Strange Flesh, Stranger Blood

Technically, by definition of postcodes, you didn’t live in Silent Hill. You worked in Silent Hill and lived in Hillside, which was much less gentrified. You liked it there. Rent was cheap, the Order didn’t usually get around to doorknocking there more than once a year, and there hadn’t been any significant murders in your building since 2012. 

The downside was work nights. The public transport in your town was okay if you needed to get to Ashfield, but shit for trips between suburbs. You’d sold your car two years ago to pay for top surgery, and in its absence the ridesharing app economy had failed to take off, so at these hours it was your bike or nothing. After your shift, you had to take Nathan Avenue all the way through the Saratoga Valley to get home.

The city council wasn’t the best at maintaining street lights past the tourist destinations—the historical society, the First Church of Blessed Alessa, the shores of the lake. Once you got out of the inner suburbs, the ratepayer’s money ran out. Your bike lights barely pierced the enshrouding gloom, and you only had the pump of your pedals, the whisper of road noise, and the tinny music in your headphones for company. 

You used to be able to scab a lift home off your coworkers, but over the summer, Chase and Jennifer had started carpooling to work from South Vale. They said this was because: it was safer, it was more fuel-efficient, it was no trouble, they liked the same music, they were on each other’s way—and neither of them had offered you a lift since, even in the rain. The justifications and the sudden lack of charity had made you suspicious that ‘carpooling’ was actually code for ‘sex’. You often watched them out of the corner of your eye, trying to assess if they were getting on more flirtatiously these days and whether they were arriving to work normal-dishevelled, or sex-dishevelled. It helped pass the time.

It was nights like this, when you’d agreed to work late and the slender moon was already setting by the time you were pedalling home, that you wished you had an erotically-charged carpooling arrangement of your own. Most of the people in your dating pool had left town as soon as they could. You tried to stay in touch with some of them, but sooner or later they’d ask why you were still living in such a hellish backwater, and you never knew what to say. The conversations would get more and more judgemental until, inevitably, they stopped. You wished you had an answer. Sometimes, when the weather got cooler, you worried that it was because they were right. Really, why were you here?

The cruising over the high season was good, but hookups with tourists weren’t without challenges. Guilt complexes played well with the kinds of sex you liked, but whenever you fucked a tourist who was trying to work through something, you ended up worrying about them for the rest of the summer.

Silent Hill was popular with tourists. They liked New England’s scenery and the carefree and lighthearted locals. This was because locals who were worried or guilty didn’t last very long. You’d grown up with the routine of your parents matter-of-factly closing the curtains whenever the fog rolled in off the lake or the ancient air raid sirens sounded. You and your Ma would sit under the table in the lounge with a battery-powered lantern and your books from school. You accumulated stories about the worlds behind, beside, beyond this one—Fogworld, Otherworld, Nowhere, and the creatures that lived there. You and your friends found animal skulls while playing by the lakeside, bleached white and eerily misshapen. Walking home from your bus stop, you came across sections of wood that had gone from verdant and green to desiccated and stinking of death in the space of a schoolday. When you were seventeen, home alone on a visibility warning day, you’d forgotten to close the curtains. You’d heard the howls and screams outside when the fog pressed close, and had never made the same mistake again. You knew the survival tips; never underestimate the power of a light conscience, always be courteous to the Order without ever promising them anything, and most of all to avoid the out-of-towners with haunted looks in their eyes. Those were the strangers who brought the fog in.

You couldn’t blame them for it, the same way you couldn’t blame a dog for going rabid. They didn’t know what was happening to them. They didn’t know that their suffering was contagious. You had to pity them—they were dead and didn’t know it yet.

The out-of-towners rarely appeared during tourist season. They’d show up on a Tuesday in mid-November, disoriented and afraid. They’d opened a door in their apartment and found a path leading to a vast lake, or fallen asleep on a train only to wake up in a shadowy park. When they spoke, they were never really speaking to you; when they looked at you, they were seeing something else. It was best to give them a wide berth in the street, to lock the door and close the curtains when the sirens sounded. If you got too close, you could see the sky turn grey and shadows creeping in at the corners of your vision. 

