Tremble: Erotic Tales of the Mystical and Sinister

In acknowledgment of his approving eye his penis began to harden. Life force—nothing to be ashamed of, Gavin thought. But he couldn’t help remembering Cathy’s face in the throes of orgasm, an image from the golden days of their marriage—his hands tracing the line of fine blond hair that ran from belly button to pubis; the sound of her laughter—girlish, not yet tainted with cynicism.

Recently he’d suffered a deluge of such memories, as if time had decided to play a cruel trick on him, bending back on itself like a lewd female contortionist. In reality he and Cathy had slipped into an antagonistic celibacy after the birth of their third child.

Gavin had loved his wife, still loved her, but the insidious loneliness had stifled him as she turned away from him night after night. She made him feel fallible. Human. Male. A sperm bag. In his darkest moments he hated himself for his weaknesses.

“You never know what you’ve got until you’ve lost it,” he reminded himself. Then, determined not to free-fall into depression—something that seemed to happen increasingly lately—he grabbed a dressing gown and headed into the bathroom.

It was a magnificent triangular room set into the corner of the apartment. Gavin had hired one of Queensland’s top interior designers to do the fittings and it was resplendent with spa, bidet, and sunken bath. Sinking into the steamy bathwater the property developer tried to remember what the theme was meant to be. The curved golden taps reminded him of exotic belly dancers. Then there were the Arabic tiles whose mosaic patterns covered the bathroom floor. Harem, that’s right—a bathroom fit for a sultan. A strange choice he had thought at the time, recalling the immaculately groomed homosexual interior designer who had proposed it. But Gavin had approved it anyway and the outcome stank of luxury, a perfect foil to the rest of the apartment, which echoed the pristine transitory world executives liked.

He stared out the ceiling-to-floor windows. From this height he really was the king of the castle. The apartment was on the thirtieth floor and looked over the whole panorama of downtown Brisbane. Gavin had deliberately left the steel vertical blinds open. The idea that he might be visible to any office worker working late in the building opposite excited him.

His hand crept down his thigh and wrapped itself firmly around his cock. Three strokes later and he was in the middle of an orgy featuring two of his personal assistants and a very cute schoolgirl he’d spotted at a bus stop several days earlier. Groaning, he settled farther into the warm water and submerged his ears, allowing the aquamarine roar of the water to blank out all other sound. The landscape he chose for his fantasy was the empty floor of a parking lot, with his Merc, a toy he’d bought for himself for his forty-fourth birthday, parked in its center.

Gavin liked hard surfaces. To reach orgasm he had to be in an environment where everything that encompassed him was man-made. The three objects of his fantasy lay draped across his Merc like unwrapped Christmas presents. The two women—one a slim blond in her midtwenties, the other a buxom brunette in her late thirties—held the tall curvy schoolgirl between them, spreading her thighs wide. The women’s breasts and shaved genitals had been sprayed with a kind of edible PVC—a recurring motif in Gavin’s fantasies. Gavin, dressed in his tightest, most expensive suit, strode up to the Merc and buried his head between the struggling young girl’s legs, breathing in the pungent smell of pussy and rubber. Nibbling, he began to tear off tiny strips of the PVC with his teeth. The image of his mistress’s glistening childlike slot crowned with the pink bud of its clitoris appeared at the corner of his fantasy like a floating mirage. Feeling guilty about avoiding her phone calls, Gavin consciously dismissed the vision and the hovering vagina vanished instantly. He pulled the last rubber strip from the girl’s genitals and began tonguing her. Above him the other two women were sucking the PVC from each other’s breasts. The moaning grew louder and the schoolgirl pulled him up to her flushed young face. Smiling mysteriously she turned and magically straddled the bonnet of his car, her arse spread high and wide. In a flash he was upon her, his fingers sinking into her creamy flesh. The next second he found himself thrown across the soft fake-leather driver’s seat. It reclined the full one hundred and eighty degrees as one girl sat on his face while another straddled him and he caressed the third with his fingers. His breath grew faster, the quivering of climax building up behind his balls and eyes.

Suddenly the grotesque face of the tramp leered over one girl’s shoulders. Feeling himself instantly wilt Gavin tried to will away the hovering image. The man gestured lewdly and his blackened hairy face faded. Again the property developer was in the grip of his orgy. The encircling tight movements of his hand quickened as nipples, long and hard, brushed tantalizingly across his lips and the smell of hot rubber, faint diesel fuel, the way the schoolgirl’s full arse had splayed over the Merc’s hard metallic bonnet all culminated into a quickening montage that finally sent his seed spurting.

Gavin sat up and opened his eyes. His sperm was a creamy ink blot etching its way through the water like white coral. He watched, fascinated—as he had been all his life—by his own emission. Is this where we begin and end, he wondered, in a shivering moment of forgetting. Such thoughts were the nearest he ever got to introspection.

Sighing, he let the last remnants of tension lift from his weary body, then lathered himself down with a loofah and stepped out of the bath.

