Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

Meredith chuckled at the pretension, then dared to look back at the boy who was still gazing intently at him, a trace of a smile on those inviting lips.

Onscreen, the masochist screamed.

The boy stood, squeezed Meredith’s knee, moved towards the exit.

He was halfway across the auditorium before Meredith started to follow. He dropped the cigarette, nearly tripping with eagerness. The boy went through the left exit door.

Meredith discovered it led to a short, narrow corridor which then opened up into another foyer area. To the right was a bar with a few patrons, but Meredith barely gave their frozen faces a second thought as the boy was heading in the opposite direction. Meredith moved quickly. He could not lose him.

Curving to the left, the corridor paralleled the auditorium. Both walls and carpet were deep red. Small orange spotlights cast pools of tangerine on the floor. Every fifteen feet a palm that had seen better days resided in a red pot.

The boy stopped and turned, smiling with satisfaction as he spied the pursuing writer.

Meredith stopped dead. Something was not right. The adrenalin spiked in his already amped up system. Warning signs flashed.

No .

Dread gripped him, desire and fear in conflict.

He stumbled as he turned, heading back in the direction he’d come.

Meredith ran, the sense of danger increasing with every step. As he rounded the curve and approached the bar area, his heart faltered, a steel band tightening around his chest. He collided with the wall, clutching at his torso.

Oh God, I’m having a heart attack!

No! NO!!!

Then he was filled with a vision of the boy’s eyes. Inviting, placid, offering peace. He gasped.

The image persisted as his breath came in tight wheezes. Then he sensed a presence behind him, felt a hand on his shoulder transferring a sense of emotion unlike any other. He turned, falling into the boy’s arms. He looked into that angelic face. The boy smiled faintly. Their tongues automatically entwined, and he stroked the boy’s crotch which felt full and heavy. After a moment the boy pulled away, yet it was not a rebuff. He smiled, squeezing Meredith’s groin in return, began to unbutton his jeans, turned to face the wall.

Finally, he was in.

Moving gently, Meredith pulled the boy toward him, devoting his attention to the hymn of his thrusts. From the auditorium came a distant sound of applause mixed with screams.

The boy’s heat excited him further, and he knew he couldn’t last long. Tension in his groin rose like water filling a lock, and the threshold breached far quicker than expected. Then, behind the bodily heat came a numbing coldness, a chill so sharp it cut into his cerebral cortex, suddenly disrupting the wave pattern of lust instinct; time and sense of place expanded, contracted; the chill expanded into eternity. Meredith opened his eyes, panic cementing his chest.

Before him was the Void. Total, unforgiving, relentless. To ejaculate into such a place struck him with primal terror, the horror of the Void absolute. Surely, to give an offering to such a place would not be enough; he would be consumed without trace. If he had sought the darkness before, he had done so in error. Now he wanted no part of it.

Then it was gone.

Meredith withdrew as his cock jerked spastically, spitting his seed onto the humus lining the palm’s pot. He grunted. The boy stood still. For an instant the image of the Void returned, then was gone as quickly as it had arisen. He felt suddenly sick, as if a cold ethereal hand grasped his scrotum, passing through the skin to penetrate his bowels. The boy turned to face him.

The smile was still on those ruby lips, but the light that had resided in his eyes was gone.

Meredith, dazed, was pushed firmly to his knees; the boy’s erection appeared in front of his sweat-washed eyes. He opened his mouth. The offering stretched him to the limit. Meredith squeezed his lids shut as the boy pushed into his throat, suddenly slapping Meredith as the writer tried not to choke.

“Look at me,” the boy said, his voice only a fraction above a whisper. “This is my body; this is my blood. Drink in remembrance of me.”

He withdrew, spraying the writer.

The world went white.

Meredith lay there for an uncertain time. Were minutes seconds or the other way around? He had no idea, no sense of proportion. Eventually he wiped the semen from his face, pulled himself upright and moved towards the bar area, the sensation of a frozen hand performing a five finger exercise in his guts. Sweat crowned his brow.

Three people sat at the bar. The woman behind the counter ignored him as she carefully wiped a glass. She was familiar. Where had he seen her? Her hair was the color of rotting wheat, but he couldn’t find the jigsaw piece to complete the picture. Two men were in front, one seated on a high stool. The man turned to Meredith as he stumbled past at a snail-like pace. The man, too, was familiar, causing further confusion in Meredith’s dislocated consciousness. As he inched by, he noticed the man’s fly was open, his penis hanging off the stool rim, puncture points in the phallus suggesting stigmata.

Where had he seen him?

(Screams)

Nails through flesh…

Thinking clearly required too much effort. Despite throwing up before entering the cinema, he still felt drunk; the alcohol remaining in his system had him cornered, was ready to lay him out in the third round.

He shuffled into the street. The two thousand yards to the pensione took an eternity to cover.

Of course, the Three Weird Sisters were outside the impoverished Spanish style hotel, its edges crumbling with age, the walls tattooed with a patina of carbon. Miss Piggy laughed at him as he careened by with the precision of a seasoned drunk. He tried to snarl “fuck you,” but his words came out “ fug tu !” his speech slurring with every increasingly swaying step. He’d never felt so tired.

As he came through the entrance of the pensione , the concierge looked up for an instant then resumed watching the TV set behind the counter. The Englishman’s condition was nothing new; the old man had seen it many times — impoverished tourists who couldn’t hold their wine. Nothing mattered to him anymore and hadn’t since the passing of his wife; yet he flinched when the guest kicked open the door to his room, realizing the fool had collapsed onto the creaking bed and wasn’t going to close it. He forced himself from the comfort of his armchair to trot down the hallway, pulling the door closed without looking in on the prone figure of il morto . He’d watched the process take place before. Once had been enough, and if it took place behind closed doors, even if they were his own, he could convince himself it didn’t exist. The world was changing in strange ways and denial was his only defence. But the sex zombies, the emotionally dead, posed no threat to him. They stuck to their own kind, their bodies rotting as they performed their dance of empty desire. The old concierge grunted to himself, fully aware of his own mortality; he was not long for this world and wanted to live out his last few days as peacefully as possible. Let them inherit the earth.

Several minutes later he heard the bed creak through the thin wall. It would be the last noise to come from the room for some time.

Inside, despite the unbearable weight of exhaustion pushing down upon him, Meredith managed to raise himself from the mattress to discard his clothes and crawl between the dirty sheets.

It had begun.

The road lay before him bright in the sexual flush of a newly aroused sun — a future of limited possibilities, restricted variations of the sex act, for their bodies were not strong. A barren future, predictable, life-negating, not life-affirming, sterile in its simplicity. Yet what faced Meredith did not appal. He welcomed it with open arms and mouth, and it in return welcomed him. Not with arms but with a multitude of genitalia and orifices — big ones, small ones, every taste, color, texture. A pornucopia of organs transformed from the frustrated parameters of the human state to that of a new flesh. Flesh, nerve endings, and blood that now coursed with a life and death of their own — a transmutational entity so powerful the host would atrophy within months.