Cthulhurotica

Matthew Marovich SENSE

She walked into my office like she owned the place, sweeping in with a presence that filled the room the way she filled out a dress. Mrs. Tabitha Barnes was beautiful; blonde hair fell down her shoulders and back like spun gold, and her skin was so pale and smooth it looked like fine china. The dress in question was red, tailored, and fit her like a second skin and she layered it with a fur-lined coat that did little to hide the body underneath. Fierce green eyes studied me as she took the seat across the desk from me. She’d called before to introduce herself and the job she was offering, but I wasn’t ready for her, not in the slightest.

I could tell you about the job she hired me for. Her husband, Professor James Barnes, had gone missing. A scientist working at Miskatonic University, he was an astronomer; three days before her call he’d vanished, never returning home from work. She wanted me to find him because she was worried he might be having an affair.

I could tell you about how from the moment the job started it went bad. The gorilla that kicked in my door had to turn sideways to enter, a mountain of a man wrapped in a grey trench coat, black gloves covered hands as big as Christmas hams. A black fedora was pulled low over his eyes so I could only see his broad, broken nose and his sneer as he glanced her way. The sound of my pistol firing as he reached for her was like a thunderclap, the bullet spinning him to the floor. I grabbed her hand and fled.

We ran down the hall and out of the building; my Packard was parked in the back alley. In my rear-view mirror I could see a reed-thin man in a black, pinstripe suit glaring at us from the doorway of my building as we pulled away. Just before we turned the corner onto the main street the thin man was joined by the gorilla from upstairs, who didn’t seem to care that he had a bloody hole staining his coat.

I demanded that Mrs. Barnes tell me who the men were.

She insisted she didn’t know.

As the adrenalin wore off I became aware of her. She had a grip on my right arm like she was drowning. Streetlights flashed across her as we drove away, briefly illuminating her wide eyes, the line of her throat; the scent of her perfume filled the car. I swallowed and shook myself, tearing my eyes away from her and back to the road. We fled to my apartment and she took the bed and fell asleep almost instantly; I slept on the couch.

The two men found us the next morning, starting a cat-and-mouse chase that would last days. The gorilla, still wearing the blood-stained, bullet-riddled trench coat, broke down my front door before stepping back for the smaller man. His voice was strange, reedy, almost buzzing, and sounded slightly out of synch with the movements of his mouth. His eyes were gray and flat, with a lifelessness that disturbed me as he demanded the return of the key. What key? It was at that moment that Mrs. Barnes walked into the room and, upon seeing the two men, screamed.

The scream distracted them so they didn’t notice my pistol as I pulled it out from under the cushion I’d used for a pillow. Three bullets to his chest toppled the short man but the larger man moved forward with startling speed, gripping my hand and crushing it; a twist of his wrist stripped the gun from my numbed fingers before he threw it out the window. We only escaped him because Mrs. Barnes splashed a kettle of hot water in his face. His roar of pain trailed off into the buzzing of flies.

Somehow, the thin man, glimpsed always from a distance after that, survived; the expression on his face was of barely contained rage. From what I saw of the large man’s face, it was a mass of pink and red blotches dotted with white blisters. I doubted there would be any more talking in the future.

All throughout the chase I was aware that Mrs. Barnes and I seemed to be circling each other like two planets, our paths slowly shrinking. There were times when we barely avoided touching each other, hands stopping a moment before contact, fluttering like pigeons over a statue. We spoke softly, almost in whispers, not for any fear of being heard but because it felt closer; a few times her breath brushed my cheek. A few times I slipped and called her by her first name, the shock of that intimacy as sudden as a glimpse of bare skin, her eyes widening at the familiarity. She would stand so near that I wondered what she’d feel like pressed against me, feeling her body against mine; I wondered if she thought that about me.

That is the story I want to tell you.

That is the only story that matters now.

It happened suddenly and without plan. We had just checked in to our fifth motel in three days, a seedy affair on the edge of the city. I’d turned around to ask her about the room when she stepped forward, running into me. My arms immediately went around her waist to keep her from falling and I reflexively pulled her against me. Mrs. Barnes’ eyes were wide and I could see the pulse in her neck jump, feel her heart begin to beat faster. As if in a daze I slowly lowered my face and she lifted her lips to meet mine. She tasted clean and rich, full-bodied. Our first kiss was electric.

