Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

THE LIBIDONOMICON Gregory L. Norris

Rain lashed the house. The thick, clotted drops clung to the outside of the misted-over attic windows, reminding Barry of sweat. Adding to the image was the attic’s smell, a heady blend of old books, musty air, and the occasional ripple of a man’s cologne, drifting up from one of the boxes or trunks entombed within the eaves untold decades earlier in the New Englander’s mysterious past. The muggy weather mixed it all together into a carnal, narcotic scent.

Barry had discovered the collection of grimoires inside a steamer trunk that had also boxed in a peculiar smell. Unlike the usual aroma of old paperbacks, library books, and yard sale finds, these exuded an odor of perspiration and sin. One in particular, a leather-bound volume with a mottled gray-pink hide, felt oily to the touch.

Five of the books were traditional hardcovers, at least in outward appearance, though written in languages he didn’t recognize. One, its indigo cover decorated in a spiral pattern of gold leaf, looked German. Barry had taken two years of German language in high school. Though some of the writing sparked familiarity, he couldn’t translate a full sentence despite retaining a decent amount of words and phrases. Another was filled with sexual pictographs and hieroglyphs.

The leather bound book, wrapped in a square of exquisite silk, held its secrets from Barry’s prying gaze. Age and isolation had conjured a waxy, pale pink resin from within, gluing the pages together. To force them apart would likely damage the book beyond repair. Barry sensed it was valuable; the most-valuable of the thirteen books in the trunk. It had to be. Simply touching its pallid, gray-pink cover sent equal parts excitement and revulsion through his blood, the latter leaving his stomach feeling like it had taken a punch while the former made his cock swell.

For the second time that rainy afternoon since entering the attic, Barry fumbled his loose-fit jogging shorts aside. His balls spilled out, hanging full and heavy between his spread legs. Bracing an eave with his spine, he worked his cock free. At twenty-eight, he hadn’t suffered such demanding erections in a decade. Since finding the books, he felt eighteen again and knew that with just a little extra effort, all he needed to do to get his cock sucked was to lean down, extend his tongue, and both of his heads would meet, an act both selfish and sacred.

Barry cast a furtive glance toward the book filled with hieroglyphs, opened to a page that showed a trio of rudimentary human figures, all male if the swollen genitals jutting between their legs were an indication. The three formed more of a triangle than a circle, the traditional geometry for an oral chain. Mouths were aimed at dicks. At the center of the human triangle, a giant inhuman eyeball sat open, observing. Barry wasn’t sure why this particular image made his flesh sweat and his cock leak. Memories of his one and only threesome to date, held in the woods behind his uncle’s house so very long ago, rose fresh in his thoughts.

Barry sighed. The warm breath teased the sensitive flesh of his cock, now so close he could take it between his lips. And he did. Mouth met tip. While one half of his body moved lower, the other wiggled higher. The head of his cock and an inch or so of steely shaft pulsed over Barry’s tongue. Only in his mind, it wasn’t his but one of the dicks from the woods. He’d gone down on himself regularly since finding the terrible, wonderful books.

Barry sucked and tasted his pre-cum, salty and bitter at the edges. Smelling the musty sweat of his pubic thatch and balls lit his skin on fire. The sweat… the attic was doused in perspiration and haunted by the ghosts of past sex. The kind of sex that had few, if any, boundaries. Sex that had teeth.

For a startling instant, the vision became strikingly real: him, David, and Jamie, naked on that tatty old army blanket someone had left in the woods, all of them high on the hot summer stink of their male bodies. There’d been many configurations on that long ago afternoon, though none spent in the wicked triangular pose that promised such intense pleasure. Between suckles on his cock, Jamie spoke in a garbled foreign language.

The itch in Barry’s cock doubled and then, without warning, his balls tightened, unloading the first blast of come across his tongue. Barry swallowed, struggling to keep up. One large shot slipped free of his lips and fell between the rafters, fresh ejaculation added to all the now-stale loads deposited there in decades past.