Cleaning up the residue that they left running through work was bad enough already. After your first few months working there, you’d figured out that Silent Hill often used the restaurant’s kitchen to funnel victims towards the lake. You wished it wouldn’t—in the real world, there were food safety practices. It was why you’d stayed late tonight. Sometime during the week, one of the back storerooms had detonated with blood and rust and mystery meat. It took a lot of elbow grease to sort that sort of pigsty out, but you liked seeing the shine of the stainless steel when you were done, and the overtime pay was nothing to turn your nose up at. It helped that—unlike your coworkers—you weren’t worried about travelling home alone this long after dark.

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You reached the crest of the hill. This was your favourite part of the ride home, the part that made it all worth it—the lake glistening to your left, the dark unknown swathe of forest ahead, and the adrenal thrill of the downhill under your tyres.

You opened up your brakes and let gravity take over, the wind so loud in your ears that nothing else was audible. By the time you only saw the woman running up the road toward you, it was too late. Behind her, a billow of fog rolled up from the woods. It swallowed up the road ahead, making your familiar world strange.

You were barrelling towards it with too much momentum to stop.

You managed to swerve into the other lane to avoid her. She had a tire iron in one hand and a haunted look in her eyes, so deep in Fog World that you were sure she hadn’t even seen you. The guilt that was hunting her probably didn’t involve a screaming transgender cyclist zooming past her on a bike lit up like Main Street on Alessa’s Blessèd Birthday.

There was so much fog that you were amazed you’d ever been able to miss it. The visibility was shit. “Stupid, stupid,” you said, under your breath. You hadn’t ever been exposed in the fog—there had always been a building to retreat to, and curtains to close. Of course you hadn’t asked yourself why no traffic had passed—you’d been distracted by imaginary car sex with a fictional coworker.

You dimmed your bike light to throw less glare back in your face. As you did, the music in your headphones broke into thick static.

“Shit,” you said, barely in a whisper. You knew better than to stop.

You saw the shadow moving in the fog before it saw you—some kind of a fucked up dog with five mouths, too many mouths, its jaws hinging off each other with the radial symmetry of a flower. It was all teeth (and teeth, and teeth and teeth and teeth), ribs and four long legs. It loped through the fog in the direction of the running woman, but it slowed to a trot when you passed by; it smelled sweat, warm meat, a beating heart.

You stood up on your pedals and rode for your life. 

The dog’s footsteps were inaudible under the puffing of your breath, but you knew it was keeping up. Even on a bike, you weren’t able to outpace the static in your ears.

Silent Hill was not hellish enough to have a greyhound racing industry, but the part of your brain that loved collecting helpful little facts surfaced and said, Can’t some of those pointy bastards run like, seventy kilometres an hour?

You pedalled faster, air burning in your lungs. You were in forest now, travelling way too fast for foggy conditions, and didn’t dare glance over your shoulder to see where that fucking Pentahound was. If you hit a pothole, it would all be over. If you hit a tree, it would all be over much more quickly.

You crested the next hill faster than ever before, racing up into Hillside—but your neighbourhood was dark. No lights in the windows. No street lights or neon signs flashing in Open Late Kebabs. There was no hum of traffic. There was nothing to hear but static—until the air raid siren began to wail. 

The road tarmac aged and greyed under your tyres, spiderwebbing with cracks and fractures. You dodged a sudden rupturing of potholes. The fog brightened to an indiscernibly greyish time of day or night. The grocery store coming up on your right bloomed into a springtime of rusted scrap iron and bloodied canvas. 

As the siren rose, the static fell. You risked looking over your shoulder and saw that the Pentahound was peeling away, back towards the depths of the valley and the dark of the forest. You frowned after it, perturbed. Was that its whippy little tail tucked between its legs? 

The air became wretchedly humid. Every breath stank of carcass and compost, like a greenhouse left to rot. Up the road, Hillside Apartments performed a Möbius strip twist to become frames of steel girders and chicken wire. You slowed to a halt in front of it, one foot on the ground. You couldn’t retreat home. That 80’s kitchen, the shitty water pressure, your two house plants—none of it existed here. If it had, it certainly wasn’t worth the rent.

A long, metallic scrape reverberated through your empty neighbourhood. You looked up and down the street to see what was changing, but the transformation to Otherworld was over; the haze of fog bounced back diffuse light, burnished like wildfire smoke. The street remained empty, bleeding, and different in every way.

The scrape came again. The third time you heard the sound, your mind reconfigured the space between them into the rhythm of footsteps.

