoof on his neck, her whispering voice now hammering in his blood, drumming through his cock as he pushed himself in, all the way inside her, so beautiful, with skin like satin and a blonde waterfall of hair.

Show me you love me.

Obediently, he opened his eyes. It was a dog. He had his cock rammed into a large, smelly, hairy dog. And still he loved her, all of her, erupting into her as he thrust his way finally into blessed, sweet oblivion.

It was impossible to focus, these days. He kept drifting away. You called me up from the dark. Alex checked his watch against his office clock—another hour had gone by, and he could barely remember what he had been thinking.

Out of the darkness, into the light.

A double lecture on microbial biofilms in the morning, and so far he had managed only five slides. He took another swig of cold coffee, hoping to clear the mental fog.

From unbounded emptiness and endless night.

Of course he could always arrive late, and finish early. No-one would mind. He could have a break in the middle, too, except that Olivia would pursue him out into the corridor.

High heels, dumb questions—it was flattering, but it was awkward, too, especially the way she was angling for an invitation to his office, outside of his office hours.

Of course he said no. He always said no, even while he was imagining her straddling him, riding him hard and loving it. Yes. He would be wearing his lab coat and she would be wearing only those ridiculous heels. Yes. Why not? She would do it. She was hot.

She was not. She was a student. What was he thinking?

Not a whole lot, was the answer to that. His head was a mess, a hopeless mush of fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.

A tinny jangle made him jump, and he scrabbled for the phone, which he had seen only a minute ago, now somehow lost under a pile of papers.

“Alex.” Michelle sounded cross. “It’s about Blossom.”

“What?” He felt a flutter of alarm. He had fallen asleep in the living room and had woken up on the floor. Or maybe he had just dreamed that. He had got into the shower, he thought, and then slept again, and dreamed—it had been waking up with the dog’s tongue in his ear, he was sure of it.

“She’s been sick since Tuesday—did you give her anything, chocolate, spicy food, anything like that? Just say.”

“What? No. Of course not.” There was someone outside, hovering behind the frosted glass panel. Maybe they would go away, hearing he was on the phone.

“I took her to the vet. He wants to keep her in, run some tests. He’s not sure what’s wrong.”

“Mickey, I’m sorry.” It was so like his sister, calling him at work, though he knew she thought he didn’t do any real work at all. “I have to go. There’s someone outside.”

“He says she’s pregnant,” Michelle ploughed on, regardless. “I don’t believe it... except—”

The first seed sown in red flesh.

Pregnant. They had been in the kitchen; Michelle had finished chewing him out over the pot plant she had given him, now emphatically deceased, and had ducked down under the table to pick up Blossom’s squeaky bone, the dog woofing and snuffling around her.

“—you didn’t let her get out, did you? Alex! I told you to be careful, I did, but you weren’t bloody listening... but... no, she can’t be a whole month gone.”

That had been the first time he had remembered the dream, and he had been gripped by a ridiculous paranoia, hoping Blossom would keep her tail down, and wondering if there would be any way to tell.

“—I still think it’s just her tummy—”

Pregnant. It was all in his mind, all-everything, because it had to be, and anyhow, of course, it was impossible.

The door of his office opened. He did not look up. He knew already who it was, from the click and scrape of high heels in a place where beat-up trainers were the norm.

“—you’re not listening now, either, are you? I can tell.”

He raised his eyes slowly. Criss-crossing buckles and straps wound around a pair of slender ankles, drawing his gaze on up to a short, tight skirt and nicely rounded rump.

“Mickey. I have to go.” He made it sound businesslike, for Olivia’s benefit. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll call you later.”

Across the room the petite, curvy figure framed herself against the window and pushed out her boobs. Spread my seed. Olivia was just too cute. And so clearly in need of a good fucking, the way she followed him around.

My gift of life.

Life was messy, Michelle liked to insist. Alex peered out into the country darkness beyond his headlights, increasingly sure he was lost. In that his sister was incorrect. Life was a sinkhole of negative entropy. The mess was what it left behind it.

Two crazy days and nights with Olivia, and then he had dumped her. It was hard to explain, but she had somehow suddenly lost all of her appeal. But still, telling her like that, in a text.