The first time was not soft, not slow. Our moans and gasps were of restrained desire finally released. She stayed pressed against me as her tongue danced with mine, and when my hands took too long undoing my shirt she tore it open, the last two buttons bursting free. I pulled the blouse free of her slacks before throwing it across the room, baring an expanse of smooth, pale stomach. Her breasts were held close by a tasteful white bra; my fingers blindly worked the clasp behind her back so I could fill my hands with her soft skin as soon as the bra dropped away. When I took first one nipple, then the other, in my mouth and sucked she cried out; when her hand gripped me through my trousers I nearly came.

We didn’t even pull the covers back as we collapsed onto the bed. She scooted back until she was stretched out underneath me, a goddess carved in ivory, her blonde hair a fan around her head like a corona.

“Please,” she whispered, head tilting back, her body arching up against me as I moved between her legs. “Please.”

Our mutual cry as I slid into her burst from us both. We moved hard against each other. All the panic and fear of the last three days coming out in my hips against hers, my cock driving all of the tension out of me and up through her mouth as she moaned. Our pace grew faster, harder, until the bed creaked alarmingly, the cheap headboard banging against the wall.

We both came, wordless screams of pleasure and release pouring from us, mine chasing Tabitha’s. I collapsed sideways, half on her, half off, and sleep fell immediately across us like a shroud.

I can still feel her body, how soft she was against my side, the clean scent of her hair, the musk of our sweat and sex.

I can still feel her breath stirring the hairs on my chest.

That’s what I want to remember.

After waking we rested together, idly touching. I knew that our pursuers wouldn’t stop until they got whatever key they were looking for but Mrs. Barnes, Tabitha she corrected me as we lay entangled, said she didn’t know what they were talking about. The only place we hadn’t checked was his office at Miskatonic University. Perhaps the key was there.

The Miskatonic observatory was built on a tall hill behind the main campus. Her husband’s office was located there. We drove to the empty parking lot near the domed building. The wind had picked up on our way and it snatched at my rumpled suit jacket as we stepped out of the car; I had to hold my hat on my head. Having lost my gun, I took the tire iron from the trunk of the car; it was awkward but its weight would make a functional club. The lock on the exterior door was a simple affair; MU was more concerned with keeping out mischievous students than determined P.I.s. I turned on my portable torch and led the way.

Our footsteps echoed down the long, tiled hallways. The search took us up three flights of stairs and down a hall to his office. It was pristine — as if her husband had just straightened it for the night. Outside the office window the trees writhed under the wind’s onslaught, the long bare fingers of branches scratching against the glass. I went to his desk, setting the tire iron on top of it. The blotter was clear of papers and the first drawer was filled with blank stationery, pens, and bottles of ink. The second drawer contained his journal.

The first twenty or so pages described his work in general but an entry from a week ago caught my attention; it described an incredible discovery:

While normally outside the bounds of the Miskatonic’s instruments, Pluto had been visible, as had one of its moons. Strange lines dominated the surface of the moon, too regular to be natural and it struck James Barnes that it might be writing. The pages were dominated with copies of what he saw and his efforts to translate it.

The journal went on, drawing closer to when I knew the final entry would be. James wrote about hearing strange noises at night and of odd shadows that moved and shifted of their own accord, cast without any source. The journal ended with an entry from the night James disappeared. He’d managed to break the code, writing out the instructions on how to translate the strange writing he saw on the moon of Pluto, but he hadn’t yet gone back to start the job.

The journal didn’t mention his wife once.

“I think I found it!” I said, looking up.

Tabitha stood looking out the window. Her face was lit by a flickering light from the outside. I crossed the office to the window, leaving the journal open on the desk.

Our two pursuers were standing next to my car, which was on fire, the flames a wretched, sickly green. Both of them were looking up at us, the light of the flames illuminating the hateful expressions on their faces. My eyes met those of the reedy man for a moment before the two of them raced toward the building.

“Come on!” I shouted, collecting the journal and the tire iron. I grabbed Tabitha by the hand and pulled her into the hallway behind me.

We went up and climbed past another floor of offices to a broad stairwell leading up to a pair of double doors. We could hear the footfalls of the two men thundering toward us, echoing upwards menacingly. The double doors to the observatory were unlocked and we ran inside. The night sky was laid bare above us, the wind howling in through the retracted portions of the dome. Dim red lights around the circumference of the room provided barely enough light to see our way as we ran. There was no place to hide.

The doors slammed open behind us and the two men stepped into the observatory. The wind whipped off their hats. The tall man was bald, his face a mess of burns from the boiling water. The thin man’s face was a death mask, flaccid and expressionless, his lank hair immediately pushed and pulled by the wind.

“I have the key!” I shouted, holding up the book. “I have it! Tabitha, run!”