The Fog and Otherworlds changed to reflect the guilty souls who stumbled through them. They morphed into new landscapes and pupated new torments to mirror the subconscious of whoever entered—but through the changes, some entities remained. Maybe it was only the ones that were more sentient or more powerful, or maybe the guilty souls that they had been born to torment were still out there somewhere in the fog. These were the creatures that returned time and time again in nightmares, folklore, and the Order’s Sunday School stories.

No wonder the dog had run. The rhythmic scraping in the distance was the drag of an immense blade. What the hell had that out-of-towner done to deserve Red Pyramid, the fucking Executioner?

The dog had been right—you didn’t want to get between Red Pyramid and his prey. You dropped your bike beside your building and sprinted down the alley. Sooner or later, the siren would sound, and the fog—like all weather—would clear. You just had to hide. You just had to breathe. You just had to stay rational.

The garage doors of your apartment building had been replaced by stretched tarpaulin that was splattered with so much blood that it looked rusty. It had been wrapped around the iron frame with thin rope. You searched for a knot to undo. When you couldn’t find one, you tugged at the rope, hoping it would tear free from the ragged eyelets. The metronomic scrape of the Executioner‘s steps was getting closer.

What if it wasn’t about being deserving? What if Red Pyramid wasn’t here for the woman running through the fog, and he visited his version of justice on whoever he found? What if being in the Otherworld was all the proof of guilt he needed?

In a last-ditch effort, you dug out your apartment key and stabbed the fabric. The canvas resisted, stretching almost like skin— it can’t be, it can’t be, stay rational—before it finally started to tear. It couldn’t be skin, but still, the tearing sounded wrong—too loud. Wet, almost.

You pushed through the tear into ruddy semi-darkness.

“What the…?” you said.

You knew what an apartment garage was meant to look like, and this wasn’t it—no cars, not even the rusting hulks of cars, just layers upon layers of separate storage cages, each filling the white lines of their own parking space. Raising your phone as a torch, the shadowed masses within them revealed themselves as rusted oil barrels and stacks of old wooden crates. You set off among them at a run, looking for the stairwell that you knew had to be here—or maybe one of the cage doors would be ajar, at least, and you could sneak inside and find a hiding place amongst the junk. You’d be much safer in there than out in the open. Your tetanus booster was up to date.

Movement out of the corner of your eye made you jump and back up rapidly against the mesh wall opposite. You stared, frozen in place, trying to make sense of it through your wavering torchlight and the blood roaring in your ears. There were things inside one of the cages. The creatures were not human, but were such an assemblage of human parts that you weren’t sure what else to call them. They each hung from four human arms, fingers gripping the wire ceiling—like spiders, or sloths. The arms were white and veiny and joined in the middle of the X in a misshapen lump, a four-way shoulder joint. If the creatures had heads, or eyes, or any sense organs at all beyond their grimy skin, then you couldn’t see it. Occasionally, one would burst into movement and startle the others. 

None of them seemed to be aware of you, even when you started inching sideways past them. The door to their cage was looped closed with a heavy chain and padlock, but they didn’t seem upset about it. They hung there, grasping the mesh, swaying back and forth as if stirred by a breeze. If you had to choose between facing them or the Executioner— 

You swallowed around the rapid pulse beating high in your throat. You needed a place to hide.

A loud, metallic scrape echoed through the garage, accompanied by tearing canvas.

You fumbled to turn your torch off, keeping low. You eased yourself further into the darkness, away from the limited and reddish light that filtered through the mottled canvas walls. 

 You didn’t even know if Red Pyramid could see. The folklore about him in the town was an indecipherable jumble of religious fervour and campfire stories. He was the inexorable hand of God, or he was the slasher in an eighties flick. And then there were all those old Wordpress blog posts that the Historical Society had certainly not signed off on. If you knew where to look—and of course you and your giggling high school friends had known exactly where to look—there were stories about sexual punishments that the Executioner visited upon the unworthy or the unwary. You had laughed at the stories and their breathless, thrilling tone. They’d all seemed lurid and unbelievable inside the limited sexual imagination of adolescence—but late at night and later in life, you still knew how to find your way back to those blog posts. You’d read them on your phone, your other hand under the covers.

Guilt pierced you like an arrow punching through the body of a saint. Silent Hill responded.

