The Fane

The Fane

A short story by J.K. Ermon (jokermon)

This is a work of erotic fantasy fiction for the entertainment of adults only. It contains explicit futanari (hermaphrodite) content. If that's not your thing, or if reading this type of material is unlawful where you reside due to your age or whatever, don't read it. Nothing in this story is intended to represent actual people, events, or real-life medical conditions. Please do not repost without permission. This story is copyright©2004 the author.

~~~

Sergeant Dixon 'Dicks' Kroll of the United States Marine Corps thumbed the selective-fire switch on his Thompson submachine gun and set it to single-shot. The South Pacific heat gripped him in its giant sweaty fist as he hunkered down in the jungle foliage. His eyes, hard killer sapphires bright against the grime and sweat of his face, narrowed to penetrate the green hell. Those eyes, empty and bitter, had seen his troop transport blasted straight to Davy Jones' locker less than three hours ago.

It was sheer dumb luck that he was alive. In the maelstrom of fire and rending steel detonated by the Jap Zero's impact, he had been the only one near enough to the life rafts to have a chance. As far as he knew, he was the only survivor. Toledo, Harrison, Jacobs, the kid they called The Rabbit, all good fellas he'd served with, hoisted the flag at Iwo Jima with, now all so much shark chow.

Dumb luck. The booby prize for surviving the sinking of the PT boat was the golden opportunity to grow old on this deserted, dense-packed jungle island behind enemy lines with no transmitter and precious little of anything else. He thought about home: Cross Plains, Texas, and his parents and his girl, Cora Lee, at the ranch. He imagined them receiving that awful typed form letter informing them of their son's unfortunate but gallant tendering of the Ultimate Sacrifice. His stone-carved jaw tightened.

Fuck that

.

He checked his watch. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, April 22, 1945. His twenty-sixth birthday. With a hard-learned silence born of two years in the Pacific Theater of Operations, Dicks rose to a crouch and slipped like an olive-green ghost through the tamarack. He headed inland.

~~~

The temple ruin, when he stumbled across it, scared the shit out of him.

He had just about convinced himself that the enemy had overlooked this island--the greenery was too wild and unpathed--and then he was standing at the rocky rim of a valley, looking down at this...

thing

.

The structure filling the bowl of the valley was a kind of ziggurat, cloaked in the same tropical coral growth of vines and mosses that covered everything here that stood still for more than a minute. Bizarre carvings covered it, obscured by the foliage. The flat top was surmounted by some kind of spiral sculpture or symbol, like a weird explosion of curling ram's horns.

Dicks dropped to his belly with a curse. He set aside the Thompson and unslung his beloved Springfield M1903 from his back. Forcing his hands to be steady, he put his eye to the rifle's scope and meticulously scanned around the structure.

Good Christ

.

Through the 4x magnification, he could decipher the carvings on the side of the structure. They were a minutely detailed panorama of stylized demonic beings rending, eating and raping human figures.

He made a sound of disbelief as he panned around. Everywhere the eye came to rest was a fresh outrage. He backed away, got up and relocated several times around the perimeter of the valley to probe every possible hiding place a sniper or armed ambush could nest. There was nothing but more of the same vile carvings, chiseled into every square inch of it. The temple, like this whole island, had been untouched by men for centuries.

Dicks cautiously made his way down into the valley, his hackles up and tingling.

Dicks was not squeamish, nor was he a prude. He was a lusty, brawling young man who'd proven himself both in combat and in whorehouses from Manila to Kauai. But this structure reeked of ancient perversity. It baffled and unsettled him. He couldn't place the thing. It didn't look Polynesian at all. If anything, it looked like some deranged hophead's version of the Aztec ruins he'd seen down in Mazatlán. Dicks was not a superstitious man, but this thing gave him some exceedingly bad vibrations. It looked alien and evil as hell.

Around the back he found the entrance. Two huge headless statues flanked it, raised arms touching overhead, forming a kind of portico. They looked like large-breasted women, but with their heads gone it was hard to tell what they were supposed to be. They'd been so weathered and abraded by time and the elements they were barely recognizable as human. Their bodies bulged oddly below the waist.

The entrance itself was a gaping archway that thrust forward under a stone canopy. The statues' hands met overtop it.

