"It's been just over a year since I was designated, deigned to become more than but a man."
I never believed in anything beyond the mundane and temporal. I prioritised logical analysis and objective truth. It was in pursuit of truth that I took on a position of employment in my city's central library.
Working nights afforded me plentiful time to peruse scholarly articles at my discretion, and I ravenously devoured topics from science and metaphysics to religion and philosophy. I searched, with all the fervour of a man obsessed, for more and more knowledge. I was empty, and hungry, and knowledge became my soul perversion, for its own sake alone; I needed it all. The thing with knowledge, however, is that one is always trapped within the scope of their own understanding, arrogant in their position in the universe. That is, until the dam breaks.
It was on a temperate autumn night that I found that book, a seemingly innocuous text on Sumerian cultures and the modern cults that had adapted their teachings. It was a trivial little tome, and in my boredom, I deigned to humour it.
As I read, I felt my mood sour. Something in the text made me feel deeply uncomfortable, yet I could not stop reading. The atmosphere of the night mimicked my growing unease, the wind beginning to howl and thunder breaking somewhere distant. Had I not been feeling so unsettled, I may have chuckled at the cliché.
Time became irrelevant as I delved deeper, and at some point, an exhaustion that I had not noticed must have taken over. The exhaustion compelled me to sleep, and that was when the nightmares began.
I sat alone on an icy cold floor, a thin mist obscuring its precise appearance. My head felt as though it were splitting into a million fragments of broken glass, and my vision failed me. For what appeared like an eternity, my senses were scrambled and my lack of awareness drove me toward an instinctual panic.
Adrenaline brought me clarity, and steadying myself, I looked around. I was in a spacious, yet sparse, room constructed of what seemed to be some form of black stone. The stone appeared slick with some unknown moisture, and had an almost nacreous quality quite unlike anything I had ever seen.
As I stood, I realised that I was naked and, peculiarly, in a state of physical arousal. I idly drew my fingers along my shaft and grasped tightly. The walls of the room pulsated in tandem with my arousal and I could not help but to groan.
I fell to my knees, deeply ashamed of my actions, but compelled by some unknown force. I began to stroke upward and downward in a slow rhythm, gasping with exasperation at the depth of the physical pleasure that I felt. I had an unsettling feeling, like the walls themselves watched as I increased the rate of my masturbation, calling me, begging me to a climax.
I convulsed violently as my sense of self gave way to a powerful ejaculation that left my hands dripping with my emissions, and then I collapsed into total nothingness.
Upon waking, I was deeply shaken, and it took me a few moments to realise that I lay in a hospital bed. According to the doctor, I had been found in a comatose state in the library's spacious gardens, and had remained unconscious for a full week.
***
A month had passed since I was released from the hospital, and despite recurring nightmares of a lesser nature than the previous one, I had regained a semblance of normality in my daily life. Even so, I had been unable to return to work, to the library, to the source of my fear.
Just as I had begun to do away with the ominous feeling that something dark lay in my future, I was paid another visit, one that was to call into question my very place in the cosmos.
As before, I awoke in that enigmatic space, though there were some notable differences. I regained myself much more rapidly, and was able to stand with very little effort after only a minute or so. A cursory sweeping glance showed that the room had at least quadrupled in size, so much so that I could hardly see the walls, further exacerbated by the far greater presence of that ghostly mist. Still, I held the sense that they were there, ever present and watching.
Again, my hand was drawn to my arousal, hidden within the expanding mist, but it never made contact. Instead, something unseen crouched before me. My skin crawled with the realisation, and my every cell became as ice.
Lips surrounded my penis, slathering it in an overflowing mucus that revolted me as much as it pleased me. It dribbled down over my legs, pooling somewhere around my feet, and brought with it the sickening scent of rotten flesh and sweet lavender.
I pressed my hands to what I assumed to be this entity's head, and at first it felt as much like a hairless women in a thin film of some sticky substance, but the realisation dawned that its movements were wholly unnatural and not to be expected from a head that sat atop a body. I panicked and pushed back against the creature, but its putrid skin caved as if not supported by a skull, and it continued to pleasure me with unspeakable sensations.
Perhaps it had multiple analogues to a tongue, or perhaps something beyond imagination, but the repetitive suction and undulation drove me to a very quick and very hard finale.
