It’s possible to go for about three days without sleep before the really severe symptoms start to set in. Joseph knows this well. Staying awake is, after all, the only thing that keeps the monster away.
It doesn’t matter where he is: he’s tried sleeping at friends’ houses, motels, mattresses on the floors of semi-abandoned buildings, even sitting in a deck chair outside. It doesn’t matter what time of day he sleeps, or what he does beforehand. It doesn’t matter if he takes sleeping pills to knock himself into the deepest unconsciousness or sleeps fitfully with one eye half-open. All that matters is that he sleeps.
The only way he’s found to keep the monster from visiting him is to stay entirely awake. And this is, of course, not sustainable. When he was younger, Joseph had tried it. He’d drunk coffee, taken pills once he was old enough to get his hands on them, tried pricking his finger on a pin whenever he started to nod off. It works, for as long as it lasts. But sleep is an inexorable, gravitational force; there’s no avoiding it forever. As long as he can stay awake, the monster is nowhere to be found. But as soon as he closes his eyes, as soon as he starts to succumb and sink into the hypnotic lapping ocean of unconsciousness, it appears.
Having people nearby can sometimes delay it. Sleeping in a room with others, or asking someone to watch over him. But somehow whenever the monster shows up, the other people nearby are always gone. Do they all just step out, every time? Does the monster take him to some other dimension where no one else exists? Is it all, despite the painful, horrific reality of it, somehow just in his head?
Joseph can’t remember a time when he wasn’t visited by the monster. In his earliest childhood the visits had been terrifying, but vague. A shadow, watching him at the base of his bed. A pressure on top of his body that kept him pinned down. A feeling of ominous uncertainty, like he could die at any moment. The vague sensation of claws hovering a hair’s breadth from his skin, skimming over him as though about to select a delicacy from a buffet of choices.
It wasn’t until he hit puberty that the visits became sexual, that the monster’s control over him became absolute. He would lie, shivering, in the center of his bed, wondering where it would come from. Underneath was a favorite. Or out of the closet. Or just materializing from the darkness in the corners of the room. Every day its form seemed to grow more concrete: first the claws, then the fiery orange eyes, then the smooth, jet-black skin. One day he noticed spines on the shoulders; had they always been there, or was his attention just now bringing them into being?
Even now it feels as though every day he notices some new minute detail about the thing. Or perhaps it is the same set of details over and over again? Despite seeing the thing nearly every night since childhood, the image of it somehow refuses to stick in his mind. When he thinks of it he can never summon more to memory than a vague, ominous black shape. And then each night, when it appears, the details come back with a painful familiarity and immediate, terrifying recognition.
Joseph waits in his bed, staring at the shabby ceiling of his tiny studio apartment. He hadn’t thought that getting his own place for the first time would deter the monster, and it hasn’t. He knows it’s coming. He can hear his own heart pounding loudly in his ears in time with the ticking of the analogue clock on the wall. It’s the anticipation that’s the worst, really. The feeling of sleep coming on mixed with the terror of wondering when it will start.
He closes his eyes. Opens them again. The room is faintly lit by the streetlight outside the window, laying long shards of illumination across the floor. He closes his eyes. Tick. Tick. Tick. He opens them. A shadow stands at the foot of the bed, an inky black void in the dim gray of the room. Ah. Here it is.
The shadow starts to crawl towards him. His brain can’t fully parse the transition from looming to creeping; in the dark the movements have an almost liquid, amorphous quality to them. He feels a weight settle on the foot of the bed and begin to slowly move upwards, like a tide rising to drown him as more and more of his vision is eclipsed by the dark figure. Joseph can’t move; he can never move, at least at first.
The weight settles on top of him, clawed hands pinning down his arms, sharp knees on his thighs. Joseph no longer tries to hide under blankets like he did as a child. He doesn’t even bother to wear clothes anymore; it’s over faster that way.
The creature lowers its hips, bringing the pressure of its enormous cock down against Joseph’s pelvis. He clenches his jaw as the monstrous member grinds against him, sliding around for purchase until it rubs against the length of his own cock, dwarfing it and bullying it into rising with the friction.
The creature’s face lowers to Joseph’s neck. He can feel the hot damp of its breathing, hear the hissing of its breath through razor-sharp teeth. Those teeth press lightly, warningly, against the junction of his neck and shoulder, a mouth full of crooked pinpricks. He feels a long, sinuous tongue like a snake’s begin to extend along the side of his neck, continuing and continuing until it wraps all the way around his throat, encircling him and threatening to strangle him if he makes one wrong move.