Down the row of storage crates, the Graspers burst into a flurry, climbing over one another, rattling and banging in agitation. Overhead, the garage’s fluorescent lights tick, tick, ticked on and lit the row of storage cages you were in like a spotlight on centre stage. The scraping rhythm of Red Pyramid’s steps became abruptly faster.

“Fuck,” you said, and ran. You got most of the way down the next row before a mass of teeth and legs and static noise came out of nowhere, hitting you so hard that you went sprawling. You grabbed at its face as it snapped its too-many jaws close to your neck—teeth, teeth, teeth—and kicked brutally upwards, feeling the crunch of the dog’s bones against your shin. Rivulets of its cold saliva fell on your face alongside hot drops of your own blood. You kicked up again, desperately and brutally, and felt a more decisive crunch. You wrestled it aside to kicked it, this time in the head—once, twice, before it whimpered, hissed a last gasp of static in your ears, and fell still. You climbed unsteadily to your feet and stood over it, swaying, blood dripping from the punctures in your hands and arms down onto the dusty floor.

You couldn’t feel the pain yet, muffled under the roar of adrenaline, but you did feel a small, childish sadness. You’d never killed anything before. It had just been doing what it was made to do.

You looked up from the body of the hound and into the unreflective expanse of an impossible helm. Red Pyramid was standing at the end of the row, motionless. Even though he had nothing to see you with, you knew he was watching you; that he had stood there and watched you mourn the dog you’d killed. 

He was preternaturally tall, even without accounting for the tallest point of his helmet. The helmet itself was riveted metal, dented in places, all of it coated with corrosion and rust. The underside of it bulged with stained, straining canvas that you wished you hadn’t seen. His smock was torn and bloody. His gloves and arms were stained to the elbows with the grime of duty. A long, pitted knife hung from his right hand. One side was blunt; the other side shone with guillotine-like sharpness. It was long enough to come up to your chin, and heavy enough to burden him. The creature’s body was wiry with strangely-built and asymmetrical muscle from wielding it.

Your legs shook, torn between the instinct to kneel at his feet and the prey reflex that told you to run and keep on running. 

He stepped forwards and your body decided. You turned on your heel and sprinted, trying to outpace the lights flickering on over your head. Red Pyramid followed, the sound of his blade dragging mixing with your ragged breaths. Spying daylight in the distance, you rounded a corner and picked up speed, work shoes almost losing traction on the dusty concrete floor. You couldn’t manage to stop before you hit the wire of the storage cage that the light was filtering through. You twisted to take the impact on your shoulder and bounced off it, reeling for balance. A dead end. This storage cage was the only one out of pattern on the grid.

The impact of your body knocked the loosely-latched cage door open. The Graspers inside were in a frenzy of agitation, climbing over each other and trembling with excitement. At the end of the row, Red Pyramid blocked the way you’d come. 

You backed into the cage, pulling the gate with you, watching his approach. Surely the thicket of anonymous, brainless arms was preferable to the Executioner’s unblinking focus. You fumbled to close the gate, but it didn’t latch. When you looked down, you discovered that it didn’t have a chain or a lock. It didn’t even have a sliding bolt.

You should’ve known you couldn’t outwit this place. This had been a trap all along.

One of the Graspers got a hold of your shirt and heaved you back from the gate with terrifying strength. Your sweaty fingers slipped on the mesh and slowly, painfully, inevitably lost their grip. You were sucked backwards into the forest of hands; they clung to your clothes, pulled on your hair, groped at your skin. Whenever you pulled free of one hand, another took its place. Their skin was chill to touch, but full of life and muscle. One of them hauled on your collar, choking you. You tried to wriggle free, but your arms were being wrestled out of your control. The shirt got pulled up over your head, its seams digging into your armpits, and stopped. Your arms had been pinned against the wire. You struggled against the restraining hands, desperate to see, panting in a dark and private world of sweat and work grease. 

The gate to the cage gave a long, slow creak. There was a grinding, rasping noise as the knife scraped over the threshold.