The stink in the attic burned in Barry’s lungs. The air had grown almost too hot, too ripe, to breath. Perspiration cascaded down his face and legs. Despite two climaxes since tromping up the stairs, one pumped directly into his mouth, his cock hung hard and heavy, wanting more, and his balls loosened up, aching for further release.

The books. He wanted to gaze through them again and enjoy their wickedness. Instead, he tucked his protesting dick back under cover and piled the antique books into the trunk. Touching the leather bound grimoire with the mottled hide and the resin-soaked pages again nauseated and aroused him. By the time he lugged the steamer down the narrow staircase to the second floor landing, his cock had unintentionally rubbed itself to the verge of unloading a third time.

Barry silenced its complaining and finished the job in the shower, where he washed away the external grime coating his body. Not long after he emerged, pondering the internal, the doorbell rang.

His name was Nickolas Kantemir. A dealer in rare books, he had answered Barry’s post on a blog about the collection in the steamer trunk. The lone sentence was both vague and promising.

I know what you’ve found.

Barefoot, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Barry padded down the stairs and opened the front door. Twilight had fallen, welcomed in early by the rain. Standing between the threshold and the dusk was a column of darkness in the shape of a man, its back turned toward him. The muggy breeze swept up, rich with the man’s clean scent, a mix of summer rain and pine trees. Barry sucked in a deep breath, exhilarated for reasons he couldn’t at first identify.

The man turned, and Barry’s next breath came with difficulty. A classically handsome face with sapphires for eyes, dark hair one length longer than that of most professional athletes, and a mouth too tempting to ignore materialized out of the shadows.

“Barrett Manning?” the man asked, his voice a musical baritone.

Barry choked down a painfully dry swallow and nodded. He somehow found his voice and answered, “Yes. And you’re Nickolas?”

“Guilty,” the man smiled, flashing a length of perfect white teeth, and for one blinding instant, all Barry could think about was kissing that mouth, and being kissed in return. Kissed everywhere, shuddering as it grew intimate with his flesh. Earlobes and instep, throat and toes, nipples and asshole and even places far beneath skin and muscles, places normally inaccessible to another man’s mouth.

“I’m here concerning the Langston Collection.”

Barry realized he’d fallen under a spell. Blinking, he regained some of his composure. “The books, of course.” Then a wave of worry crashed over him. He sensed his cock had grown stiff—if it had ever softened following his shower, which he doubted—and that if he looked down, the tent in his jeans would be capped by an expanding wet spot, damning proof of his guilt. Worse, what if the vision standing outside on the top step noticed?

“May I come in?”

“Of course, dude. Forgive my rudeness. Please, come in.”

Something in the man’s face changed. He glided into the house, graceful yet masculine. His hypnotic male scent deepened, but as he passed out of the shadows and into the light, Barry noticed the man’s pallor, ashen-gray, pink around the edges. The illusion was there one moment, gone the next.

Nickolas Kantemir wore a spotless black button-down shirt under a leather jacket. One shirttail hung out of his jeans in that jaunty, modern style. Old hiking boots on big feet, faded blue jeans. The man was stunning in an understated way.

“Can I take your jacket?”

“You can take my cock, Barrett.”

Barry’s eyes snapped fully open. “What?”

Nickolas’ lips curled into a seductive smile. “I said you can take me to the collection.”

Barry had heard the man wrong; he’d only heard what he wanted to. Watching the man’s smile, he realized Nickolas’ lips never once moved as he spoke. Perhaps he’s trying to hypnotize me, Barry thought. Or seduce me… which Barry couldn’t have wanted more.

“So, about this Langston Collection,” Barry said.

“Ford Langston was a professor of antiquities from Midlothian University, in the town of Avonmoors, Massachusetts, and a notorious sexual deviant who secretly—and not so privately in some instances—sought to explore every act of sensuality and lust known to man. He was obsessed with experiencing sex on every plane, not only physically but the metaphysical as well. Soul sex. God’s sex. Every sacred and sinful kink and bent ever conceived. And in order to obtain that goal, he assembled a collection of the rarest books on the subject. Arcane, forbidden books which became known as the Langston Collection.”