Like a mouth

, thought Dicks uneasily.

Like the mouth of a big old anteater, reaching out, feeling and fumbling, open wide...

Dicks shook it off. The thing was jarringly man-made in the midst of all this wilderness, that was all. It was also clearly abandoned. If there had been any enemy presence on this island, this would have been the logical base of operations. Dicks figured he was the only man here.

As it turned out, he was right, but not in the way he thought.

~~~

Dicks was actually feeling pretty good until the flood started.

He'd finished his sweep of the island and turned up nothing out of the ordinary besides the temple. There was a freshwater spring not too far from the structure and Dicks had brought down a small wild boar with one of his Springfield's precious.30-06 rounds. He dressed and cooked his kill over an improvised fire pit and washed down the pork steaks with deliciously chilly spring water.

Letting out a resounding belch, the big Texan thought:

This beats K-rations any day of the week

.

He'd contrived a lean-to out of the life raft--there was no way he would sleep inside that crazy pyramid unless he had to--and was settling for sleep when he heard a distant rumble of thunder.

Then the rain started. And it didn't stop.

Throughout the night the dirt floor of the island had gradually softened, dampened and then turned to muck. The freshwater spring formed a river, then a raging flood that cascaded through the jungle. A thoroughly waterlogged Dicks woke in the morning to animals stampeding around him, heedless in their terror. Against his every instinct, he decided he had to take shelter in the only structure available.

Size thirteen Corps-issue combat boots squelching in shin-deep mud, Dicks trudged to the valley of the temple.

The rise around the vale kept the flood waters clear. He made his way down to the entrance around back. He swept aside the curtain of vines blocking the opening with the muzzle of his Thompson SMG. The entrance hall echoed, cool and dry and empty. The darkness ahead was like a solid, palpable mass. Once he was more or less certain nothing was going to come rushing at him, he tried the flashlight from the life raft, and to his amazement, it clicked on, throwing a cone of light through the dusty air. The floor was composed of great rectangular flagstones with rounded corners, evenly laid. Through a layer of dust, the walls were covered with hieroglyphics that continued the ghastly themes on the outside.

Dicks frowned. He blew away some of the dust, and blinked; the pictures were sharp, the colors bright. They were completely unlike anything he'd seen before. They weren't laid out in ordered rows, like the pictures he'd seen as a kid of Tutankhamen's tomb. They seemed to spiral from apparently random central points, and Dicks was reminded of the Hopi and Cherokee artwork of his own southwestern home. Large-breasted women, with swollen gravid bellies and spread legs revealing shockingly detailed vaginas were everywhere, as were men with enormous erect penises. They were all engaged in every kind of sexual activity imaginable, including many things that weren't technically necessary for procreation.

Sergeant Kroll wasn't a small man by any yardstick; he'd earned his handle back in Basic, when one of his showering buddies swore Kroll had "enough dick for three men." The nickname

Dicks

, a play on his first name, had stuck. The male figures on the wall put him to shame. Some of their members looked as big as their arms. There were even...Dicks squinted. There were figures that appeared to be female, had the signature bosoms and rounded hips, but had both male and female genitals. Dicks was both intrigued and repelled. They were all fucking and being fucked in staggeringly complex orgies that were detailed to the last wrinkle of foreskin and crinkle of anus.

Dicks stared in sick fascination at one panel that showed one such hermaphroditic creature, shapely, long-haired and golden-skinned, ejaculating a fountain of white semen out over a sea of rapturous faces, all of whom had their mouths open and tongues extended.

Like they were takin' communion or something

. Dicks shook his head, nonplussed.

A few steps deeper still and the pictures became more specific. They depicted rites, dances, gatherings that looked like worship. They all appeared to be set in a chamber, ornately detailed, clearly some type of sanctum sanctorum, with an altar block set at the center of a twelve-pointed star figure with arms that curved and wriggled oddly.

