The Chosen

Others seemed to be…

Eating.

Vera backed out of the entry.

I’m dreaming again, she convinced herself. It’s just another nightmare, like all the others.

Many more such doors lined the strange hallway. Would she find a similar scene behind these other doors? From the low chorus of shrieks and moans, Vera imagined so. She looked back into the first mist-filled den. A croaking sound augmented the roving moans, and a dark, clicking chuckle. The nude women writhed en-frenzied as their hideous suitors stepped up the pitch of fornication. Discolored, bony hips pummeled splayed white thighs. Maws like gouges in dark meat drooled copiously into the woman’s open mouths.

“Hey, Vera! Come on in!”

Her eyes dared up. Through shifting, hot mist another figure turned from what appeared to be a sconce cut into the earthen wall. A male figure different from the others.

Naked. Bald. And human.

Kyle.

“We knew it was only a matter of time before you found out,” he commented, grinning. The amethyst pendant glittered in candlelight. The cocky grin widened. “But that’s the way he wanted it. He likes you, Vera. He needs you.”

He, she thought numbly. And at once the dreams came back, The Hands, the brutal sex, and the ecstacy.

The hideous face seen departing down the hall.

A face, she realized now, so similar to these.

“See anyone you recognize?”

Vera couldn’t move. Instead she remained where she stood, gazing into the carnal den, one cheek pressed against the edge of the doorway. She felt helpless.

And, indeed, there was someone here she recognized…

One of the women on the bed, who now locked her ankles behind her grotesque lover’s back, heaved shrieks in response to her obvious climax.

Vera felt her heart shrink very quickly.

The woman was Donna.

Her mate grunted in its knobby throat, eventually withdrawing a penis that looked like a mold-ridden log and discharged streams of semen onto Donna’s breasts. But at the same time, the thing—and that’s all Vera could think of it as: not a man but a thing—strangled Donna with a leather strap. Donna, still in the throes of orgasm, convulsed wildly, her tongue bulging between her lips. The thing chortled, its hideous penis drooped. Donna’s swollen face turned red, then blue. Then she died.

Kyle slapped his bare thigh, laughing. “Now that’s what I call coming and going!”

Vera stared at him through the rank mist. This wasn’t a dream, she knew that now. This—however mad, however impossible—was real.

Kyle turned back to his hidden task at the sconce. “Yeah, they’re party animals, all right. Sometimes they get a little carried away. But that doesn’t matter; we’re here to serve them—”

Serve them, Vera thought, remembering the book.

“—and if they snuff a chick every now and then, well…shit happens, you know? We can always get plenty of girls. Me and Zy have been snatching them for months.”