Joseph is reluctantly hard. He can now move enough to struggle, but has long since learned not to. Instead he tries to enjoy what he can of the sensations. The warm pressure of the monster’s cock builds as it grinds harder and harder against his own, holding his hips down and forcing their arousals to meet. The creature’s member—or whatever it has that resembles one—is far larger than any human’s. It is also... sharper, for lack of a clearer word. It has more angles, more ridges, more unexpected gnarls than its human equivalent. It is hard as stone but also covered in some kind of slimy ichor that allows it to slip easily into whatever orifice the monster desires. Joseph has been forced to taste the substance in the past; it is chokingly sweet and oily, like tar.
Joseph would like to lift his legs and offer himself, to make the process go more quickly, but the monster’s weight on his thighs keeps them down and spread. For now the monster seems content to merely frot against him, grinding its dick first against his pelvis, then his stomach, then his breastbone, before returning once more to mash their hips together, cock-to-cock.
Joseph makes no sound, just lies still and allows the monster to have its way with him. There has been plenty of crying and protesting and carrying-on in the past. Joseph remembers vividly how he’d screamed his throat raw the first time the monster had taken him, its enormous manhood sliding inexorably up his tight, virgin passage. By now he’s felt it so many times that it’s almost routine; he just waits for the inevitable.
Eventually the monster seems to tire of rubbing its cock along every inch of Joseph’s body, and reaches down to place a hand under Joseph’s knees, pulling them up and spreading them wide. Joseph clenches his jaw as the pointed tip of the member finds its way to his hole, pushing in with no preparation at all, forcing itself relentlessly deeper no matter how hard Joseph tries to clench and keep it out. Inch after never-ending inch slides into him with no pause at all, just a single fluid spearing of Joseph on the enormous spike of the beast’s cock. He can’t help the tiny groan that escapes his throat, in spite of everything.
The monster begins to thrust, harsh and unceasing, like a machine. One of its midnight hands slides up the side of Joseph’s face until a clawed finger slips into his mouth, pushing down against his tongue. Joseph swallows reflexively around it, trying not to let the sharp digit cut him. His body rocks back and forth with the rhythm of the monster’s hips as it mercilessly claims him.
Joseph never has a strong sense of how long these encounters take. It always feels like hours, but often he will check the clock afterwards to find that barely a minute has passed. It would support the theory that he is only imagining all of it, if it weren’t for the physical evidence he often finds on himself afterwards: the torn pajamas, claw-shaped bruises, the dark leavings dripping down his thighs.
He tries to focus on remembering to breathe, feeling the harshness of his own inhales through his nose, the panting exhales through his mouth as he tries not to let them hitch into whimpers. Each breath is punctuated by thrusts as the foot or so of gnarled monster flesh slides in and out of him, splitting him open again and again.
Tick tick tick goes the clock as the monster fucks him harder and harder until his hole is sore and mangled, until he is sweating with the pain and exertion of being bent in half for the monster’s pleasure. The tongue around his neck tightens, as though in warning, forcing his breaths shallower until Joseph sees sparks behind his eyelids. The pinpricks of the claws against his shoulders stop just short of drawing blood.
Joseph continues to endure as he is spread wide and fucked over and over. He loses count of the thrusts, loses track of time, loses a sense of himself. Finally, what feels like hours later, the monster abruptly yanks its cock out of him and lifts itself up off of Joseph’s body.
But it is not to withdraw; instead the monster uses its immense strength to flip Joseph over as though he were a child’s toy, forcing his head down and pulling his hips up as it slides back in and resumes its plundering of Joseph’s ass. Joseph is almost relieved; from his experience, this means that they are somewhat close to the end.
Sure enough, it is not long before he feels the monster’s dick explode inside him, flooding him with the same mysterious black substance that coats its odd genitals. It comes, if it can be called that, far more than an ordinary man would. The liquid continues to pour into Joseph for some time, filling him up and up until he can feel the swelling pressure of it in his guts and the wet, slimy gush of it down the backs of his thighs.
When the flood finally ceases, the monster allows Joseph to slide down off the spear of its cock, collapsing back to the bed. Once again it flips Joseph over, sliding its body up the length of Joseph’s until it is sitting on his chest, where it proceeds to wipe its cock off on Joseph’s face and neck, leaving black streaks of ichor in its wake. Joseph does not protest, but keeps his mouth closed lest he give the monster any further ideas to continue. He can feel the call of sleep pulling at him, dragging him down, begging him to close his eyes.
He blinks once, twice, and he’s asleep, dragged under by the blackness. He wakes in the morning still hard and jerks himself off with a sob, eyes still closed as he tries to think of nothing at all.