Beneath the New Moon–Part Two

by Matthew Pridham

PART TWO

The next night, he hadn’t even finished the ritual when Eliora Vav burst out the mirror. She tracked white chalk through the pentagon of protection he had so dutifully drawn on his wood floor. She grinned toothily down at him, shook her head. She grabbed a fat, burning candle with one of her feet, her two-inch prehensile toes rolling it between them before she burst it, hot wax and little tongues of flame raining down on the floor. “Quaint, beast,” she said and crept toward him, “but I have no time for medieval chicanery. Up.” His legs and his penis both responded to this command with equal alacrity, neither under his control. Vav slipped one clawed fist around his erection and pulled him to her. “Tonight, we will fuck for the first time.” Her tail wrapped around his waist, drawing him close enough to taste her breath. “Tonight, we will fuck four times for the first time.”

She released his cock, shoved him toward the mirror. His face loomed in front of him, closer and closer as she pressed him to the glass. “I wouldn’t try this on your own, manimal,” she said, laughing behind him, “you’d just bruise that skull of yours.” And then she pushed him through the mirror with a slap on his ass. The reversed bedroom they crawled into seemed to undulate, every solid surface rippling as if they were surrounded by waves. Vav slipped one claw around the back of his neck and steered him in the direction of his living room. “Long here stay, to want don’t we,” she said, her words warbling through the air. “Yourself as creature fragile,” she explained, pushing him on, “a such for good be, wouldn’t it?” He’d hardly sorted out this word jumble when they arrived at the flimsy mirror he’d hung by the front door. Instead of casting back an image of the real world, though, this glass swirled with a riot of colors and shapes. Vav pushed him to his knees and leaned back against the wall. “First where?” She stroked her chin while her tail slid around his throat. “Course of,” she exclaimed, pointing one claw upward. “First place first!” The colors in the mirror stabilized when she stroked its surface, slowly steadying into coherence.

They now looked into what appeared to be a rather humdrum, if prettily decorated, dining room. “Shhh,” Vav hissed, and pushed him through the glass. The air here was scented with potpourri, the smell of chic cooking, a hint of perfume. He got to his feet, tried walking, and stumbled into a sleek black chair, almost upsetting a crystal vase filled with flowers. After the rippling mirror-world, his legs wobbled almost uncontrollably and he needed to lean against an expensive looking table for support. With one movement, Vav was at his side, one green palm pressed against his mouth, her eyes glowing with barely repressed irritation. “Did I say ‘Shhh,’ or did I not,” she whispered, her tongue tickling his ear. “There are others of your kind sleeping in this house.” She gestured down one long hallway, then crumbled her claws into a fist. “If you wake them, if they come running out here in disheveled nightgown and bedhead, beast, if they come to see what the fuss is all about, well,” she grinned widely, revealing all those pointy little teeth. “I may just enjoy a meatier snack than I’d planned on having. You understand?”

She nodded his head with her hand. “Yes,” he whispered, surprised to find his voice.

Vav led him away from that hallway and toward a staircase that stretched up into the house’s second floor. This place looked so familiar, though rendered foreign by new furniture and by the moonless dark that lay thick over every surface. Vav pulled him up the stairs, treading every step carefully enough to avoid creaks. He was halfway up before he remembered his sister chasing him down these very stairs, pissed at the tableau into which he had organized her Strawberry Shortcake and Star Wars dolls. His mom’s room had once been down that hallway, just far enough from the living room that you could watch television without hearing her crying.

Vav quietly opened the first door on their left and, after peeking in to make sure it was empty, pushed him inside his old room. The space now held nothing but a bed decorated with linen which screamed “guest bedroom.” “This was the place, wasn’t it, manimal?” She poked him in the chest with one claw, eliciting a whimper from him, herding him toward the bed. “This was where you and some female fucked for the first time, yes?”

He nodded. “Ayla,” he said. “That was her name.” Being in this room, it brought back the way she had giggled at his stupid jokes, the cavalcade of gory movies they’d watched together, those awful cigarettes she’d smoked, her first, earnest stabs at poetry, the feeling of her thighs in his lap. “But how did you…”

“Oh, please,” said Vav and toppled him backwards onto the bed, “as if any of you little mammals,” a distinct note of contempt in that word, “could hide something from those of my kind.” Without even turning to look, Vav flicked her tail at the doorknob and depressed the lock with a click. She slipped onto the comforter (puffy, adorned with images of cows jumping over yellow crescents) and ran her hand up his chest. “I want you to fuck me like you fucked Ayla, beast,” she whispered and guided his fingers to her nipples. “I want this to be like your first time.” She met his mouth with her own, sucked his tongue so fiercely he wondered if she’d uproot it, suck it down. “I want you inspired,” she said. He licked her breasts, careful not to chip his teeth on the black rings that pierced them. Her claws drew faint designs on his face, his back, his thighs. Her pussy tried swallowing his fingers.