Barry glanced around the simple New Englander, half of it in desperate need of updating. “If it is this Langston Collection, what was it doing in my attic?”

Nickolas half-smiled and, inwardly, Barry reacted fully. “Perhaps some of Ford Langston’s research took place here, in this very house. Do you know anything about the history of the place?”

Barry shrugged. “I’ve only owned it for a few weeks, but there are some strange smells up there, and I’ve found claw marks on some of the walls.”

“Maybe the previous owner or tenant was one of his many conquests.”

“You mean lovers?”

“Sure, that works.”

Silence fell between them, warm and awkward. The central air conditioning felt nonexistent, though Barry sensed it whispering over his arms.

“I thought the books might be valuable,” he rambled. “That I could sell them and use the money to fix up the place.”

“Valuable? Oh, yes, very. If they really are the Langston Collection, you’re sitting on a fortune.”

The heat in the room doubled. “Fucking-A.”

Nickolas placed a hand on Barry’s arm. The connection was powerful, icy and electric. Barry gasped, suddenly aware of his nipples as they stiffened into hard points beneath the thin cotton of his shirt.

“No; books A, fucking B… ”

There it was again, that teasing frankness. Dumbfounded, Barry said, “This way.”

But Nickolas was already a step ahead of him and navigating the staircase to the dark room at the top.

Barry caught the intensity in Nickolas’ sapphire eyes, which glinted preternaturally in the wan light cast by the spare bedroom’s lone lamp. The other man knelt between the open trunk and the mattress and box spring sitting on the scuffed hardwood floor in what Barry envisioned as becoming the guest room some day. He leaned forward, enough that Nickolas’ shirt pulled free of his jeans, exposing a patch of furry skin just above the crack of his ass. The dude had gone commando, and Barry’s cock pulsed.

“Are they—”

Nickolas withdrew the indigo book with the gold leaf spirals. “The Callae Cardera, painstakingly recreated from scrolls found in canopic jars at the infamous Walled Lake in the shadows of Castle Hayne. Das Buch Des Dunkel Lebenz… roughly translated as ‘Book of Dark Passion.’ The Taos Testament… ”

The handsome man grunted something under his breath as he lifted an oblong book from the pile.

“Zettle’s Diary. An exploration of unholy sexual rituals with those abominations known as the First Gender. The Insatiable One, Yiig Y’Reka… tentacled Toth Helote… Watan Ranssae, the Dark Lover and Romancer of Fallen Souls… these incantations were believed lost following the destruction of the Third Reich.”

“So, is this the Langston Collection?”

“Only if The Libidonomicon is here.”

Barry parroted, “The Libidonomicon?”

“‘The Book of Lusts.’ Think of it as something of a dark Karma Sutra. The original text was written in human blood, by the Mad Hungarian, Adolfo Ardeshin. Subsequent copies were even more meticulous in their creation, bound in the flesh of his unwilling victims.”

Nickolas froze, and Barry’s heart galloped.

“What is it?”

Nicholas drew the silk-wrapped volume from the trunk. His hands shook as he unwrapped. “Can it be?”

A buzzing undercurrent of electricity infused the air. Barry’s arms broke in gooseflesh. His cock pulsed.

“Of all these treasures,” Nickolas said, his voice taking on a haunting echo. “You are the most priceless.” Then he faced Barry directly, a glint in his eyes and a surly grin on his lips. “I can say with certainty that this is the Langston Collection.”

Nickolas clutched the pinkish, gray-skinned book against his chest and stroked it. Though Barry initially dismissed what happened next as a trick of the room’s poor light, he swore The Libidonomicon quivered. The book made an undulating motion, like a snake, as though the pages were pulsing from within. Pulsing, like Barry’s cock.

“So… you interested?” he asked.

Nickolas’ grin widened. “In the books? Very much so. But also in you.”

The wine in the air, which had steadily built in Barry’s ears since being touched, crackled out. And the book, The Libidonomicon, puffed and shrank against Nickolas’ chest, as though taking breaths.