Dicks swallowed. In these pictures, clearly some kind of ritual impregnation was taking place. A man or a woman was placed on the altar, and one of the hermaphroditic things would couple with them, all while nude worshippers chanted and danced. Weird lines and waves of pink light emanated from the scene, indicating to Dicks a focus of religious power and importance. The double-sexed things would ejaculate into the prone victim; there were several pictures showing this in loving detail, right down to the leaking sperm and the holy rapture on the faces of both the weirdly beautiful creatures and the human on the stone, with unreadable text surmounting them.

And then the male or female recipient would

change

.

Dicks grunted with his eyes wide. This place was taxing his capacity for disbelief.

The next sequence spanned several panels which Dicks had trouble following, simply because he couldn't credit what his eyes were telling him. Once inseminated, the victims, male and female alike, would swell up in an obscene parody of pregnancy and then, in the climax of the ceremony,

metamorphose

into something...hideous. Dicks suddenly recognized the end product of the rite as one of the demonic beings that crawled all over the outside of the structure: an amorphous mass of phallic tentacles, mouths, vaginas, glaring eyes and other organs Dicks couldn't begin to identify. What Dicks had assumed was a stylized representation was actually a realistic rendering of something phantasmagorical, right down to the silvery glisten of slime.

From the scale of the artwork, the things were massive, each easily twice the size of a grandfather willow tree. Emphatic text in that same crawling runic alphabet would always surmount pictures of these things and coruscating pink light, which Dicks supposed indicated the presence of the divine, haloed them.

Dicks lost his appetite. The newly created monstrosities were of course worshipped as gods, with the hermaphrodite things as their high priests. The humans would fling themselves joyously upon them en masse and were fucked and devoured indiscriminately. The hermaphrodites would preside over these atrocities, masturbating and performing ejaculatory blessings. None of those being gobbled down seemed particularly unhappy about it. These bloody orgies of foulness were captured with the same unflinching detail as all that had proceeded. Dicks finally had to look away.

Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick

, he thought.

This is just too much

.

He put it together. The odd sculpture at the top of the ziggurat was clearly the symbol of this insane religion, a reference to these misshapen creatures. The two statues guarding the entrance were the servitor beings, the finer points of their breasts, faces and cocks worn away by the jungle and time. From the wall art, he saw that whenever any of the preternaturally well-endowed men and women managed to couple with the tentacle creatures without getting eaten, the end result was another hermaphrodite, either being birthed the normal way from one of the ever-present pregnant women, or oozing full-grown from one of the vaginal openings in the god-monsters themselves.

The hermaphrodites were the offspring of the monstrosities. The monstrosities were the product of the ritual violation of a human being by their priestesses.

Dicks shook his head to clear it. What the hell was this place, really? The drawings were mythological, clearly, but a myth so bizarre and yet clearly conceived as to be incredible. Who dreamed this up? Where had it come from and where had it gone, this mad Neolithic cult with its pornographically vivid lore?

Sheeiit

, Dicks thought dryly.

I wouldn't be surprised if this whole dang religion came straight out of whatever they got for peyote hereabouts

.

He sighed.

What I wouldn't give for about ten pounds of explosive, and maybe a dam buster or two. Blow this place back to hell

.

He shone his light down the hall. The passage sloped down, descending underground, the bizarre prehistoric imaginings enclosing every step of the way. He scowled.

Well one thing's for certain, I am not going one inch further into this damn place

.

Dicks clicked off his flashlight as he moved back into the cloudy sunlight at the mouth of the passage. He sat with his back to the wall and watched the rain fall with a moody look on his face. After a while, something else disquieting struck him.

The entire exterior of the temple was covered with plant life; the entrance itself had been choked with hanging vines. Past that threshold however, inside the temple itself, not so much as a trickle of ivy or a blade of grass encroached. The floor and walls were sheathed in dust and nothing else.

It was like the jungle was afraid to enter.