So he had probably deserved it, that scene today, but it had been in his office, where anyone could have walked in—shit, Collinson, even. Worst of all, much as Alex would like to think the Olivia business was over, he suspected he might be wrong.

He glanced down again at the map, which was next to useless. Was he driving in circles?

After the row with Olivia, all he had wanted that night was to crash out in front of the TV. Except his cock had other plans, and he had instead jumped back into the car and headed north, through narrowing and darkening lanes, until he had got to the White Hart.

The girl in the corner in the bright yellow dress had caught his attention immediately. There had been something about her; not her dress, or her foxy little face—it was her smell, he had realised as he sat down opposite, a heady, salty musk he had wanted to drown in.

But he could hardly say that, and apart from that his mind had been a blank, and so he had asked if she would go outside with him, and she had said yes. Yes. It had been that easy.

They had fallen on each other as if it was the last night of the world. No talking: he had pulled his hand from between her legs and glossed it over her lips and kissed her, then thrust into her, deep and hard, feeling her clench around him as he came. Then he had slid out of her and kissed her again. He was done. They were done.

But now he was lost. There was no denying it. Two hours, he had been out here, now. The sky had been clear, out behind the pub—maybe he could get a bearing from the stars. The stars. It was ridiculous. For all of the time he had spent speculating what was out here, he had never owned a telescope and had only the vaguest idea of the layout of the constellations.

Even so, he stopped and got out and walked a short way down the road. It was so dark, with no buildings or streetlights. So many stars. He looked for the familiar shapes of Orion and the Big Dipper but recognized nothing. There were too many stars.

The darkness wrapped itself around him. It loved him. And it seemed to him in that moment that he prayed, not to the stars, but to the darkness between the stars, to the spaces between space. To me.

She who is mighty. She who is beneficent. Bona Dea.

Jacket slung over his shoulder, Alex hurried across the car park. Coveney tonight, or maybe Welches Dam. He felt the pull of the wide horizon, and the promise of a starry night.

“Alex—wait—”

It was the voice of Bob Collinson. Alex turned and regarded the head of department warily. The chance of his escaping without actually running was small.

“I’ve been trying to catch you all day,” Collinson said. “We need to talk. Just briefly. Can you make some time tomorrow morning? Say, ten-thirty?”

“How about now?” Alex said. “Seeing as it’s brief.”

“Look, it’s rather awkward,” Collinson said. “I’ve had a call from the Dean’s Office. It seems there’s been a complaint. A girl in your Geomicrobiology class. Sexual harassment. I’m sorry. You know what these girls are like.”

“So what’s happening?” Now the axe had fallen Alex felt only a dull ache. “What do you need me to do, exactly?”

“Nothing. Do nothing, nothing at all. If this girl Olivia contacts you, don’t respond. Let’s see how far she’s willing to push it. Maybe we can ride this one out. Otherwise—”

“Yes.” The reputation of the department, of the university. Etcetera. “Well, if there’s nothing to do—” Alex unlocked the car door. There was no need to let this wreck his plans.

“The way things are nowadays,” Collinson said, “it’s too easy to have some innocent remark taken out of context.” He paused. “To have some small action misunderstood.”

The silence between the two men stretched out uncomfortably. Alex was standing at the edge of a cliff and the urge to jump was overwhelming. All of that sky, all the blue.

“I told her to take off her clothes and give me a show.” The sensation of free fall was exhilarating. “She was lovely. Great finish. Bare ass in the air, legs spread, grinding her clit into my desk and mewing like a kitten.” He slid into the car. “And then I fucked her. Anything else?”

There was not. Collinson was unable to speak.

It had been a choice moment, and Alex was halfway home before he hit the ground: why, why had he said that? It was he, Dr Alex Frazer, who was now fucked. Royally fucked.

As the familiar streets passed by he tried to relax and let the thoughts come as they willed, because at this point he had nothing left to lose.

The mine. That was where this had begun. There had been a voice—he flinched again from the echo of it inside his head, only to stumble instead into a memory of a thing so bizarre but so undeniably real he had to pull over before he crashed the car.

So many small lives, lost and yearning—

It had caught the light of his head-torch, embedded in the wall, pure white against grubby grey; smoothly rounded, but with an odd geometry—whatever it was, it could not have been natural, and he had hacked away at the surrounding rock and had hit the thing accidentally, and then there had been nothing, only darkness like a blinding light.

