to sink lethal fangs into their necks and skulls. They screamed almost like people did. The phallus of one stallion had been as tough as an old boot, but the foal inside one of the mares was as tender as butter.
The dream faded and Milo struggled to wake up. He saw shadows leaving his room. He staggered out of bed and began to follow. Out in the yard their shapes humped, twisted, bent tortuously. And then they became men. He gasped. Were they not wolves in the spirit? Had they always possessed real flesh and bones?
Milo followed as they went beyond the edge of town, to Fatima’s. Looking through a slit in the tent, Milo observed the freak ladies bathing the men, rubbing them down with fluffy towels, wrapping them in silk robes. They patted and caressed the men but never kissed them, never spread their legs for them. Their slavish devotions consisted only of touching, as they had been doing with Milo when he’d visited the tent years before.
Did the women know that these creatures had just been slaughtering livestock this night, human beings on other nights? Couldn’t they smell the meat and blood on them?
He growled in the back of his throat, thinking. Yes, the women knew. And it didn’t matter. They must have thought he was one of these when he’d run away to Fatima’s when he was only thirteen, a bear rug stitched to his skin.
Or maybe they had only been humoring him, recognizing him as a would-be cub, a fledgling beast.
Milo inhaled sharply, frightened of what he was going to do next. He flexed his muscles to give him courage and then boldly walked into the tent. The women cried out in surprise and alarm to fall back to positions behind the furniture. The men jumped to their feet, eyes faintly red at the edges, black at the centers, like moons emerging from full eclipse.
“I know who you are. I wish to become one of you,” he stated as if this was reasonable. Did he not wear their power on his skin in tattoo? Had he not ridden to their places of slaughter with them in the shadows of his nightmares?
The men glanced at each other, then turned back to him and grunted.
It made him angry that he’d broken his usual silence to speak to them. And they wouldn’t speak back to him.
“Will you not help me?” he demanded.
One of the men stepped forward, wetting his lips from a cup of wine.
“We can’t bite you,” the man said with slurring, lispy words. “We have no teeth.”
The men laughed, pink gums poking out in the half-light from the tent’s lamps.
The freak women tittered behind the furniture, peering up shyly to stare at Milo.
“Please help me,” Milo pleaded. “I want to live your life. I need to live it. It is the only touching I have ever known.”
One of the men rubbed a stubbly chin. “There is one way,” he replied tentatively. “Not just saliva carries the germ of the were. Semen does, too.”
Milo started as if he’d been slapped. He imagined bending over a table so that each of these men could take their turns ramming their hardness into his rectum, until they were spent and he was contaminated. And by the nasty leers on their faces, he knew he would have to endure all of them, not just the one it might take to grant him their shifting powers.
But he wanted it so badly.
I enter the jaws of death.
I become the jaws of death.
After all, the wolves frolicking amid the pieces of their kills had fucked one another. It hadn’t repulsed him then.
Even the most brutal touch was still a touch in a wasteland of isolation. And it had to hurt for he was sixteen and a virgin. And they were creatures addicted to very rough play.
Milo began to unfasten his trousers.
“No,” said one of the men. “Not that way. The newest member of a pack must always submit.”
They dropped their robes and stood, erect and ready in a gauntlet of anxious animals. Milo understood and sank to his knees before the first in line.
The freak women began to have sex with each other in an orgy of frustrated, voyeuristic passion. Skeletons rattled rocky pubes against the balloon faces of the fat women. Beards at both ends speckled with wet musk and occasional menstrual juices. Stumps thick as dildos vibrated with song. Lizard Lady’s gills were opening and closing in a frenzy. The fetus of an aborted hermaphrodite in a jar was jiggled from its shelf as two entwined two-faced prodigies kept bumping into the table it sat on. It smashed to the floor and the enraptured women kept right on rolling over the top of it, the baby’s elastic body pulping and the glass shards making them cry out in gurgling pleasure, embedding in their buttocks.
The men rocked above him. Their unusually long, black, curved fingernails raked his scalp and shoulders as he sucked them. He felt his blood coursing down his face into his eyes, flowing across his shoulders. He had his own erection, not from the act he was performing — but from the rust of his own blood, the scorch of it on his flesh. Its scent filled his nostrils as it crept down his face and he sucked it in great red drops, pulling it back into his head. He couldn’t help but revel in it for this was touching. It was any kind of touching at all that made people and beasts aware that they were alive. He’d always wanted to be loved, and violence was a sort of love — a bond in contact between two participants intent upon release, upon getting dirty with the night. There was a grace in fury and a gift to be given with each outrage. Milo heard the man above him howl in inarticulate orgasm.
He tried to swallow the bitter semen but couldn’t. It wouldn’t go down. He tried to spit it out before sliding down to the next in line but it wouldn’t be dislodged. He sucked until the next man came, then moved on to the next. He growled as he cupped his mouth around each shaft, snarling with the impulse to bite down at the most explosive of the meat. But he restrained himself.
Soon I’ll be able to actually run with them …
But when he’d done them all — wiping at his chin, still unable to swallow or spit out their seed — Milo looked back to see that all the men were dead. Their faces were peaceful as if they were sleeping. They did not have the strained, sweaty faces of a mob that has been satiated with oral sodomy. The freak women were cradling the slightly shriveled bodies and smiling, cooing to them like the men had been husbands and sons who’d fallen in a worthy battle.
“You’re the king of the wolves,” the ladies told him through their happy tears.
Milo ran out of the tent, choking on the mouthful of semen.
He didn’t go home. He collapsed in a field somewhere, exhausted, scratching at the tattooed skin, feeling the teeth press firmly against him, closing him in, hard as a kiss with open mouth and bared fangs.
The moon had risen by the time he woke up again. He stretched in the darkness and thought at first that his tattoos of teeth had gone black. But he rubbed it and it ruffled. It was hair sprouting all over him, tickling its way around his genitals and into the crack of his ass, filling the hollows of his armpits, flowing down his thighs. Itchy loving fingers crawled across his belly. His snout jutted forward and he thought he heard his nose bones cracking. His jaws became cavernous with wicked fangs.
He exulted and sniffed the air for signs of life somewhere, for the delicious odor of blood and the sound of a quickened heartbeat.
Inside him, the semen of the werewolves ceased to choke him. It coated his tongue, slimed his gums. He grinned like a maniac in the moonlight, that being what he was. Grinned as he ran off to hunt and to rip to pieces and feed, knowing that the spirit wolves were going with him, riding in his mouth. Wherever he roamed and whoever he slaughtered with his terrible love, they would dream in death of his exploits.
Godflesh
BRIAN HODGE
“Godflesh” first appeared in