I awoke sluggishly and groped around for my bedside clock. The light of the digital display made me very suddenly aware of the nausea that overwhelmed me, and I barely made it to the toilet before vomiting violently.
Sweating, I looked down at the contents of my toilet bowl and felt a bottomless sense of emptiness, as if a part of my very foundation had been stolen from me.
Stumbling back in to my bedroom amidst a maelstrom of spinning blurs and high contrasts, I steadied my thoughts. The encounter had felt far too real, more real than even the room that whirled around me.
I became increasingly aware of a growing discomfort in my loins and, trembling wildly, pulled down my sleep shorts. I could neither gasp nor blink, frozen in the moment. My entire groin was awash with purples, yellows and reds. It was a deep, violent bruise.
The weeks that followed my second encounter were a jumbled mess. I did not go outside, I stopped washing, trash piled up upon itself filling my small apartment with heinous smells. A deep black mould had begun to cultivate on the walls, spreading in greedily grasping patches, reminding me far too intimately of those dark confines in my nightmares. I rummaged mindlessly through maggot-infested food- more on instinct than actual desire to eat- for edible remnants of past meals.
In a deep fervour, I searched online for any sort of answer, for a simple explanation to what I had experienced. Particularly obsessed with one conspiracy website, I was transfixed on the details of cults that worshipped higher beings beyond the comprehension of mortals.
In one moment of deepest disassociation, I watched as a cockroach scuttled over my hand, up my arm and down over my body. Curiously, as it reached the rim of my boxers it fell dead to the floor, landing upon a pamphlet for my previous place of employment.
The library, the book that started all this. A sudden clarity empowered me as much as it horrified me; I would need to find that book again, I would need to return to the conception of my nightmares.
At some point that eluded all memory, I had covered my windows with cardboard so as to complete my solitude, and so stepping in to the cold night air was somewhat of a surprise. Despite my manic fervour, I was overcome with the sort of precise comprehension of time and place often granted by a brisk chill.
I walked the once-familiar pathways toward the library with a trepidation that bordered on outright adrenal terror, the sort that spurs locomotion at an increased pace. It took no longer than ten or fifteen minutes to make a typically twenty-five minute journey, and then I was there.
The silhouette of the main building stood ominously over me, like some shadowy creature emerging from the gardened grounds. I looked upon it, and I felt it stare back at me, in to my depths. I became clammy, and surely pale, awed in my own smallness before this mammoth structure.
Hastened from my hesitation, I took the steps two at a time and came to the main doors. Of course they were locked as the library was not open to the public at such a late hour. Furiously, I pounded at them, with no real plan should someone answer. I would have preferred that they had.
Becoming tired from my incessant pounding, I slumped forward, and in that very instant there was a dull clunk and the doors gave way to my weight. I was beyond fear, beyond self, and all that remained was my singular purpose.
I snaked through the rows of ancient texts, and the ceiling-high shelves that housed them, relying on sheer muscle memory to reach my location. My paranoia was only heightened by the very real sense that something followed me, toyed with me. It felt as though I were an ant, chased by the cruel rays of some child's magnifying glass.
Exhausted, I came to a stop. There it was, the arbiter of my descent, the book. I lunged forward and grasped its decaying edges with two hands. In simply lifting it, I felt resistance, unseen hands denying me my salvation.
With the last of my strength, I tore the book from the table and turned to run. A sudden and excruciating pain split my skull, the world around me fading away into so many tatters, and consciousness abandoned me.
I rose slowly, already knowing what I would see as my eyes opened. The black walls pulsated, covered in a new viscosity, revoltingly reminiscent of something disturbingly biological. Various holes, ranging from very small, to at least a foot in diameter, opened within the membrane of material. From each pit, thick grub-like growths perfectly fitted to each respective opening, thrust outward before retracting. With each retraction came a billow of that familiar mist, which fell heavier than it had before to barely obscure the floor.
The entire scene sickened me to my very core, and I dry-heaved hard enough to leave a lasting pain in my throat. The way that the larvae-like pistons pumped in a rhythmic chorus of whirs and hums evoked far too shameful a sense of my own masculine sexuality, contrasting against my body's physical arousal.