—for the joining, to sing at the gate.

It was some kind of a device. An artifact. One sunk at the bottom of an ancient ocean and buried for more than two hundred and fifty million years, which meant—yes—and incredibly, it was still working. Doing something, anyhow. Unless he had broken it—

—no, he had activated it. It had tried to communicate with him. His thoughts had been invaded and disordered by it, but now he was thinking clearly; he felt saner than he had done for weeks.

It was proof of life elsewhere, of technology—but more than that, he could not escape the feeling it had been waiting, if not for him then for something like him, that had a mind with which it could engage. He set off again slowly, his hands clammy on the wheel. It was not there by accident. There was a purpose.

Of course nobody would believe him. Not without evidence, but he had that—buried, now, half a mile down, but it was still there and he would dig it out himself if he had to.

Though he would need to be careful, he decided as he turned into his drive. Very careful. The Olivia thing was just a thing, but this—it would be orders of magnitude worse to end up with a reputation as a carpet-chewing crazy.

Fitting his key into the lock he stepped into his flat and stared. How had he been living like this? It looked like the morning after a student party in hell. The kitchen took the prize, stinking of garbage and host to a plague of flies that buzzed thickly round the overflowing bin.

And there was something in the bin. Mice. Or a rat, maybe. Hardly surprising, given the state of the place. He took out the garbage carefully, one piece at a time, and was almost at the bottom when he saw it: a pale, squirming maggot almost as thick as his wrist, repulsively covered in hair.

Pushing over the bin, he stamped on anything that might possibly be moving—and he had got it, he was sure of it, he had felt it squish under his foot. Some of it was stuck to the sole of his shoe: pus and blood and hair, hair rather like his own.

A thought was occurring as he looked down at weeks-rotting food laced with wads of compacted tissues. All those times he had sat at his desk pumping his cock, wiping off his hand before returning his fingers to the keyboard. He had been draining his balls into the bin. He had been fucking with his garbage. He had been fucking flies.

And upon his garbage he had got himself a fly-baby. He had just stepped on it, in fact, that gross, hairy maggot, and was feeling unexpectedly racked by pangs of guilt.

His head was spinning, and he took a deep breath; it only made him feel more dizzy, but still, if he could breathe, he could think, and if he could think he could at least make sure there were no more of those things.

There were not. But there was something else. Somehow Michelle’s dead plant had returned to life, now sporting waxy leaves and a single, ugly flower. He touched its petals—soft, like velvet. It was another horrible miracle. Except he was sure he had not been fucking that plant, even by proxy.

There was more. Outside the window a flash of colour had caught his eye: the patio paving was covered in blue-green slime. And there on the garden wall, what might have been threads of fungus, except for the way they were moving.

Down there in the dark, he had been infected by something incomprehensible. Alien. And now it was loose in the world, spreading, jumping species barriers—worse, breaking them down. He had unleashed an agent of destruction.

Your bodies are my altar.

He looked around. But that whole doomed world seemed so thin, a shining skin beneath which shadows moved, black on black. It was glorious, the abyss.

Your world is our gate.

He heard her voice, her unfolding revelation: what he had seen down there was not a machine, it was alive. It was life.

You touched my shadow in the earth. Now give me flesh.

Heart pounding, he waited for the apparition, but though the air now had a shimmer, it was still just empty air.

Her shadow in the earth. Whatever passed for matter out there could not exist in this space. She could only mould what she could find. What she was given. He needed raw materials within which she could manifest her lovely being.

Give me flesh. Touch me. Fuck me.

His eye fell on the garbage. He assessed its contents critically, then added a dishcloth and a plastic bowl—foodstuffs, textiles, plastics, it was all good—then wondering if she would need bones opened the freezer and threw in a bag of lamb chops and a couple of frozen chickens.

Fuck your goddess and become a god.

The shimmer in the air had now become a drumming, like raindrops pattering over his skin. He stripped quickly, adding his clothes to the pile of trash, then slid off his watch and threw that in too. Now he had nothing. It felt worshipful. It felt right.

Bona Dea. He willed her to be beautiful.