It had only happened once, in the deep green woods behind his uncle’s house. Dave and Jamie were a couple of local guys, friends bored out of their skulls during an otherwise unremarkable summer. A couple of no-good punks, he’d been told, but that wasn’t true. In the woods, they’d been great, at least so much as Barry remembered. Though not to be repeated physically beyond the one time, that sweaty, dirty afternoon proved to be unforgettable, fodder for a decade’s worth of jerk-off fantasies.

Barry thought of them again as Nickolas maneuvered him onto the nearby mattress. The pill-covered quilt felt scratchy beneath his naked spine, like that old army blanket in the woods, which had likely been somebody’s picnic castoff. The scent of pine hit his nostrils strongly, more nostalgia than Nickolas, he imagined. Nickolas, so handsome, moved on top of him. But in the murky near-absence of light, it was Jamie he saw. Jamie was a brute of a young man, probably now married, divorced, and living with one female friend or another in a long succession of meaningless lays since that long ago afternoon. If he wasn’t in jail serving time, that was. Barry hoped Jamie thought about their day in the woods, too, when he jerked off or was buried balls-deep in a choice pussy or ass.

Barry blinked and the face now belonged to Dave. Dave was the handsomer of the two and the dirtier-minded of the boys his uncle had labeled no-good punks. He’d also been the one to incite the dance steps that ultimately led to their conga-fuck beneath the pine trees; often, Barry had thought about seeking Dave out on the internet. Dave, who was also probably married and still playing around with men, cuming and making them cum. Oh, to cum…

Dave-Nickolas sighed, washing a cool breath across Barry’s throat, and the scintillating shudder cascaded down his chest to his abdomen; lower, engulfing his cock in concentric waves of pleasure. A fortune, Nickolas had said. Barry was about to become rich, thanks to the Langston Collection. Of course, Nickolas would take possession of the books. This very night, in fact.

“You are beautiful,” Nickolas said, his voice throbbing with an echo even more distant now. “Can you comprehend how very long I’ve searched for you, my love? Or the lengths I went to in order to reunite with you, after that charlatan of a dark priest stole you away from me?”

Dave hovered over him, but his mouth never moved, and the voice professing its undying love was speaking at some length’s distance. Barry summoned his strength and looked. The illusion of Dave who’d been Jamie a minute earlier dissolved in a swarm of black dots. Turning his head required more effort, but when he did, Barry saw the book, placed on the bed, expanding and contracting, as though breathing. And something else.

The lamp had been switched off, but candles had been lit, fat and waxy ones that exuded a bitter sexual smell. The only other light in the room came from the section of the floor where the steamer trunk sat. The lid sat open; an unnatural glow, part indigo, the rest a mix of crimsons and greens, emanated dully from within, as if from the arcane books themselves. He knew the texts were valuable, but at that moment, he also realized they were different from other books. Dare he think it? Dangerous.

A shadow passed between Barry and the books. It stirred the sexual tang in the air, a stink of fresh sweat from a man’s ripest, most wonderfully male destinations. Barry’s pulse quickened.

“What… what are you doing to me?” he managed.

“Making love,” Nickolas said between scattering chilly kisses down his throat.

Barry moaned. Whatever protest he thought of making died in a rush of exquisite sensations. Nickolas’ lips clamped to his throat. Pain flickered. All else was ecstasy.

They were naked, skin pressed against skin, their chemicals mixing liquidly as sweat mingled with sweat. A man’s sweat could be so powerful, so intoxicating.

Nickolas sprawled out on the bed, his body as magnificent as Barry imagined. Every detail came clearly: the neat T-pattern of hair superimposed over a muscular torso; fur-ringed belly button, a full nest of dark curls above a swollen uncircumcised cock; low-hanging balls; moderately hairy legs; big feet, sexy in ways Barry hadn’t considered possible before this night.

Nickolas’ lips, full and pink… no, crimson… in the room’s muddy light, beckoned him with a smile.

