Dance Of Desire (5 page)

Terror’s sickening grip seized Cassie. She fell silent and motionless, entirely petrified where she was. The logic was wrong, the common physics of it were off. What she was seeing was wrong, even if it were all inside a dream. If the many pairs of strong hands restraining her had gently let her go, she would still be frozen.

Tears streamed down her face involuntarily. Her body shook on its own, trembling out of control. She wanted to plead for mercy but her tongue wouldn’t obey. She’d lost her voice to fear.

This wasn’t Paulo.

This
wasn’t human.

When the figure had gotten up from its knees, its many hands had never left her shoulders or wrists or ankles. Even with the minimal light she could see that it was hunched and not fully standing straight, but it was towering high above her, taller than any man she’d ever heard of or seen.

A big and fleshy thickness touched the goose-fleshed, chilled skin of her stiffened legs. It touched and tasted the tender, defenseless insides of her nude thighs. The “tongue” felt heavy, like a great python slithering over her bare skin.

She flinched when another one touched her. It slowly snaked and crept over her thinly-clothed body. The first “tongue” inched its way up from her shins over the tops of her thighs, then made a more direct route between her thighs.

Cassie’s mind was locked in. She wanted to both freeze in place and run away and of course couldn’t accomplish either. She felt one of the snaky tongues graze too closely to her tightening vagina, her thin bikini no protection, as it continued slithering heavily over her belly.

And in spite of it all, her body started humming again. Her breathing came in quick gasps as she tried to fight the next orgasm while both
things
heavily slither over her skin and encircled her tits, displacing the thin fabric with their weight and friction, while twisting and slithering around her nipples. The things were sliding back and forth, back and forth, and around and around upon her, and she moaned against her will because it felt good, before finally gliding upward to her neck.

Cassie strained her neck to keep her head away from them. But the two slithering things found her throat and wound around her outstretched throat with a whispering, scaly rasp.

Cassie’s quick gasping stopped because she couldn’t breathe! She tried to gasp but nothing came and she panicked and shook, ineffectually fighting against the huge, multi-limbed silhouetted creature still shrouded in darkness. Her body was going limp, as it was burning up the last of the oxygen in her lungs and blood.

The entire time, her mouth gaped open in vain, her tongue bulging forth. Cassie stared at two glistening black pools, the murky creature’s eyes staring back at her.

As the heavy darkness folded tighter around her, another heavy slithering thing took a firm position between her legs, completely filling the space between her thighs. The thing pushed against her thin bikini bottoms. Her mouth opened wider.

It passed. Sweat trickled down her brow and her neck was slippery with it. And yet, as the thing worked, she could feel herself cumming again.

She wished she could see his face at least, not this thick, inky darkness.
Paulo.

As tears slid from her eyes, Cassie lost consciousness. She did not even had time to be grateful for it. Everything just… stopped.

CASSIE AWOKE shaking violently, and whimpering.

Her mind was able to function just enough around the fear to register that the foot of her bed had creaked. The entire bed jolted upwards abruptly, as if an exceptionally weighty object had just fallen from it, and landed without any noise upon the floor.

She tried very hard to not breathe so loudly that she couldn’t hear what might be in the darkness of her own bedroom. She forced herself to stop shaking from a nightmare that was so vivid but was quickly sliding away into nothingness, replaced by her instincts screaming about a possible nearby danger. She couldn’t move, and her limbs felt so heavy that the lamp felt miles away.

There was a dense intensity in the black, as if something were near and heavy, like too much humidity hanging in the air or when someone leans over close to you in a dark room. You can feel their presence, even if you could not quite feel them.

And though she couldn’t fully explain what she was sensing, all the hair in her body stood on end. Why wasn’t any light coming in from the moon outside her window, or from the street lights, or the security lights off the side of her building? She strained her ears, too, to catch any sound. She heard nothing – not the thrum of the air conditioner or street traffic or night insects. She heard nothing but her own heart hammering furiously against her ribs, as if it wanted to break out and escape.

The darkness wasn't helping her calm down. Within it, her eyes played tricks on her, creating images out of thin air and black ink, like darkness folding or reshaping itself; images that appeared substantially real to her frightened mind, and felt tangibly alive to her inner terrified animal.

A chilly breeze touched her exposed body, like from a doorway briefly opened then closed. And though it was just a momentary occurrence, the sudden chill it brought was enough to startle her. Cold breath blew on the naked inner skin of her thighs.

Cassie bolted from the middle of her bed and scurried to the upper far corner where the headboard met the wall. And then… there was light everywhere! It suddenly exposed the furniture now; as if whatever had sucked up or blocked it before had finally left.

But where? How? Did she just woke up now and the darkness was part of the dream… the nightmare… that she couldn’t suddenly seem to remember, too? Like it left with whatever nastiness she had felt when it was still dark… or when she was still dreaming?

Nothing was moving or lurking. Just her normal inanimate things still lying where she’d last laid them. She took comfort in the solidness of the walls, and she slowly felt much calmer, secure with her back pressed tightly against her apartment walls’ reliable solidity. But, like the breeze, her comfort was fleeting, as she noticed the cold of the wall at her back.

Her back was bare!

Her fear escalated once again. Her gaze darted about the dark, but could see nothing. This wasn’t the first time she’d slept in an oversized shirt, but it was the first time she’d ever awoken without it, without knowing when she’d removed it. Even during a really hot night.

And it wasn’t a hot night. Not tonight.