A heap of greasy cartons slid away abruptly into nowhere, and then came back, as a tiny black speck in the air that swelled out rapidly into a funnel. Inside it, cartilaginous rings of ribbing expanded and contracted, and from its open mouth a syrupy gel spilled out. It was beautiful. He wanted to fuck that thing until he died of it.

Not that he had a choice: a voluptuous, slithering mass had erupted into the air behind him, like tube worms covered in small rubber hooks, and was holding him tightly in its grip.

He was inside her: she had clamped herself over his cock and was beginning to grip and pull. It was heaven. And she was inside him: one of those slippery things had just crawled up his ass. He groaned. It was bliss, it was—

—fuck, no—it was inside his head. He had felt and heard the sickening crunch as it forced its way under his skull.

Sheet lightning crackled behind his eyes—let me in—as she worked her way deeper inside, licking at every particle of his body with her slick black tongues—say yes—until space peeled away in every direction—love me, your goddess—and he fell into the eternal and unbreakable embrace of Bona Dea.

On a beach that had once overlooked a small market town in Suffolk, Alex Frazer inspected the contents of a rock pool. A mixed bouquet of eyes stared back up at him, blue, grey, and brown, connected by a tangle of optic nerve.

There had been another flesh tide, and the beach was strewn with debris. Tattered sheets of piebald skin. A few of those long, feathery ribbons he thought might be trailing gills. But mostly the pieces were unidentifiable to him.

The great leviathan. It needed deep water, so he had never seen it, except for what washed up on the beach. Had the whole world one day decided to walk into the sea? He would most likely never know, given he had been dead at the time.

He was the servant and consort of Bona Dea, the witness and custodian of her works. Dear Dea. He had lost count of the times she had killed him. She got bored. It appeared he was easy to reassemble, even from widely separated parts.

He aimed a pebble at a purplish lump, and it hit with a wet slap. Dumb as kelp, he had always assumed, but lately he had begun to wonder—all those billions of minds, connected—

—but even so, what did it do? What could it do? Nothing. Drift and think. Dream. It was the wreckage of humanity. It was unable even to crawl up onto the beach.

It prays. His question had been answered, but not by the Dea. To us. Other things were out there, nuzzling at the underside of space. It calls us to the light. And now he too could hear it, the chant of the world-voice echoing through vast underwater canyons.

It prays. To let us in.

The CONQUEROR WOMB:
PARSING SHUB-NIGGURATH

Scott R Jones

This essay was originally published in Jones’
When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality
from Martian Migraine Press, March 2014

At the time of this writing, my wife and I are expecting the arrival of our second child, a girl. We are, as we were with our firstborn, naturally excited about the prospect of meeting this new being, this freshly-minted consciousness, and look forward to sharing in her growing awareness of herself and the world.

We are also, as thinking humans and R’lyehians, appropriately appalled by the prospect, and particularly the nature and manner of her arrival into our lives. Common wisdom claims the birth of a child as a small, everyday miracle, but too few individuals ever really explore the awesome and terrifying implications of sexuality, breeding, and birth against the vast background tapestry of Time and Space. But this we must do, to arrive at an appreciation of the ultimate temporal insurgency and animating essence of Shub-Niggurath: the Prime Mover in the Ooze, Mother of Abominations, Fractal Felitrix of Fecundity.

Our daughter is more active than our son was. Not to put too fine a point on it: she’s a kicker. A kicker at the walls of her rapidly contracting universe. She is also, with only eight weeks to go, still in a breech position, which means her kicks tend to land with brutal precision on the inside of her mother’s cervix...

“Goddamnit! I swear she’s going to punch a hole right out of me,” said my wife recently, after a particularly vigorous internal assault.

“She wants to get started,” I replied.

Of course, that’s not actually the case: babies in utero have no conceptual tools or structures with which to create such a conscious desire or drive in themselves. Kicks, in this case, are merely kicks. Nevertheless, there is something of truth in the statement, for it cannot be denied that, as far as the career of Life itself is concerned, we are nothing but drive: a constant, frantic, multi-limbed pushing forward into the stuff of Time, and a concurrent dominance of Space and progressively higher dimensions.