She pulled him on top of her body and guided him inside. He was engulfed in wet heat, already wanting to pound away at her, barely able to control himself. The bed, he was vaguely aware, began emitting plaintive creaks and snaps. Vav sighed and arched beneath him, her tail stroking his legs higher and higher. She pushed him up into a crouching position, then pulled him into her frantically, her eyes glowing beneath him in the dark. “What if this was the end,” she asked him, a look like malevolence meeting, merging, with that of desire on her cunning face, “how would you fuck if this was the last time?”

Vav shuddered and he felt that secret vaginal tongue curl around his cock, slither its way up his length. The orgasm building in him felt undeniable, a storm about to break, a flood he was sure would wash them both away. And then her tail, which had been inching its way past his buttocks, darted forward and seemed to stab into his back, his sacrum, to be precise. There was just a second of sharp pain, instantly replaced with a numbing warmth, and then that crashing orgasm was receding from him, turned away at the last moment. Under him, Vav went completely still, her mouth frozen open, her eyes squeezed shut.

Then, with the ease of an acrobat handling a balance beam, she flipped him over, pressed the length of her body against his, and began rocking her hips to some demoniac rhythm in her mind. Those eyes burned at him in the gloom, that smile wolfish. “Liebestod, little manimal.” She bent down, flicked her tongue down the side of his face. “You know this word? Love-death.” She dug her claws into the sheet on either side of his head. “The little death, yes? Ecstasy and extinction are kissing cousins, my sweet.” Her smile broadened, split open, her jaws yawning wide with the pop of bone and cartilage, her scaled cheeks stretching like taffy. He saw the fangs in her upper gums rise over him, glint in moonlight, and then everything went black as she took his entire head into her mouth.

On either side of his saliva-slickened skull he felt her teeth grazing his face. Her tongue danced across his lips like a snake before slipping between them. Her breath, hot and sweet, filled his lungs, an air like a drug, both rarified and intoxicating. Lights swam through him as the insides of her cheeks sucked against his head. The thought that she could decapitate him with one good chomp danced through his brain, danced right out again. Her moans were his world. Distantly, he felt her pussy grip his cock, felt it wetly wrap itself around him, felt her arms squeeze his sides as she came violently. Once more, however, a stab from her tail stopped him from filling her.

When she sat up, his head emerged from her mouth with a liquid pop. The gloomy light of his old bedroom poured into his eyes. “No release for you, my beast,” she said and stretched her arms to the ceiling. She rolled her head on her neck, apparently happy with the sounds of her alien spine cracking. “Not yet, at least.” Vav licked her lips, clearly proud of herself, and then hopped from his sweat-slicked body. She opened the door, led him back down the same stairs he and Ayla had many, many times crept through, drunk and horny and stupid and so young. He and Vav had reached the dining room mirror, Vav had in fact already pushed one leg through, when a door creaked open at the end of the hallway and he heard an old voice tremulously say, “Hello? Is there someone there?”

Vav laughed, full-throated, and pulled him into the mirror with her. Before her head had left behind his old house, she called out, “Not anymore.”

#

They crawled through a mirror set in a closet filled with expensive, executive looking suits. This second room was a big oval one he had seen many times before, though only in photos, movies, news-reels. Vav ignored the two couches that took up the center of this office, loped across a seal imprinted in the lush carpet, and bent over the sturdy desk at one end of the room. “Come on, manimal,” she hissed at him, “before anyone knows we’re here.” That dark green ass wiggling at him was all the invitation he needed. Vav’s tail, far from getting in the way, served as a goad to his desire, dancing across his chest, reaching between their legs to slap him on his ass as he thrust against hers. He removed the hand with which he had been tickling her clit and grabbed a handful of her hair, pulling her head up so he could see her face reflected in the giant windows across the desk. Her tail curled around and buried itself in between her groin and the wood, its tip now taking the place of his fingers.