The Graspers seized your wrists and forearms, pinning your arms back against the cold wire. You hissed as they pressed against your wounds. Fingers hooked through your belt loops and groped the exposed skin of your stomach and sides. One found its way up under the cuffs of your pants to pluck at your socks. Your left shoe, then your right, came undone. At first the Graspers’ movement had felt purposeless, but now—as a shadow fell across your interrupted vision—you knew that they were acting with intent. An arm wrapped around your waist, pulling your ass back against the wire. Fingers fumbled at the button of your jeans and yanked down your zip. You tried again to break free, but now every movement you made helped them—as you kicked, your jeans started to slide off your hips, taking your underwear with them. The hands shoved and tugged with renewed energy until all you were wearing was your blindfolding shirt and your own blood. You tried to keep your knees together, but the hands were frenzied now, pulling your legs open with bruising ferocity, grabbing your ankles to pin you in place, groping and pinching at your thighs, and—

At the first cold touch on your dick, you found that you hadn’t yelled yourself hoarse after all. You thrashed in place until the chain-link jingled around you, but the hands held firm. The broad fingers of the Graspers prodded at your dick, pinched it, tried to push it back into its own hood. Other fingers ventured lower, spreading the lips of your cunt. The first finger to slip inside it made you yelp—half at the violation, half at the cold. The finger retreated as though it was startled by your body heat. You strained against your bonds but couldn’t close your legs any more than deny the truth the hands had discovered. You were despicably, embarrassingly, filthy wet, wet beyond plausible deniability. 

It had been months since tourist season, and even longer since you’d had an opportunity to pull out the leather cuffs in the drawer beside your bed or to buckle them on anyone else. You liked restraints. Your body didn’t care what context they were in; it knew what they promised. You flushed hot with shame, but that only served to further frenzy the Graspers.

The finger that had penetrated you returned. This time it came with a handful of something, a cold and viscous lubricant that it all but poured into you. No matter how wet you were, it wasn’t enough. It pumped one finger in and out, then shoved in a second with a sudden squelch. You thrashed in your restraints. Hands collaborated to splash the unknowable lubricant up around your dick and smear it all around your cunt. Cold drips of it oozed down your leg. The fingers inside you scissored back and forth, opening you up until you cried out. The heat filling you was undeniable; the rasp of your own breathing was changing in tone even to your own ears. Through it all, visible through the stretched fabric of your shirt, was the shadow that loomed over you, watching you struggle.

The penetrating fingers retreated and returned with yet more lubricant, shoving it up inside you like they were trying to smuggle it out of the country. The liquid didn’t get the chance to drip back out; a third finger pushed in. You made a strangled sound. The lube was cold, the fingers were thick, and your body was understandably tense; it wasn’t comfortable. Your comfort clearly wasn’t the point. But still—three broad fingers fucking you open, an incredible quantity of muscular arms holding you pinned, fingers rubbing your dick—

You wondered if Red Pyramid was just going to stand there and watch them make you come. A shiver ran through you. 

The fingers inside you yanked free. Your arms had been spreadeagled and were suddenly pulled upright, so the Grasper pulling on your shirt collar could pull it all the way free, over your head. The dark world around you went devastatingly bright. 

You blinked hard, bringing Red Pyramid into focus as he held out his arm. The forest of hands swayed to drag his weapon away. They peeled off one of his white gloves, then the other; he bowed his head, and they swarmed behind him. You stared at the display until you realised that the smock he wore fastened in the back, where he himself couldn’t reach.  The Graspers lifted the smock away, revealing his body. Maybe you imagined it, but you thought that their movements were reverent. 

Red Pyramid didn’t have a dick, exactly, and if he’d ever had a belly button, he didn’t have one now. The length of his body was cut through with a long scar. It was the Y-shape of an autopsy or dissection, the top starting at his pectorals and the tail bisecting him all the way down. Where a dick might have been there were three implanted surgical steel ports, arranged into a triangle. Each one was about as wide across as your palm. The long scar had split and healed around them roughly, and scar tissue ringed the bolts that punched through his hipbones, holding the whole thing in place. Behind them—where flesh should have been—there was only seething darkness. It filled his skin, glinting, twisting and coiling over itself. You could hear it moving. 

You fought against the restraining hands, but your muscles burned with lactic acid. You had no fight left to give. Perhaps that had been the point. Resisting for so long had exhausted you, and now the hands could hold your legs open easily.

In the silence between your breaths, you heard the drip as a thick bead of lube slid from your cunt and hit the concrete between you. Red Pyramid’s helmet tilted, watching it.

There was movement in the glossy darkness. Out from his two lower ports poked two black somethings, like tongues or tentacles, wet with an oily sheen. They wriggled out, sometimes coiling together into a spiral, and sometimes recoiling from each other, shivering as though trying to escape. When they seemed to have reached their full extent, Red Pyramid reached down and took both of them in his grip, pumping them firmly.