In the building opposite, a watching office cleaner reached her own climax with a sudden squeak. Then, as the yawning silence refilled with the buzzing of fluorescent lights and the distant ringing of a fax machine, she pulled down her drab wool skirt and, sighing wistfully, lifted the industrial vacuum cleaner to continue her cleaning.

Leaving a series of damp footprints on the tiled floor, Gavin sat heavily on the toilet and allowed his penis to fall between his legs. After relaxing, he managed to urinate. As his water tinkled down he gazed across the tiles. It was then that he noticed the footprints.

At first he thought there must be some error, some optical illusion. For instead of the unmistakable outline of a man’s foot, he saw something else. Something that, as he stared closer, terrified him more and more.

The footprints were not that of a man. Bigger than his own foot they appeared to belong to a creature whose three elongated toes extended into long sharp claws. The heel had disappeared altogether, in its place the third toe. Every footprint was identical.

Dizzy, Gavin sat back on the toilet seat. He wondered whether he hadn’t been concussed by the fall after all. He closed his eyes, waited for a moment, then slowly opened them. The footprints, although rapidly evaporating, remained the same—undeniable glistening evidence that sickened him with its wrongness, its perversity.

Deciding that the best course was to assume the prints were simply a trick of misplaced body weight and water helped by the strange shadow thrown by the line of pretentious lights fitted at floor height, Gavin reached for the medicine cabinet. He swallowed some sleeping pills and headed for bed.

Flitter, flitter. The beating of enormous feathery wings filled his mind and he sensed the shifting of the air around him by their massive sweep; not birds’ wings but something finer—insects’ wings. Welcoming the drowsiness of the drug as it slithered through his veins Gavin pushed himself farther down into the mattress, aching for oblivion. The noise grew louder. His internal vision blinked into life. He was looking down the length of his own naked body but the angle was wrong. It was as if his neck was two feet long and floating twelve inches above his torso. Pinned there, unable to jerk his way out of the nightmare, he was chilled to the bone.

Suddenly his body hair began to grow, new tufts sprouting on his belly, the skin of his hips, the underside of his elbows. The growth accelerated, and thick black hair massed in dark patches, covering his body like a colony of frenetic ants. He watched horrified, paralyzed, as the spiraling hair just as rapidly thinned to fine white tendrils that snaked across his flesh, tips wavering blindly like a speeded-up time-lapse film of plant roots growing. That’s what they are, roots. With the thought barely formed Gavin realized that the “roots” had all curled downward over the sides of his body and were burrowing into what appeared to be the spongy bed of a marsh.

He woke with a nauseating jolt, opened his mouth to breathe, and realized that he was choking. His mouth was full of a mushy pulp, full to the back of his throat. Gasping, he opened his lips as wide as they could go and reached in. He pulled out a leaf and then another and another. Each unfurled as he dropped it onto the bedspread.

He stared at them, then picked one up. Holding it up to the morning sun he saw that it was like no other leaf he had ever seen. Long and thin, like a fern frond, with delicate seed pods or fruit that resembled tiny cones hanging from the end. A fruit-bearing leaf? It didn’t make sense. Convulsing, he coughed up the last leaf, which flew across the bed and stuck like a lump of green chewing gum to the shade of his bedside lamp. The light stuttered and in a moment he was waking again, this time really waking, curled around a pillow, his eyes gummy and his mouth malodorous. Something about the awaiting day hung over him ominously.

Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he held his aching head in his hands and tried to remember. Ah, that’s right. Cathy, her lawyer, the mediation. That explained the nightmare—some unconscious fear of being buried? Kids’ stuff. Trust him to be so literal.

A sharp stinging on his back broke his chain of thought. He turned to the mirror—across his shoulders ran three long scratches. Seeping slightly, they resembled claw marks. An image of the footprints from the night before glistened suddenly before him. Panicking he pulled back the sheets to see whether something had scratched him during the night. There was nothing; just the polyester sheet, innocently wrinkled. Slightly cheered Gavin tried smiling but found that his mouth was too gummy. Disgusted with his aging body

he stood and threw the curtains open.

“My client would like to point out that her self-esteem has been seriously undermined by her husband’s actions, and, since the onset of his affair, she has required psychiatric help at great expense.”

Cathy’s lawyer, a woman in her early thirties with sensible spectacles and a profile you could cut glass with, reached over and squeezed Cathy’s hand maternally. Maybe not quite maternally, Gavin noted, wondering whether the lawyer wasn’t in fact a lesbian. Cathy, resplendent and silent in a beige Versace suit and D&G sunglasses she had neglected to remove at the onset of the meeting, rewarded her solicitor with a very slight smile. Cold bitch, Gavin thought, then was dismayed to realize that he still found his estranged wife desirable.

“Well, my client would like to point out that if his wife had sought psychiatric help before the marriage began to deteriorate we might not be sitting here now.”

“That is irrelevant.”

“I don’t think that withholding sex for four years is irrelevant if we are talking about self-esteem. My client is a normal full-blooded male—”

“If he’d needed to have sex he might have chosen to have it with an individual who was not a close associate of Mrs. Tetherhook!”