From the first free-floating amoebas, directionless and adrift in ancient dimly-lit seas, to the precision-guided humans describing perfect parabolas miles above our planet at this very second, the goal of Life has always been to consume the past in a holocaust of present forms, each a potential beachhead on the future, a probe into the Possible. We are, each of us, the leading edge of every iteration of the genetic code that came before us, down through unthinkable eons of aunts and apes, arcteryx and annelid. We are, each of us, the very tip of a branch on the Tree of Life.

And that Tree, that grasping, thrusting, engulfing storm of Being, that Tree is Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with A Thousand Young.

“Did you know that right now, I’m not only carrying our daughter, but technically our grandchildren as well?” My wife loves her research. “All her eggs are present within her already.”

“That’s if we win the evolutionary lottery, and our offspring breed successfully. We have potential grandchildren at this moment. Well, half our potential grandchildren, anyway.” I took a moment to breathe, to feel the ridiculous gravity of the future pull at my core. “Such extravagance,” I muttered. “So many eggs in you... how many, actually?”

“Well, at this moment, whatever I’ve got left myself, so, maybe just under 300,000.” she answered. “She’s got around two million. There’s a lot of egg cell die-off between birth and puberty.”

“Still. More than anyone would ever need in a thousand lifetimes. And that’s nothing in comparison to the horde of swimmers present in each humble little spurt of my ejaculate. Twenty million or more. Twenty million. My seed, over my lifetime, is in the...” I found myself momentarily at a loss, boggling at the scale of it all. “Dagon’s Teeth, what’s the number grouping that’s higher than billions?”

“Trillions.”

“Trillions. It’s in the trillions. Only two of which have resulted in actual fresh humans. The extravagance! Madness!”

Truly, Shub-Niggurath is the Conqueror Womb. All shall fall, all are falling, before her miscegenetic might, her inexhaustible infinite armies of mingling microscopic code. For what is Life but a swarm of information expressed in flesh over the entirety of Time? If we were to somehow view the career of Life in a time-lapsed fashion, that is what we would see: a swarm of forms, a frothing shoggoth-wave of embodied information, a wave the leading edge of which we are poised upon, always and in all ways.

Shub-Niggurath, to borrow a phrase from Zen, is both the water of Life, the actual matter of it, the flesh and the fury, and the wave, the temporal moving point within the matter. She is Fertility and all that the word implies. If Yog-Sothoth, her paramour, is the extruding force of consciousness and awareness into our dimension(s), then Shub-Niggurath is the provider of the receiving forms for that consciousness. She is the Ultimate Mothering Pot.

These forms, whether of flesh, silicon, plasma, or spirit, share one thing in common with their Source: hunger. Not for nothing is Shub-Niggurath portrayed in much of the Mythos-related fiction as a deity of vast appetite, for she is the embodiment of the First Rule of the Universe: Everybody Hungry. This hunger manifests in various ways: for food, territory, information, experience. All these things must be consumed, in whole or in part, and all to feed the First Hunger itself: the hunger for Time, for the Future, a hunger that can only be sated through sex and procreation.

Time is often characterized as a consuming fire in which all things burn. Time the Thief. Time, and its grim, chalky cheerleader Death: two heads of the tag-teaming Conqueror Worm. Shub-Niggurath, the Conqueror Womb, shows us that the opposite is true: we, that is to say Life, is that which consumes Time. We are the hungry ghosts, moving from body to body, and beyond bodies into epigenetic technologies and airy Platonic idea-forms, and we pass the seconds and minutes and eons through the needle-narrow throats of our endless iterations. We are not the victims of Time. Time is our food, we take from it what we need, and once we have consumed it, it becomes fixed in the past, immovable and essentially dead.

Another view, one relating to the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: the Future is always dark, which is to say formless and unknown. To consume Time, to feed the Future through the choke-point of consciousness and being, of manifestation, is to expose it to the illumination of the Present, a brightness which calcifies and stiffens it. The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, then, are the forms of Life yet to be manifested, permanent residents of that threshold state just beyond the Now. Recall the description, given by the sometime Mythos-author Robert Bloch in his classic story Notebook Found in a Deserted House...

Something black in the road, something that wasn’t a tree. Something big and black and ropy, just squatting there, waiting, with ropy arms squirming and reaching ... it was the black thing of my dreams - that black, ropy, slime jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms.