Nothing in Otherworld had been familiar to you until that gesture. You knew what it meant. Like your hard-won t-dick, or a butch wearing a strap, no matter their origin or providence, these appendages were very much his dick.

The Graspers tugged your legs wider until your hips creaked. Red Pyramid’s first touch on your chest made you flinch. His hand was feverishly hot. He traced your scars with a touch so light that it made you shiver. Was it recognition that you, too, had a body that had been constructed? 

He pinched your nipples hard enough that it hurt, even with dulled sensation. You yelped.

His hand snapped up to grab your throat. He slid between your thighs as you struggled for air, and his dick slithered across yours, hot and wet, probing for your cunt. Both halves of his dick twined back together and began to writhe inwards. You twisted in place, but couldn’t resist. The Grasper’s diligent preparation and slathering of lubricant made sense—there was so much of him to take. Oxygen deprivation droned in your ears. The Executioner pushed deeper and deeper into you, your cunt stretching obediently around his bulk.

With one more thrust, he pushed all the way inside. Your mouth fell open soundlessly. You were crammed full. His dick jostled around inside you, trying to push deeper when there was nowhere else for it to go. Each movement lit you up from hindbrain to tailbone. Red Pyramid pressed against you until his heated skin was flush against your own. Jutting out, small but painfully erect, your dick pressed against something that engulfed it—warm and wet, sucking like a mouth. The unexpected pleasure was so—

It was—

You came immediately, thigh muscles quaking, rocking your dick into the opening. Spots danced across your vision. Your body squeezed tight around the intrusion inside it, over and over, as though trying to make sense of it. 

Red Pyramid’s helmet reverberated with a metallic creak. Was that a groan? You wondered.

His hand fell from your throat. You heaved for air, new bruises aching on your neck with every gasp. When he pulled back, you saw the glistening orifice in the third circle at the apex of his surgical site, the thing that had just sucked you off. It looked just as not-right and oily-black as his dick did—perhaps it was a failure, a third tentacle that had inverted itself somehow. You could see it throbbing with its own pulse. Your stomach roiled with discomfort, but everything below it said yes, I want that.

Before you could catch your breath, the creature got twin bruising grips on either thigh and used the leverage to fuck you, pumping you full of his senseless mass of twisting ridges and bulk. Your dick pounded against, and into, and around that strange hole, every so often being sucked inside. Now you could move your head, you looked down and wished that you hadn’t; you’d seen the way your cunt stretched wide to welcome the horror. It didn’t even hurt. Surely it was meant to—surely this was sex to call the ambulance for. It wasn’t as though your nerves were dulled; pleasure used the same nerve-endings as pain, and you felt it sing through your skin with every incomprehensible inch he drove into you. It was so good, and surely that alone proved it shouldn’t have been possible. 

Maybe the Otherworld had altered you for this purpose, moulded you like clay for the use of its beloved Executioner, and you’d be forever changed. Or, worse—maybe you hadn’t needed alterations. Maybe you’d always had the capacity for his unnatural body inside your own, and this was how you were finding out.

This close, you could see that his helmet had an outlet welded into it. A new black tendril started to emerge, questing into the air as its host fucked you. When it emerged all the way, you couldn’t tell if it was a tongue, or a tentacle, or another dick—whatever it was, your mouth was already open for it. It was as feverishly hot as the rest of him, and its taste was overpowering, a blood and rubber iron-chemical tang that stung in the back of your sinuses. The warm, wet thing pulsed heavily on your tongue, which was all the clarification you needed; you hollowed your cheeks and sucked, tilting your head to take it deeper.

Red Pyramid’s helmet let out a long, creaking groan above you. His hips jerked with renewed vigour. The chain link fence rattled with the force of it. You let out a muffled groan around the thing stuffed into your mouth, breathing through your nose as it fucked your throat. The Graspers holding you in place were shivering with tension. Bruises already darkened where they clenched at your skin. They were also getting something out of this, though you couldn’t guess what it was, or how; the hands not occupied with pinning you open and in place wandered across your body, pinched your nipples and felt the tentacle thrust in and out of your throat. Your skull buzzed with dizzy helplessness.