“No,” Tabitha said, taking a step to the side. I shot her a confused look at the same time as the thin man tried to jump me. Without time to think, my arm shot out on its own and the tire iron struck the side of his head with the sound like a melon hitting the floor, taking with it chunks of skin and hair. He staggered to the side and I had just a moment before the gorilla’s fist filled my vision; it hit me like a thunderbolt. I crashed to the floor, the tire iron and journal falling from my fingers, my hat flying off of my head. I lay on my back, nearly senseless but managed to crawl weakly backwards away from him but the large man wasn’t following. Both he and Tabitha were staring at the thin man who’d climbed unsteadily back to his feet. He turned to look at me and I nearly screamed.

Part of his head was missing.

What peeked out from the gap in human skin was spongy and utterly inhuman. The dull drone of insects issued forth as his mouth fell open and he raised his hands to his face. Chunks of skin fell beneath his nails, the flesh giving way like sodden newsprint, coming off in damp, bloody chunks. His fingers pulled his face apart and his eyes fell out to land like two soft-boiled eggs on the floor.

More and more of the horror was revealed — a bulbous, misshapen head lined in antennae but otherwise featureless on a thick, ringed neck. It was from this ill-conceived head, glowing an angry red as it tore itself free of its human suit, that the buzzing noises came. Two small bat-like wings, disproportionately sized to the body, snapped out from its back as it shucked the remainder of its disguise, fanning a sick, fetid smell over me. Four thick arms ending in pincers tore free from its legs and it clambered forward, claws clicking against the floor. Its color was difficult to make out in the glow of the red lights but its skin looked dull and smooth, like the flesh of a mushroom. It loomed over me and I shrank from it.

“Tabitha?” I asked weakly, struggling to my side, looking up at her, my mind refusing to make sense of the creature before me.

Her face had gone as still and lifeless as the other two men. She was reading the journal and when she looked up at me her eyes were dead. Whatever had been there was gone now.

“You found the key for us,” she said and, barely audible above the sound of the howling wind, I could hear buzzing. “Barnes had stolen it from us.”

The three of them advanced towards me slowly. The buzzing creature moved with an unsteady, uneven gait, its pincers opening and closing as they approached.

“Get away! You have what you wanted,” I shouted, trying to crawl backwards but the room swam sickly.

“Take him,” she buzzed and the creature ambled quickly toward me. I tried to fight it off but I was still weak from the brutal punch to the face and it lifted me easily. The wings flapped, faster and faster until they were a blur and we rose upwards despite the wings’ size.

“Tabitha!” I screamed as the thing lifted me higher and higher into the air. Her dead face, red from the lights, slowly shrank. “Tabitha!”

Something pinched the back of my neck and darkness overtook me.

Waking was strange. It was not like slowly drifting awake, nor was it like a sudden start as if waking from a dream where you’re falling just before you hit the ground. It was if someone had flipped a switch; one moment I was awake, aware, alive and the moment before I… wasn’t.

“Where am I?” My voice was strange. It didn’t come from my mouth because, as far as I could tell, I didn’t have one anymore. I tried to move my arms but I didn’t have those either. A sudden flash of fear of paralysis came over me; what had those creatures done?

Slowly I became aware of my sight. The picture faded into view like a photograph slowly appearing in a developing tray. My vision was wrong, gray and grainy like a badly printed newspaper picture. The details of the room slowly became more and more distinct. Ahead of me was a far distant wall lined with shelves and on each shelf were small vats in which something oblong and spongy floated in a viscous liquid. Wires connected each spongy mass to various strange electronics that protruded along the outside of each vat. Each container had a small box on the front that resembled a speaker and a shiny, blank lens like that of a camera. As my vision improved I saw that my point of view was from a shelf, several feet off the floor. It was about then that I realized what was wrong in a sudden flash of terrible insight; I no longer had a body to move.

And now I’m here, the story I wished to tell you over. The lens fixed to my optical nerve shows me a constant grainy image of rows and rows of vats with brains suspended in thick, mucous-like solution. I can hear cries from the other speakers, the gibbers and rants, pleas and prayers and screams of all the others. I wish I could stop the noise but there are no ears to plug, no way for me to close my unblinking, ever-seeing eye. The creatures made me the perfect victim of my senses.

They left me with nothing but the memory of her, the look and feel of her body, the taste and smell of her skin, the sound of her voice.

This story, these memories of what I believed her to be, torment me worse than the understanding of my reality, what I have been reduced to, or the sight and sounds of the hell beyond my prison. In my mind’s eye I see her as she was that last night, pale, luminescent, alive, human. I taste her skin, smell her scent, feel her.

It’s all I have left.