What is this image of a single Dark Young, if it is not a composite form of the shifting, viscous flesh of genetic possibility? Of some future chimeric proto-manifestation of a life force not yet locked down into a single form? Mouths and ropes and snakes and hoofs and trees, a being (or myriad beings!) vibrating with quantum uncertainty at every point of intersection with the moment that is to come, the one just after this one! The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: agents of the ultimate insurgency.

But why is such an insurgency necessary? Why must Time be consumed, processed, shat out? All things move toward their end: Time, though the thing through which all things move, is itself no exception to this cosmic law, and so we see the goal of the Great Old Ones brought closer to fruition by the activities of Life at the behest of the Mother, the Conqueror Womb...

That is not dead, which can eternal lie

and with strange aeons, even Death may die

Yog-Sothoth knows the Gates and is the Key to them; Shub-Niggurath is the pressing of the flesh against those Gates, and when the Great Old Ones awaken and return to their full consciousness and might, that which bursts through will be her spawn. Shub-Niggurath devours Time to hasten the moment of their return, or, to be rather more crude about it, Shub-Niggurath fucks Time to death.

The R’lyehian, knowing this, and knowing the method whereby this devouring is accomplished, has her answer to the nihilist and the anti-natalist. The latter claims that, given the cruelty and suffering inherent to incarnating in this world, the worst cruelty a sentient being can commit is being party to the creation of yet another sentient being.

This view supposes that survival-in-the-flesh somehow means survival-of-the-individual. The R’lyehian knows there is no such thing. The R’lyehian knows that “the individual” is a momentary condensation of consciousness (itself an extrusion of Yog-Sothoth) on the shifting surface of flesh and form, and any pain or joy “the individual” experiences is likewise momentary.

Just as we are all Yog-Sothoth, so, too, are we the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: we are mind and consciousness, and the base matter that houses consciousness for brief moments, birthing and dieing in our unguessable numbers, and all of it surging towards the point when Time (exhausted, devoured, and unable to hold its shape against the onslaught of the First Hunger) finally shatters, ending the cycle. At that point, the stars will come right.

As the Buddhists affirm, only in Time is suffering possible. Is not its destruction the awesome work of gods? Is it not the ultimate Great Work, performed by Ones no less Great?

To Shub-Niggurath, then, Primal Kali, Annihilating Dark Mother, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, the R’lyehian offers praise and, so far as they are able, abundance.

About the Authors

ROSE BANKS (@rozbanx, rozbanx.com) is a Londoner who writes mostly in the urban gothic and contemporary Lovecraftian genres, about extraordinary incursions into the lives of rational people, busy streets where the lights go out, and about those things that hide behind the walls and in the cracks. Blossom is her first published story.

RAN CARTWRIGHT has written in a variety of forms and formats for years. He prefers horror, but has also written science fiction and fantasy satire. Two of his short horror tales were recommended for Bram Stoker awards in 2000. Ran has several horror and fantasy tales in the works, and an episodic road novel. A retired archaeologist, Ran lives in Biloxi, Mississippi with two cats, Rufus and Pixie.

VICTORIA DALPE is a writer and visual artist based out of Providence, RI where she lives with her husband, writer and filmmaker, Philip Gelatt. The site where H.P. Lovecraft’s childhood home once stood can be spotted from their attic window. Victoria loves horror movies, reads too much, and has a soft spot for painting animal skulls. Visit her under-updated blog here: victoriadalpe.blogspot.com/

AMBROSIUS GRIMES was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a writer of erotica and speculative fiction with a degree in English and an addiction to dark roast coffee. He discovered the writings of H. P. Lovecraft in the early eighties and has not slept well since. That is probably just a coincidence. Or it might be the caffeine.