Red Pyramid’s thrusts began to stutter. You swallowed around him. A tremor shivered through the tentacle pressed against your tongue, and his fingers dug harder and more desperately into your thighs. It was too much to bear. You came again, your world narrowing to the no-sound no-sight sensation of climax. His dick spasmed deep inside you. Your cunt bloomed with heat. A gush of bitter and brackish fluid filled your mouth. You choked, trying to swallow fast enough to keep up with the flood. You wondered if you could drown like this. You came again.

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The tentacle in your mouth withdrew with a sound that deserved an R rating, taking a string of saliva with it. Breathing hard, you glanced down to see that there were rivulets of oily black liquid dripping out of you, seeping out around the bulk of his dick. A Grasper scrambled in with a large, dusty glass jar, catching every possible drop of abyssal seed. What do they want that for? you wondered. 

Red Pyramid was still hard, or what counted for it with his anatomy; his helmet tilted as he appeared to take note of the same thing for you. He released one of your thighs to the Graspers, who tugged it back into place against the fence, staring with his intense focus at where your bodies joined. It didn’t occur to you that this would be the perfect time to struggle free. Red Pyramid’s hand reached out to squeeze your dick between his thumb and forefinger, his fever-hot fingers lubricated with his own inky come. Your slick flesh slid through the pressure of his fingers. Your head fell back to rest against the chain link. Your moan was ragged and honest. His helmet tilted up, assessing you as he jerked you off. His grip was firm and insistent.

There was no reason for him to do this other than his own curiosity about your body. Perhaps it was an act of placation, or reward.

Or maybe he just wanted to touch a dick. You got it; you had those nights, too.

“Fuck,” you said. 

He jerked you off until you were beyond language, a babble of grunts and broken syllables pouring from your mouth. You came again, pulsing in his hot hand, cunt squeezing around the coils of his dick. He didn’t stop. He brought you through one orgasm and straight into another, and then pulled at your dick thoughtfully, watching it throb between his fingers. He was considering whether you could go again. 

You could— your body was humming like a plucked string. But you’d never been one for letting someone else do all the work.

“Wait, hold on—“ You panted into his shoulder and tugged your right arm repeatedly against the fingers encircling its wrist. “Come on. This hand. Give me this one.”

There was silence as your request was considered, and a slow rustle amongst the Graspers as it was approved. Leaden with exhaustion, your arm dropped into your own custody. You flexed your fingers and rotated your wrist as Red Pyramid watched. Carefully, like you were trying not to startle a wild animal, you reached out for him, sliding your hand down his body, across his scarred stomach, towards the orifice above his dicks. His body was still terrifyingly warm to touch. Here it was even warmer, and wet with the same fluid that was dripping out of you. When your fingers made contact with the hole, he gave another of his strange, creaking groans. You took it as permission. There was a visible pulse beating in his chest beside your head. It reassured you that he was flesh and blood, even if it was strange flesh and stranger blood.

You slid a finger inside him. He was warm and slick in a way that made your mouth water; you could still taste the rubber-rust-chemical tang in your throat, and could imagine it closing around your tongue. You couldn’t feel anything through the walls of his passage; no muscles, not even bone. And there was that strange and mouthlike sucking, as though he contained a vacuum desperate to fill itself. It was no wonder that he took your second finger easily. It was more of a stretch by the time you added a third, but he seemed to like that. He was eager to open himself up, eager to be fucked, and the rocking rhythm he made against your hand made it impossible to forget that your cunt was stuffed full of him. You weren’t sure if it was possible to fill him the same way. Even reaching as deep into him as you could, you couldn’t find an end to the passage—maybe it was bottomless. When you looked down, it looked as though your fingers were disappearing into him. You fingered the abyss and listened to it groan in your ear. Brainlessly, too well-fucked to think anything of it, you turned your head to kiss the skin your head was resting on, just below his collarbone. You found yourself talking to him like he was one of the strangers you fucked during tourist season.

You were happy with all sorts so long as they were queer, but you often met a certain type of man. They were the ones who came on tough, but when you offered to don your harness they’d go docile as lambs. They’d fall to their knees for nine inches of silicone and sob gratefully into the pillow when you got a grip on the backs of their necks. They wouldn’t make eye contact afterwards, but they’d still cuddle—squeezing you tight like somebody putting pressure on a wound. Transmasculinity provided them a sanctuary from the world’s judgement of if they were being man enough . How could you judge them when they were the same as you? You loved those strangers with a ferocity that made your heart ache.

