Note: This story has been previously published on the Nifty Archives.
* * * * *
To bow. To worship. To breed. These are the notes of his symphony, his soul's hunger.
His eyes dart from body to body, evaluating, finding nothing of either sustenance or substance.
In his emptiness, I sense his desperation for my religion. He seeks a fane with an altar of leather and chains. Here is not that temple.
Here
is an artificial place, shat from a machine's anus.
Here
, mirrors are black, reflecting nothing.
Here
, exploding, manic strobe lights illuminate nothing. Malice and hatred wafts like mustard gas.
Here
stinks of quotidian suburbs, and he would not be here except for the lies he'd been told that this was a place for sublime pleasures.
He is surrounded by entities human in shape but monstrous in soul. Hello, Shub-Niggurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young: that vast belly sags like a great teat full of milk fit only to nurse a foul brood. Bitch ye, O Cthulhu, about clothes and television and the queens and the rent boys who took the money but wouldn't put out. Like mushrooms growing in shit are the fungi from Yuggoth, sporting identical goatees, duplicate piercings, and shaven skulls. And the colour out of space is the greenback, passed from palm to greedy barkeep, a leprous plague that does not kill but disfigures.
I hear his thoughts. His mind quivers on the verge of a higher plane. I decode his uncertainty.
Is this all? Is there no heaven? Is it all hell, from the Big Bang to the latest remix of thirty year old disco?
In his ear I whisper:
no
. My breath is hot and dry as sunburn.
Silently I chuckle when he jumps. He looks round at the medusas thronging the bar, uncertain of where this truth has come from.
Since I transcend flesh he cannot perceive me. But his cock does. In his jeans--most becoming to his slender body--an unbidden hardon thrusts down his right thigh. He's astounded by his sudden lust, confused about the cause, wondering who was speaking to him.
His age is delicately poised between youth's squeamish insecurities and maturity's bitter defeat. Eschewing the fashion of this sexed-up but sexless era, tight denim outlines as ass of perfect imperfections -- more slender than conjoined-melon ideal, yet pleasantly round, firm, eager to part. Hot testicles jostle in his crotch, rubbing each other, stretching the fabric, revealing his potency and his eagerness. A sleeveless tee shirt, adorned with the skeletal logo of a speed metal band, marks him out from the herd.
Shoulder-length hair lies like a buccaneer's banner upon his skull; the desire for more of it shimmers down his spine. His smooth torso beneath the sable cotton belongs to the realm of those who idolized Olympus and not to those who submit to the knife and to the silicone and the grease-dripping ratburger. No beard decorates his jaw, for that would mar its right-angled perfection. He is a slut colt eager to be bucked by a bronco stallion.
He's easy to read.
Once, when he was a lonely teenager fisting that rod in a lonely bed, he dreamt of places like this, thinking--not wishing, not hoping, but simply assuming--them to be altars of the flesh, vast orgiastic palaces of degradation and lust. He'd hoped the True Old Ones--those gods who rutted and fucked and bred in the light of the gibbous moon, ithyphallic and spewing psychedelically-colored jism, and who had to have sanctified these places--would pop his cherry, tight as all junior high cherries are. Dreaming of the day of his apotheosis, he stained his sheets over and over with spunk.
But now he knows he has been played for a fool, sucked in by the lies that are endemic to this race of naked apes on this miserable, dying world. He now knows these places to be prisons, anterooms of this dreary theocracy emulating Rome not in greatness but in its moralizing hollowness and in the magnitude of its fall.
Here there are no massive prongs hanging free, no fists greased and ready, no whips burning with lust's flame. Just dull fags, undeserving of their flesh, ravenous for fashion, nursed on television. Themselves nothing, they have become human-shaped mirrors, inanimate and capable only of reflecting brilliance not creating it.
His emptiness, so pure, pleases me.
I act.
His lust provides the power, and his imagination supplies the form of my manifestation. So I enflesh myself.
His need endows me with equine-sized breeding equipment, of human shape, supporting breeding-sacs like boulders between my thighs. He bequeaths me a reek powerful enough to drive from his mind the horror of this place and the dying empire which whelped it: I stink of ancient sweat and crusted testosterone and the hay from ten thousand breeding stalls and all the piss that's passed through all the cocks since sexual reproduction began all those millions of years ago, when my kind encoded the erotic impulse into the DNA of this world's first autotrophic organisms. He needs to see a hard, muscled ass made to drive a cock, so my ass flares into the globular perfection he aspires to, and admires, but does not have. Thighs striated with muscles strain to support my horsecock. Chaps creak, struggling to encase this hypermale bulk he's given me; he's an odd one, for his lust covers the chaps in a pelt of shaggy fur. My torso he leaves bare, unmasking my armored pectorals and stomach for his delectation. Down my back writhe tattoos depicting demonic things: raging infernos, unnatural couplings of dragons and boys, dark men with burning coals for eyes bearing barbed whips, clenched fists dripping rectal mucous. In miniscule lettering all the porn stories ever written crowd round the images: hieroglyphs relate the buggering of Osiris by Set; cuneiform tells of Mardek balling Gilgamesh; Hebraic recounts the tale of David sucking Goliath's prong; Aramaic narrates the forbidden--and true--version of the wilderness temptation, when Satan fucked Jesus.
Quick as lightning struck by Thor's hammer, I reveal myself to him. He is an intelligent boy. For when he sees me, he