Across the wet grass between the dormitory blocks, heralding herself with a strident, indrawn wail like the sound of darkness laughing.
If any of the wakeful inmates heard her, they did not look up. If they had seen, they would not have dared to believe. Only he knew.
For she was coming to him.
The tree outside his dorm window shuddered, shaking off a night fragrance that was not its own-a scent pungent to the point of rot.
The boy lay naked on his bed, knowing there was no point in being anywhere else. She would have him there and had been violent getting him there on previous nights; he did not wish to extend the struggle or invite her wrath. Her affection was terrible enough.
One night, months ago, returning late from a party where he had drunk
But she had sensed him. Had heard his unworded lust, felt his molesting thoughts as he passed into the night.
And she had responded.
Every night since.
Every single night since, he had refused all engagements, denied all company, in order to be in his room at this time, in his bed, waiting for her to come and claim him and take her pleasure.
He no longer even bothered to stay clothed. He knew how she wanted him and no longer had any desire to appear otherwise when she arrived. Her will was like white-hot iron-everything melted and cleaved to it before shrivelling to nothing in the heat. All his waking hours had yielded to the marauding night. Entire days shrank into a few sweaty hours. The nocturnal torments reverberated through his twenty-two-year-old mind all through the day. His body ached, his balls were knots of dull pain, taut with overuse. His cock, so unbelievably tender from having been so unbelievably hard, did not feel like it belonged to him any more.
And it didn’t.
The curtains fretted in the otherwise still air. She had arrived.
The fluorescent tube coughed briefly, spitting darkness, then recovered.
Two weeks ago, he had taken to leaving the lights on in the vain hope that this would either weaken her or strengthen him. Now, she liked it this way. It forced him to see his body being used, watch his cock take on the angles she imposed, watch it shiver uncontrollably as it spewed forth the essence she extracted from him with her mouth, her hands, her dead vagina.
Now into the room she came, and at once her presence pressed down on him. He sank into the sheets, paralysed. His eyes reeled, compensating for his body’s immobility, and in answer to his search, she took form. Out of the still air, a faint haze became a fog, then developed outlines and contours, grew solid and opaque… and then she was there.
She was beautiful, but not in a way the living or sane could possibly comprehend.
She, too, was naked-but while his body shuddered with shame, hers was defiantly bared. Her skin shone faintly with a glow that made him think of shapeless, writhing plant-things, fathoms deep in the sea. She must have been young when she died and took this form-how long ago? Decades?
Centuries? Living death had drained her of moist youth and left her skin smooth but powdery, her breasts paler and colder than marble.
Her eyes were cruel and colourless. She rarely looked at his face or met his gaze-her obsession lay elsewhere, her control already complete. Her hair glistened but was not wet; moving in response to winds he could not feel. Her teeth were not sharp-she had bitten him often, yet he had never bled-still, they were a predator’s teeth. She never touched his lips or kissed him, those actions meant nothing when she could bite, suck, swallow every other inch of him.
She was now stretched out in the air above him, looking ravenously at his meticulously gym-toned body. The inches between them filled with lead, crushing him against the mattress.
Her hands reached down and began to touch him.
Her fingers, cold and raking, ranged across his torso. In the beginning, he had expected to be repulsed by the touch of death, to seek refuge behind stubborn flaccidity. Let her mangle his limp body till she shrieked her way back into the night in banshee frustration, he’d defiantly thought.
But his body was a traitor. While his mind recoiled, scrabbling away from all that she was and everything she did, his body responded to that ancient pact of flesh and lust. Even now, he shuddered and trembled at her touch; as his nipples tingled beneath her fingertips, humiliation rushed to his hot cheeks. He was more disgusted by his own raging flesh than by the outrage of her hands.
Her hands traveled downward, hard nails scraping faint red trails across his helpless abs. And still downward.
His humiliation was now complete. Even before he felt her touch on his cock, he had felt her desire; and already his cock strained towards her, mocking him. Was this the erection dead men had? The hardness of impassive death rather than vigorous life? Was it dead blood that was hardening in his veins, engorging his betrayed manhood?
Then she took him into her mouth, so deep that she would have choked if she could still breathe. With horror, he felt her lips touch his pubes, his cockhead rub against the flaking inside of her dust-dry throat. The only wetness was his-the shameful ooze of precum that his cock treasonously offered up to lubricate her impalement.
Would she drink his first load? She sometimes did, as if receiving a preliminary offering before the cruel consummation. She could afford to let a load or two go astray, as she seldom left him before he had surrendered his young seed three or four times. In the early weeks, he had felt as if she would empty his balls for good and leave him desiccated, but his body stunned him by repeatedly and consistently satisfying her hunger, against his will.
But this night, her hunger was acute, she wanted his warmth inside her.
Already now she was poised over him, her body gaping over his turgid cock.
Her eyes met his suddenly, pinning his frantic gaze, and her lips stretched into a merciless leer as she lowered herself onto him. Her cold clamminess drew him in, the emptiness of her pulling him deeper and deeper, as if she would suck his whole body into her — to fill her hollowness, to warm her from the core to the underside of her skin. As if his hot wet life could quench the death that raged in her.
She began riding him, taking him deep with every downward thrust, her body never touching the bed. He could feel the dryness of her vaginal passage rasping against his swollen, throbbing cock. Her silence terrified him: her body displayed all the abandon of lust, but she emitted none of the noisy breathing that underscored physical pleasure. The silence seemed to sharpen her intent, to take all of him, to rape his body until he lost his mind and she possessed his soul.
His young body was stiff against the bed-arms useless, legs unresponsive. He could not resist, could not pull back his groin to deny her.
Locked into place, his erection was like a skewed tombstone upon which her insatiable lust perched.
He was getting close. Soon he would offer up this night’s first hot libation, a fluid guarantee of his enslaved virility. Any minute now, the dead muscles would gulp at him as his life spurted out in creamy ropes, flowing upwards into whatever emptiness comprised her insides.
As she dragged him towards climax, he understood with searing clarity that he would never belong to anyone else again. Least of all himself. Before anyone else had had the chance, her touch had claimed him. What remained of his life would be spent in the burning shame of nightly surrender… until he had nothing left to offer, even to her.
Somewhere inside his head, plummeting downwards through the chasm that her lust had opened in his mind, his dwindling reason began to scream.
And then he came.