They fucked in that flag-draped office for a full half hour before someone walked through the door, screamed, and went running. “Oh, make it good, beast,” Vav said through gritted teeth, “make some history.” When she came, she rocked against the desk so hard she knocked a nameplate onto the floor, she punched one green fist through that desk, sending splinters and paper flying. He did not need to be told he wasn’t to come, and fortunately that tail of hers did not stab his back a second time. He was pulling out of her, wet, raw, aching deliciously, when a door to the side flew open and a handful of men and women in very serious looking suits tumbled into the room waving guns and shouting orders. One of them reached his hand to his ear and began to speak and then they must have taken in Eliora Vav, that green skin, the tail now switching back and forth angrily, that impossibly wide and toothy grin aimed at them from two dozen feet and a million years away. This crew froze beneath her gaze just long enough for her to grab his arm and pull him into the closet with her and they were away again.

The next thing he knew, she was sitting on an altar in a vaulted space decorated with frescos. Above his head, a naked man reached out to touch the finger of a geriatric in pink. Vav wrapped her legs around his head, pulled her face toward her pussy. “Such funny stories your kind tell one another,” she said, her claws splayed on the back of his skull. “Purity, sin, physics.” She rubbed his head, sighed as he licked her. “Is this defilement, mammal? Or are we only now making this place holy? Will the glow of our lust render this stone sacrosanct…”

His first chuckle, muffled between her thighs, may have escaped Vav’s notice, but soon he was laughing uncontrollably. He glanced up, saw her eyes peering down at him. Wiping his chin, between guffaws, he asked her, “Sacrosanct? Really?”

A smile twitched at the corner of her lips before she recovered herself and slapped his gleaming face. “Insolence, beast!” She shifted a bit, knocked over a candelabra, and pressed his face back into her wet warmth. “I did not bring you here to mince words with me. Hold still.” A slithering sound as her tail crept over his shoulders and then he felt the point of it enter the nape of his neck. “Wait,” she said, holding his head steady. In his mouth, his tongue vibrated, pulsed in time with her heartbeat, then split into three smaller, lither tongues. The pain was gone before he’d even registered it and then all three organs were as under his control as they would have been had he been born with them. One for the clit, one to flicker the sides of her labia, a third to plunge into her depths.

They were entwined on the altar when a goofily dressed guard wandered down the aisle and began yelling at them in Italian. Vav shouted back and they were running toward the bathroom mirror they’d emerged from, her laughter echoing diabolical off the painted walls.

Finally, she told him she was taking him somewhere no one would ever interrupt them. At first, all he was aware of was the crushing weight of water all around their bodies and a cold he had never imagined possible, her eyes the only light he could see. Then, she poked her tail into the center of his chest and he could breathe again, the cold now a minor annoyance soon remedied by the friction of their bodies. They floated in darkness biting at one another’s mouths, squeezing and pushing and pulling and she drew his head to her and “Come,” she ordered, bubbles leaving her mouth, and he felt like his spine was emptying itself, brain and all, into her pussy. Only as last of his throbs ebbed did he realize he could see something moving in the murk past her face. Some filigreed creature, glowing with orange phosphorescence, crept across a fungus-covered ground far below them.

Vav, who had been licking her lips, lost in her own thoughts, tracked his gaze and turned to look. “Aren’t they marvelous, beast,” she asked and ran her claws down the length of his back. “There are more of them,” she said, pointing up, and much further above their twirling bodies, he could make out tiny dots of light squirming across a rocky ceiling. They were in a sea without a sky. He turned his shocked look on her and she burbled, playfully smacked him. “Let us say,” she said, “we are in an ocean no woman or man has ever sailed. At least not yet.” Vav spun them around, aimed at an outcropping a few dozen feet away. She swam them toward it, trusting him not to let go. “No one will know this, little manimal, but you are the first of your species to swim these waters.” They had almost reached that stony surface when something bellowed in the waters behind them. “Oh, for Maldemog’s sake,” Vav spat, glancing back, “even here we can’t get a moment of privacy.”

Out of the darkness a glowing mass emerged, swimming straight at them. He had the impression of a whale covered in writhing limbs, something with one giant purple eyeball, something with a cavernous mouth opening with horrible lethargy. He spluttered, gripped Vav’s torso, and then she was pulling them through the reflective surface of a giant mineral vein and they tumbled, soaked and shivering, into his mirrored room.

 

This is Part Two of a three-part series. See Part Three here. (And here’s Part One if you missed it.)

Matthew Pridham writes horror fiction. He is a student in CU Boulder’s MFA program and also has a Master’s Degree in English. His novella Renovations was featured in Weird Tales (issue #348), his essays on strange films have found their way onto Weird Fiction Review, and he’s written an essay on polyamory for The Thought Erotic. He is currently working on a mystery novel in which Eliora Vav will return.