~~~

Dicks wasn't aware he'd nodded off until the sounds of grinding stone awoke him.

He woke to full alertness instantly by habit of survival, gripping and cocking the SMG. There was movement outside and shadows in motion on the ground. Dicks silently faded back into the shadows deeper into the corridor.

Japs. Goddammit, I knew this was too good to be true

.

He was acutely, nerve-janglingly aware that he was in an enclosed space with absolutely no cover.

Then something, two impossibly huge somethings, stepped into the light.

Dicks squinted in disbelief. The black silhouettes were at least twelve feet high apiece and broad as two men. They nearly scraped the ceiling. Then they moved under the overhang and suddenly resolved into clarity.

"What the

fuck?

" Dicks almost screamed.

The guardian statues moved and walked. Their bodies, painted with some copper pigment to mimic the golden skin shown on the walls, were cracked and pocked, revealing chalky pits of white stone underneath. Likewise, the headless stumps of their necks. Fine powder misted around their joints as they shifted ponderously with a frightful grinding of rock against rock, like the toll of a millstone. The solid rock of their bodies moved with the fluid sinuosity of muscles and flesh. The stone around their elbows, knees and ankles actually bunched and wrinkled like elephant hide as they moved, sending chips of paint popping in every direction.

With a yell, Dicks leaped back, bringing up the Thompson as he did. The monstrous pair crowded the entrance, blotting out the light. Dicks squeezed the trigger and the roar of automatic fire was deafening. Instinctively pulling down to counter the SMG's upward buck, Dicks kept the flat top of the weapon level as he swept it from side to side, hosing down the corridor with blazing.45 caliber slugs.

Dust and painted rock fragments exploded in the corridor. White patches of bare stone splattered across their bodies where the bullets hit. They weren't slowed down in the slightest. The two of them standing abreast filled the corridor and took a slow, giant pace toward him. Their arms lifted with spread fingers crackling with granite arthritis.

They're made of

stone

, dumbass!

Dicks' brain screamed at him.

They don't have brains or arteries, you can't kill them,

shoot out their goddamn legs!

Dicks dropped into a crouch and set the wooden stock of the Thompson against his shoulder to aim down the barrel. He squeezed the trigger and sent a stream of fire straight into the knee of the horror on the right. Dry ancient stone was gouged out of the thing's leg like the action of an invisible pneumatic drill; clouds of rock powder filled the hallway. With shocking suddenness, the thing's lower leg snapped off in mid-stride. Unable to stop its impetus, the statue pitched forward and shattered like a clay pigeon on the flagstones. Its fellow tripped over the debris and fell too, cracking in two at the waist. Horribly, its legs kept working, flopping like mating pythons linked by their fragment of pelvis. To Dicks' horror, the top half also remained animate, dragging itself with its arms forward toward him. The grate of its broken torso scraping across the flagstones was like a roar. Dicks was insanely reminded of a man swimming, head and shoulders above water, pulling himself forward with powerful breaststrokes.

Nearly gibbering with terror, Dicks jammed a fresh clip home and sprayed the oncoming impossibility with bullets. A hand disintegrated and an arm came apart at the elbow. The thing no longer remotely resembled anything humanoid, and still it came, inching with the stumps of its forearms. Dicks' nerve finally broke and he turned and ran screaming into the depths of the ziggurat.

Passageways opened to the left and right. Dicks kept sprinting straight ahead. Panic ruled him like it never had before.

Before today, he thought he knew everything about fear. Hadn't he seen all the horrors that war had to offer? He'd seen men he'd loved like brothers turned to ragged bloody meat by 20mm shells. He'd seen every possible gory permutation of human trauma and mutilation that modern technology could provide, and had often been the one dishing it out. He'd learned to be brave, to act decisively, not because he was particularly fearless himself, but because he'd learned by the fatal example of others that hesitation killed. He had learned to be ruthless, to compartmentalize his feelings, not because he was inherently cold or a monster himself-- quite the opposite--but simply because one of the first things a soldier learned in this grim conflict was that if you let it get to you, not only did you get yourself killed, you got your buddies killed, too.

What he'd just seen was beyond him. It was as far beyond all the inner resources he had developed to cope with the reality of war as Oz was beyond Kansas. It had no place anywhere in his understanding of the world. His brain and balance felt rubbery from the impact to his pragmatic and rock-solid sense of the real and possible. He felt like he'd been shot, physically: woozy and naked with shock. He had no idea how to deal with it. The only response he could think of was to run like hell.

It didn't happen

, his mind kept repeating, even as he hitched and panted in terror, a patently ridiculous calming mantra.

It couldn't have been real

. It was the prim voice of his fifth-grade schoolmarm.

We live in a world that is defined by physical laws. Inanimate objects don't move. Monsters don't exist.