KENTON HALL is a Canadian actor, writer, director and musician who, for reasons he tries desperately to make sound more mysterious than they really are, lives and works in the United Kingdom. The longest film he has been in, to date, is Les Misérables and his novel, Godbothering, which he never stops going on about, is actually coming along quite nicely. To find out more, follow him on Twitter @KentonHall or, indeed, type his name into whichever search engine purchased promotional consideration in this book. (Ha! We wish! Sorry, Kenton! – the Editors)

After winning a horror story competition on her honeymoon, LYNDSEY HOLDER decided that perhaps this writing stuff wasn’t so terrifying after all. She’s currently complaining about the state of comics these days on her column Comics Over Innsmouth over at Innsmouth Free Press. In her spare time, she’s editing Storm Battalion, her husband’s forthcoming RPG, and writing a novel that combines her two passions: pulp detectives and inescapable doom.

ANNABETH LEONG’s weird erotica has appeared in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (Circlet Press) and Coming Together: Arm in Arm in Arm. Her standalone work includes the dystopian erotic novella Icarus Bleeds (published by Forbidden Fiction). She is very proud to live in Providence, RI, and frequently visits H.P. Lovecraft’s former haunts. For more information on her writing, please visit annabethleong.blogspot.com or find her on Twitter @AnnabethLeong

COPPER SLOANE LEVY is a Toronto native who spent most of his life in the Midwest and Southern United States. His first official foray into Lovecraft appeared in Fiddleblack #8. Currently he is at work on the second installment of his I AM INEVITABLE series of sci-fi novellas. He tweets @coppersloane and you can email him at csloanelevy@outlook.com

LUKE R. J. MAYNARD is a writer of fiction, poetry, music, and scholarly criticism. As both a doctor of English literature (PhD Victoria 2013), and an alumnus of Victoria’s Tongues of Fire spoken word and slam poetry collective, Luke enjoys working anywhere and everywhere that literature is wont to flourish (now including, it seems, the lurid world of Lovecraftian erotica). His work has appeared in Transverse, Sparks, Grubstreet, in a few obscure collections of essays, and on the 2011 indie CD Desolation Sound. Luke lives and works in Canada, mostly in London, Ontario, but sometimes elsewhere.

CHRISTINE MORGAN works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility and divides her writing time among many genres, though her true calling seems to be tending toward historical horror and dark fantasy (especially Viking-themed stories). A lifelong reader, she also writes, reviews, and beta-reads. She has several novels in print, with more due out soon. Her stories have appeared in more than three dozen anthologies, ‘zines and e-chapbooks. She’s been nominated for the Origins Award and made Honorable Mention in two volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She’s also a wife, mom, and possible future crazy-cat-lady whose other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, and cheesy disaster movies.

JONAS MOTH is the divergent identity of a writer too embarrassed to associate his proper Christian name with the filth that he sometimes creates. Please lodge any complaints and/or requests to stop, please, stop! with him personally at his Facebook page.

W. H. PUGMIRE has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since his days as a Mormon missionary in Northern Ireland in 1972. He was the editor of Tales of Lovecraftian Horror and Visions of Khroyd’Hon, and is now concentrating on writing collections of tales that are Lovecraftian to ye core. His newest book for 2014 is the short novel, written in collaboration with David Barker, The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal, published in an illustrated limited hardcover edition by Dark Renaissance Books.

SHON RICHARDS is allegedly an erotica writer who writes science fiction, pulp adventure, sexual magic and occasionally suburban bondage. He is really the herald of an unnamable erotic entity and writes with the sole purpose of preparing the psyches of the human population for the coming Apocafuck. His latest book, Doom Vagina, tells the story of a groupie for the world’s most demonic girl band. His current plane of existence can be found at ShonRichards.com

BRIAN M. SAMMONS has been writing reviews on all things horror for more years than he’d care to admit. Wanting to give other critics the chance to ravage his work for a change, he has penned a few short stories that have appeared in anthologies such as Arkham Tales, Horrors Beyond, Monstrous, Dead but Dreaming 2, Horror for the Holidays, Twisted
Legends, Mountains of Madness, Deepest Darkest Eden and others. He has edited the books Cthulhu Unbound 3, Undead & Unbound, Eldritch Chrome, Edge of Sundown, and Steampunk Cthulhu. He is currently far too busy for any sane man. For more about this guy that neighbors describe as “such a nice, quiet man” you can follow him on Twitter @BrianMSammons or visit his website: brian_sammons.webs.com

CHRISTOPHER SLATSKY grew up in the Pacific Northwest, spent quite some time in the U.K., and currently resides in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the first volume of Arcane, Eschatology, Innsmouth Free Press (pending), and the Lovecraft eZine where Obsidian Capra Aegagrus originally appeared. He may be infrequently found loitering on Facebook.

