Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

Nickolas froze, and Barry’s heart galloped.

“What is it?”

Nicholas drew the silk-wrapped volume from the trunk. His hands shook as he unwrapped. “Can it be?”

A buzzing undercurrent of electricity infused the air.  Barry’s arms broke in gooseflesh. His cock pulsed.

“Of all these treasures,” Nickolas said, his voice taking on a haunting echo. “You are the most priceless.” Then he faced Barry directly, a glint in his eyes and a surly grin on his lips. “I can say with certainty that this is the Langston Collection.”

Nickolas clutched the pinkish, gray-skinned book against his chest and stroked it. Though Barry initially dismissed what happened next as a trick of the room’s poor light, he swore The Libidonomicon quivered. The book made an undulating motion, like a snake, as though the pages were pulsing from within.  Pulsing, like Barry’s cock.

“So… you interested?” he asked.

Nickolas’ grin widened. “In the books? Very much so. But also in you.”

The wine in the air, which had steadily built in Barry’s ears since being touched, crackled out. And the book, The Libidonomicon, puffed and shrank against Nickolas’ chest, as though taking breaths.

It had only happened once, in the deep green woods behind his uncle’s house. Dave and Jamie were a couple of local guys, friends bored out of their skulls during an otherwise unremarkable summer. A couple of no-good punks, he’d been told, but that wasn’t true. In the woods, they’d been great, at least so much as Barry remembered. Though not to be repeated physically beyond the one time, that sweaty, dirty afternoon proved to be unforgettable, fodder for a decade’s worth of jerk-off fantasies.

Barry thought of them again as Nickolas maneuvered him onto the nearby mattress. The pill-covered quilt felt scratchy beneath his naked spine, like that old army blanket in the woods, which had likely been somebody’s picnic castoff. The scent of pine hit his nostrils strongly, more nostalgia than Nickolas, he imagined. Nickolas, so handsome, moved on top of him. But in the murky near-absence of light, it was Jamie he saw. Jamie was a brute of a young man, probably now married, divorced, and living with one female friend or another in a long succession of meaningless lays since that long ago afternoon. If he wasn’t in jail serving time, that was. Barry hoped Jamie thought about their day in the woods, too, when he jerked off or was buried balls-deep in a choice pussy or ass.

Barry blinked and the face now belonged to Dave. Dave was the handsomer of the two and the dirtier-minded of the boys his uncle had labeled no-good punks. He’d also been the one to incite the dance steps that ultimately led to their conga-fuck beneath the pine trees; often, Barry had thought about seeking Dave out on the internet. Dave, who was also probably married and still playing around with men, cuming and making them cum. Oh, to cum…

Dave-Nickolas sighed, washing a cool breath across Barry’s throat, and the scintillating shudder cascaded down his chest to his abdomen; lower, engulfing his cock in concentric waves of pleasure. A fortune, Nickolas had said. Barry was about to become rich, thanks to the Langston Collection. Of course, Nickolas would take possession of the books. This very night, in fact.

“You are beautiful,” Nickolas said, his voice throbbing with an echo even more distant now. “Can you comprehend how very long I’ve searched for you, my love? Or the lengths I went to in order to reunite with you, after that charlatan of a dark priest stole you away from me?”

Dave hovered over him, but his mouth never moved, and the voice professing its undying love was speaking at some length’s distance. Barry summoned his strength and looked. The illusion of Dave who’d been Jamie a minute earlier dissolved in a swarm of black dots. Turning his head required more effort, but when he did, Barry saw the book, placed on the bed, expanding and contracting, as though breathing. And something else.

The lamp had been switched off, but candles had been lit, fat and waxy ones that exuded a bitter sexual smell. The only other light in the room came from the section of the floor where the steamer trunk sat. The lid sat open; an unnatural glow, part indigo, the rest a mix of crimsons and greens, emanated dully from within, as if from the arcane books themselves. He knew the texts were valuable, but at that moment, he also realized they were different from other books. Dare he think it? Dangerous.

A shadow passed between Barry and the books. It stirred the sexual tang in the air, a stink of fresh sweat from a man’s ripest, most wonderfully male destinations. Barry’s pulse quickened.

“What… what are you doing to me?” he managed.

“Making love,” Nickolas said between scattering chilly kisses down his throat.

Barry moaned. Whatever protest he thought of making died in a rush of exquisite sensations. Nickolas’ lips clamped to his throat.  Pain flickered. All else was ecstasy.

They were naked, skin pressed against skin, their chemicals mixing liquidly as sweat mingled with sweat. A man’s sweat could be so powerful, so intoxicating.

Nickolas sprawled out on the bed, his body as magnificent as Barry imagined. Every detail came clearly: the neat T-pattern of hair superimposed over a muscular torso; fur-ringed belly button, a full nest of dark curls above a swollen uncircumcised cock; low-hanging balls; moderately hairy legs; big feet, sexy in ways Barry hadn’t considered possible before this night.

Nickolas’ lips, full and pink… no, crimson… in the room’s muddy light, beckoned him with a smile.

“Y’toth Ve Zetha Sog.”

“Huh?” Barry asked. The voice in his head wondered if he’d misunderstood, or if Nickolas was speaking in one of the tongues from the ancient texts.

“I said that you have my permission.”

“For?”

“For whatever you want.”

What he wanted, Barry thought, was to be there again, to know the kind of unapologetic release he’d experienced that summer in the woods with Dave and Jamie. The kind of hardcore, primal sex one man can only experience with another. Sex so dirty, so wrong, outcasts throughout human history had written forbidden books about it. Sex rarely spoken of, but also never forgotten.

Their lips met, and Barry knew that Nickolas would give him all that he wanted. The black and the blessed; the hallowed and the unholy; from head to toe and everywhere in between.

Slowly, Barry’s mouth descended. Chest to stomach, lower into that thatch of male-smelling curls. His mouth encircled Nickolas’ cock, and taste ignited on his tongue, deceptively pure at first.  The longer Barry suckled and savored it, the more sanguine it grew.

“Hebbe… Alane… Raema… Amiot… Suggs… Braye!”

Barry glanced up. The words from a lost language ricocheted through the shadows around him, but the lips of the handsome man he fellated didn’t move. He closed his eyes only to suddenly be transported there again, onto the army blanket in the woods, only…

The old blanket was different, stained with a dark, moldering circle at the middle. Feathered skeins decorated the top of the circle, like eyelashes, thought Barry. The stain at the center of the army blanket resembled an eye.

He lay across one side, at an angle, canted toward the other, naked. Nickolas was posed in a straight line, his face at Barry’s ankles. And on the blanket’s far side, in the last space of the geometry where a third male body should be to form a triangle, was The Libidonomicon.

The book, no longer pallid and gray, had taken on a rosy complexion. Its shape altered before Barry’s wide eyes, stretching out into an oval. The circle at the heart of the triangle, too, had changed. A two-dimensional line drawing of an eyeball now stared up at him.

“W’Tenue… Shrout… Kohl-Theda!”

The book inhaled, and with a liquid, languid slither, put forth an arm.

“Come back to me, my love. Back, through the pages… ”

An arm first, and then a cock. A lone, pink tentacle stretched out from the resin, hooded and moist.

“Yes!” Nickolas sighed. “Live again!”