She eased down and knocked the little bed lamp over, reaching for it from this angle. But the room did fill with shadowed light, despite the lamp being askew. Cassie stared around her again, upon her bed, the bare floor covered by the hideous, heritage rug that alone was probably giving her nightmares. She kicked at her covers, as if she believed a rat might be within. Then she fell upon them, casting them in all directions, like she’d desperately lost something.

But Cassie found no oversized, sleeping shirt. That was enough to send Cassie into a full-fledged, screaming panic.

A screeching sound caught her attention – the sound of a car driving away fast along the street nearest her apartment. It stirred her, such a normal sound that it gave her courage. She hugged herself as she tried to collect herself back together.

Before she lost her resolve, she immediately jumped out of bed and ran for the door to find the light switch. The room was immediately flooded with brighter light. The abrupt change from shadows to bright, safe light caused her to shut her eyes to shield them from the sudden illumination.

She shifted her weight, feeling something underfoot, and she stared down at it.

It was the sleeve of her sleep tee. Just the sleeve, torn ragged.

She stood glued to the spot by the door, under the bright light, not picking up the thing beneath her foot as she fought to analyze the situation.

She needed to make sense of it. She had never been a sleepwalker. Even when she was drunk, she never wandered off or do something she could not explain later when she woke up.

Cassie screwed up her face and attempted to recall if she’d gotten up to pee. Maybe, once coming out of her bathroom she had discarded her shirt altogether before slumping back into bed. She didn’t recall that, but it was the only explanation. She walked to the bathroom and back, twice. Even cautiously got on hands and knees and checked under her bed. Nothing.

Where was the rest of her shirt?! Why would she tear it apart? She certainly didn’t eat it. Although, she did check to see if she felt, well, full. She didn’t.

Cassie started to laugh, but then she saw something far more unsettling.

The foot of her bed bore a deep, large indentation that should have been gone, after all the time she’d spent cowering in the corner. It was as if someone—or something—had been in here.

MONDAY. A.M.

Cassie was not able to sleep after that. She managed to get back to bed, but she didn’t turn the lights off until the sun rose outside. While she sat, she stared at everything with her darting eyes. She saw nothing, becoming startled by every little sound she heard, whether a chirping bird in the dark of early morning or distant car doors slamming as other people came home from their night shifts or left to start their day.

When the sun finally poked through the blinds of her bedroom windows, Cassie finally stood up, shook her head clear, still not knowing what to make of the entire night. They had a few extra credit sessions on human logic versus instinct, human reason versus fear back in honors class in high school. Her arguments for the superiority of human logic and reasoning over baser, thoughtless animal instincts, superstitions, and fear, had gotten her excellent class points and grades,
and
an award certificate.

She recalled that it was possible to control life through reason, by simple clear logic in the bright of day. However, once she sighed in relief and fully relaxed into the day, was when something became obvious.

“Ow! Ow.” Soreness! Her entire body felt sore.
Again.

She moved each arm, each leg, bending every joint and bent her frame from the waist – every part was sore. Even her wrists hurt. There were subtle hints of bruising on both. She didn't know what to make of that and decided to dismiss it. After all, the bruising was faint, although painful.

She started to walk to her small kitchen. “Ow!” Her ankles felt sore, too.

Self-preservation triggers came again, and hair stood all over her body. Suddenly, there seemed like something was within the silence, weighing on her. She scurried to her small couch, then sat and pulled her feet up to take a closer look at her ankles.

They were there, the same subtle bruises around her wrists, like large hands had held them tight.

The vivid nightmare of last night flooded back into her thoughts, and it overwhelmed her. The intense panic she’d felt before came rushing back.

She remembered seeing
something
in the thick darkness.

Although Cassie was now wide awake, sitting on her own couch in a large urban city near her chosen university, she shivered, unable to stop remembering something – the slithering feel of things crawling all over her body. She suddenly knew that little memory came from her forgotten nightmare.

A nauseated feeling whispered within her.

Cassie suddenly felt very naked and all too vulnerable. But she couldn’t fight fear if she could not find explanation for it. She had to be brave. She stood in front of her full-length mirror and observed all that she could see. Like with her wrists and ankles, there was a subtle bruising and sore spots around her neck, as well.

And her breasts were tender and sensitive to the touch overall; except for her nipples and areolas and the surrounding flesh, where all normal sensations were numbed and noticeably flushed with bruising, as if she had enormous hickeys! She did not!

“Breathe, Cassie. Breathe. Just breathe, girl. Calmly. Deeply. Breathe.”

She scrutinized her tits more closely and noticed that, even without stimulation, her nipples were standing intensely erect and that her areolas and the area around her areolas protruded, as if they’d been sucked or pinched hard for a long time.

The thought of which made her cunt ache in reciprocation, and she frowned at the feeling; she didn’t want to feel that, not now. Not yet. She need more sun. She felt too exhausted, too drained… what?

Another memory that sneaked from her nightmare.

Cassie’s gaze darted here and there about her apartment. She needed to get out. Now. She needed to be anywhere but here. Taking a quick shower and sliding into a loose and soft turtleneck sweater and jeans to hide the bruises on her neck and wrists, Cassie nearly ran all the way to school and classes, postponing any possible hope she didn’t really have of finding solid answers to her questions.

She didn’t really feel as certain that she would find answers. It was something that had never happened to her… until now.

“C? DID YOU drunk dial me Shunday?” Lauren mumbled with a slur soon as Cassie slumped down the corridor to her first early-morning class. Anne stumbled into Cassie’s blurry-eyed view to lean against her roomie.