“Y’toth Ve Zetha Sog.”

“Huh?” Barry asked. The voice in his head wondered if he’d misunderstood, or if Nickolas was speaking in one of the tongues from the ancient texts.

“I said that you have my permission.”

“For?”

“For whatever you want.”

What he wanted, Barry thought, was to be there again, to know the kind of unapologetic release he’d experienced that summer in the woods with Dave and Jamie. The kind of hardcore, primal sex one man can only experience with another. Sex so dirty, so wrong, outcasts throughout human history had written forbidden books about it. Sex rarely spoken of, but also never forgotten.

Their lips met, and Barry knew that Nickolas would give him all that he wanted. The black and the blessed; the hallowed and the unholy; from head to toe and everywhere in between.

Slowly, Barry’s mouth descended. Chest to stomach, lower into that thatch of male-smelling curls. His mouth encircled Nickolas’ cock, and taste ignited on his tongue, deceptively pure at first. The longer Barry suckled and savored it, the more sanguine it grew.

“Hebbe… Alane… Raema… Amiot… Suggs… Braye!”

Barry glanced up. The words from a lost language ricocheted through the shadows around him, but the lips of the handsome man he fellated didn’t move. He closed his eyes only to suddenly be transported there again, onto the army blanket in the woods, only…

The old blanket was different, stained with a dark, moldering circle at the middle. Feathered skeins decorated the top of the circle, like eyelashes, thought Barry. The stain at the center of the army blanket resembled an eye.

He lay across one side, at an angle, canted toward the other, naked. Nickolas was posed in a straight line, his face at Barry’s ankles. And on the blanket’s far side, in the last space of the geometry where a third male body should be to form a triangle, was The Libidonomicon.

The book, no longer pallid and gray, had taken on a rosy complexion. Its shape altered before Barry’s wide eyes, stretching out into an oval. The circle at the heart of the triangle, too, had changed. A two-dimensional line drawing of an eyeball now stared up at him.

“W’Tenue… Shrout… Kohl-Theda!”

The book inhaled, and with a liquid, languid slither, put forth an arm.

“Come back to me, my love. Back, through the pages… ”

An arm first, and then a cock. A lone, pink tentacle stretched out from the resin, hooded and moist.

“Yes!” Nickolas sighed. “Live again!”

Barry only saw the abomination briefly. Without warning, the room went dark, and he smelled the acrid wisps of smoke from the blown-out candles. Nickolas moved beneath him, crawling upward in a slithering motion, until his muscular body encompassed Barry’s possessively. The other man’s lips returned to his throat; given his paralysis, Barry wondered if they’d actually ever left. How much of their sexual fumbling was real, and how much had he imagined?

“Nickolas?”

The mouth on Barry’s throat sucked harder in response. Cocks ground together. A finger invaded Barry’s asshole.

“What are you doing to me?”

The finger became two, filling him while searching for the trigger of sensitive nerves buried deep at his prostate. Nickolas kissed, chewed. Barry moaned. A guttural sucking sound teased his ears.

The fingers found their target, and Barry started to unload. Something warm and wet engulfed his cock. A mouth? The only other mouth in the room was at his neck, feeding. Curiously, the thin flicker of pain added to his pleasure, and Barry’s cock continued to ejaculate, and the shivers and ecstasy engulfed him without abating, a tantric wave that showed no sign of slowing.

Through that inhuman pleasure, Barry somehow focused on the book, that vile text bound in human flesh, and how it had seemed to come alive beside him on the bed. The mouth on his cock sucked, and the fingers inside him wiggled… if they were actual fingers.

“Feed, my love,” Nickolas whispered. “Feed on the young and the living, until you are whole and back with me again, after these many centuries apart.”

Barry’s climax, growing more painful with each second, ebbed. This level of sexual stimulation wasn’t possible to maintain, he thought, because it wasn’t natural, wasn’t human. Neither were the two horrors draining the blood and the life out of his body, he realized, Nickolas and the body being reborn out of the book, right before his dreams of the woods faded, and the darkness claimed him.