It was masculinity spreading open around your fingers. It was warm against your skin, textured by salt sweat and body hair, and it wanted you inside it even as it was inside you.

You said, “There you go, baby. Good boy.” He got wetter. You could hear it as your fingers pistoned in and out of him. You added a fourth finger and he shuddered all over. His hips rocked with increasing urgency until he was fucking himself on your hand with small, breathy sounds. His dick twitched and twisted inside you as he pumped his hips. Your bodies dripped onto the floor. You gasped out encouragement, fucking him harder, your fingers plunging deeper. He was coming undone, and you were alight with it.

“Good boy, that’s right,” you said, and mouthed another distracted kiss against his scarred chest. A shiver passed through him. Oily black fluid spurted out around your hand with enough force that thick beads of it rolled down your stomach.

You thought, How come the Order isn’t doorknocking with the good news that Red Pyramid can squirt?

His free hand squeezed into the awkward space between your bodies and fumbled for your dick with earnest desperation.

“ Yes, good boy,” you gasped, feeling the callouses left by his knife, and that praise was enough. His muscles tensed; his cunt squeezed your fingers harder still. You kept fucking him, curling your fingers now, until his body spasmed. Dark seed poured out around your penetrating hand. His hips slammed forwards to feel your fingers as deep inside as possible. Heat bloomed deep in your cunt. You gasped. Every last inch of his unearthly dick was packed tight inside of you, and he was still coming, letting out a string of long, broken groans. Unnatural heat filled you, hotter and hotter, until you came. Your head filled with the white-noise roar of radio static. 

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The wail of the air raid sirens rose and fell.

Red Pyramid pulled out of your body with slow reluctance, unplugging a gush of dark and viscous liquid from inside you. His body still pulsed with it, spending it out from his cunt and his retreating dick, oozing a black stain down his body and legs. Below you, the dutiful Graspers were catching it in jars before it reached the dirty concrete floor. You watched your body leak long strings of the Executioner’s come into the dusty glass and concluded, It’s none of my business.

The sirens kept wailing. Reality wavered at the edges. The humid air got colder and drier, like a fan in the next dimension had been turned on.

You cleared your throat. You finally had an answer.

“I haven’t left Silent Hill because I don’t want to,” you said to him, to the Graspers that still held you, and to the listening air of your town. Your voice was hoarse, but you persevered. “This place made me, just as much as it made you. It’s my home. It’s where I belong.”

Red Pyramid inclined his head to you, and turned away. The Graspers laboured to pull his apron back on. They dragged his knife from its resting place against the wall to put it back in his hand. As though he was one of the tourists you met—one of those men who weren’t as guilty as they thought they were, who was pulling his shoes on at your door—you said, “Hit me up when you’re back in Hillside, if you’d like. I’d love to do this again.”

The Executioner turned slowly in place, his knife dragging with him. Your heart rate started to climb as your mortal body remembered where it was and who it spoke to, but you held firm. You stared back, making eye contact with where his eyes might have been, as the world warped and wobbled around both of you. As Otherworld faded away, his empty hand rose to gently touch the skin just below his collarbone. It was the place where you had kissed.

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You woke up flat on your back with a pounding headache.  Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. You sat up gingerly, relieved to see that the wall beside you was made of breezeblock, not skin. You were dressed. Your shoes were on your feet, and their laces were tied—double-knotted, even.

Your headphones were in your ears, though nothing was playing. Your apartment keys were in your trouser pocket.

You’d woken up in an unoccupied car space in the back corner of the garage. Your bike lay on its side by the wall, as though it had been resting there and slipped.

You made your unsteady way upright. You braced yourself against the wall until the dizziness faded; when it did, you could see that the car space you lay in was your own.

You knew you hadn’t imagined it. You stank of blood and sex, and your work shirt was stuck to your body with sweat. The taste of blood and rubber lingered at the back of your throat. The dog bite wounds on your hands and forearms had scabbed shut, but were raw with pain. They throbbed in time with your pulse; so did the dark blue fingerprints circling your wrists and marching up your forearms. Your muscles were weak and exhausted; your cunt was tender, aching with emptiness. You knew that when you made it upstairs you’d find your underwear soaked through—and probably your work trousers, too.

You groaned, bending to stand your bike up. First, a shower and a load of laundry. Then you would sit down with your laptop. You had a blog post to write.

Empty, bleeding, and different in every way, you made your way home.

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