JACQUELINE SWEET writes about supernatural sex workers, tricky succubi, gay werewolves and hungry implacable creatures that lurk beyond the veil of Time and Space. She lives in Oakland, California and has agreed to stop reading her work at parties. When you want to read more Jacqueline Sweet stories please check out her blog: therealjacquelinesweet.wordpress.com

MOLLY TANZER is the author of the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book award-nominated A Pretty Mouth as well as Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations. She lives in Boulder, CO where she mostly writes about fops arguing with each other. She tweets @molly_the_tanz, and blogs— infrequently—at mollytanzer.com

DON WEBB teaches Creative Writing for UCLA Extension. A nominee for the International Horror Guild, Rhysling, and Shirley Jackson Awards, Don does an amazing job of not winning. His latest nonfiction was a book on Aleister Crowley, Overthrowing the Old Gods (Inner Traditions 2013) and in 2014 Hippocampus Press is releasing a 30 year retrospective of his Lovecraftian fiction.

About the Editors

JUSTINE GEOFFREY is like nothing you can easily imagine. She is the author of the classic weird-erotica series Blackstone, the gonzo sci-fi smut extravaganza that is Orgy in the Valley of the Lust Larvae, and (with fellow editor Scott R Jones) the steam-engineering-manual/Victorian-erotica mash-up Seawater & Stars: The Last Novel of Gideon Stargrave. Upcoming works include the second Lust Larvae novella and Blackstone Book 3: Yellow Sign Bound. Justine stopped identifying as anything other than a multi-dimensional omni-sexual being years ago, so unless you’re turned on by “the regular stuff” and glasses of water, atomic storms, and hot pics of barely legal teen dust mites, then don’t even bother, honey. She’d probably eat you alive, mantis-style, if you met her (something you might even enjoy) or, just to be safe, you could write to her instead at justineg@martianmigrainepress.com Or follow her on Twitter @BLACKSTONErotic

SCOTT R JONES is a writer, poet, spoken word performer, mostly unintentional comedian, and naturalized sorcerer. He lives in Victoria BC Canada with his lovely wife Sasha and all-round awesome kids Sean and Meridian. He keeps at this writing thing. Like a dog he keeps at it. His fiction and poetry has been published in Broken City Mag, Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku 2, and upcoming in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. He is the author of the short horror story collection Soft From All The Blood and The Ecdysiasts, a book of literary flash fiction. He’s currently polishing up a book of essays that detail an auto-ethnographical approach to R’lyehian spirituality, When The Stars Are Right, due out in early 2014 from Martian Migraine Press. Like Lovecraft, he produces more correspondence than fiction, so he’d be happy to hear from you. You can reach him by email at srjones@martianmigrainepress.com or you can follow him on the Twitter @PimpMyShoggoth

About Martian Migraine Press

We are an independent Canadian micro-press with a focus on the weird, unusual and occasionally transgressive. Fiction that plays with boundaries before ignoring them altogether; erotica with dark humour and a taste for the outré; and poetry for people from other planets. Martian Migraine books are available almost exclusively in e-reader formats through the usual fine online retailers, although we sometimes make forays into producing physical books and chapbooks in limited press runs. Mostly when we’re feeling nostalgic.

Martian Migraine Press:
the Best Kind of Headache

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Table of Contents

PRAISE & ABUNDANCE!

THIS HUMAN FORM

THAT HIDEOUS THING

UNSATISFIED

MATER ANNELIDA

The POTBOILER SIGIL

ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS

BABYMAMA

OUR CHILD

BOY

PIECES (2) for STRING OCTET

The WHISPERER in the VAGINA

OBSIDIAN CAPRA AEGAGRUS

DIRTYMAG

WITH HONEY DRIPPING

IN THE DOWN DEEP DOWN

THE SCARLET SCRIPTURE

WITHIN YOUR UNHOLY PIT OF SHOGGOTHS

BLOSSOM

The CONQUEROR WOMB: PARSING SHUB-NIGGURATH

About the Authors

About the Editors

About Martian Migraine Press

Other MMP Titles