You think there might be a monster in your apartment. Which is ridiculous, of course. It’s just your mind inventing reasons again to sabotage any hint of stability in your life. You were lucky to find a place this cheap, where the landlord you’ve never met doesn’t complain if you pay your rent a few days late. You weren’t even sure if you could afford to stay in the city after your ex kicked you out, and now that you found a place you’re letting the long twilight shadows of the trees in the park outside your window play tricks on you.

But still. You catch glimpses. Only when you let your guard down—when you see movement in the corner of your eye and you whirl and your heart starts pounding and there’s nothing. Nothing until your gasps stop coming ragged, until you stop glancing over your shoulder, until you slide back into the dim glowing respite of your phone and suddenly something moves just outside your view.

Maybe. Probably not. Monsters aren’t real.

You feel hot breath lingering on your ear as you throw yourself awake into raw darkness. The tall trees block out all hope of moonlight through your window, forcing you to grope the wall of the still-unfamiliar room until you find a lightswitch. The room is empty once you can open your eyes against the harsh LED flood, and you try to reassure yourself that the scrabbling sounds were from your own frantic search.

It takes longer than it ought to convince yourself to turn out the light again. You do not find your way back to your warm, alluring dream. Not tonight.

That morning, you make a point of taking a walk. The park by your new place is woodsy, like the city was sliced open and trees burst forth from beneath its fabric of streets. Even on this hot summer day, the shade is cool. This new neighborhood hasn’t yet become familiar, and you struggle to tell one path through the firs and cedars from the next. You do your best to think of this as an adventure rather than a trap. Occasionally, someone will pass you by, enjoying the fresh air with a nonchalance you envy. You smile and nod just like a normal person would.

You used to love working from home. You loved having your own space without a boss looking over your shoulder. You loved being bottomless when it was hot out and letting the breeze from your fan waft across your nethers. But that was when you had a home with more than one room. A home without something hiding in a space with no room to hide.

You try to focus on the data entry, you really do. Painstakingly, keystroke by keystroke, you populate a row in the database as nervous energy builds up inside you. You can’t shake the sense that you’re being watched. You feel its gaze like a physical thing crawling over your body, making you twitch and writhe and glance over your shoulder, terrified and also desperately hoping that you might catch a glimpse.

You manage a row and a half in twenty minutes before giving up. You want to crawl out of your skin. Every muscle in your body clamors to tense and go limp at the same time. You angrily shove your laptop away and grab your vibrator. As you bury yourself under your covers and peel off your panties, you insist to yourself that this is just a tactical session to shake off the gitchy feeling.

But as you start to run the vibrator in slow circles around your clit, the lovely warm feeling you were looking for flows outward from your pussy and through your body. Finally, for the first time since you moved in, you find yourself feeling something like calm, and you want to make it last. Rather than bringing the vibrator straight to your clit for a quick and businesslike orgasm, you allow yourself to have some fun. You lazily rub it along your folds for a while before holding it to your favorite spot while your fingers dance around it. You let yourself melt into the pleasure, eyes unfocused as it pulls you into its sweet vortex and away from the grim world beyond your bed.

A long, lovely time later you finally reach a crest and come back to the world around you. As the aftershocks finish rolling through you, you realize your blankets are in a heap on the floor, dashing any hope of modesty. You’re too embarrassed to admit even to yourself what you thought you were hiding from. Feeling much better, you grab your laptop and notice the time.

“Shit.”

You missed a meeting with your boss. All the stress of the real world crashes back onto your shoulders as you frantically email him an apology and offer to Zoom him immediately. You’re so preoccupied with playing the good little worker bee that you don’t notice the sticky black smears along the walls until much later that night.

You work past ten to prove yourself to your boss who’s probably looking for an excuse to fire you anyway, and then after a dinner of beans and rice you finally notice them: three parallel marks arcing across the east wall, sticky like tar but thick without leaving drips like you assume tar would. You try to take care of them yourself, but paper towels do nothing but get your hands sticky and soap and water barely makes a dent. You text the number your landlord left you with your best attempt at not sounding accusatory about whatever’s seeping through your wall. Then you walk half an hour both ways to the only department store open this late and come home with six different cleaning fluids that you can’t really afford.

None of them quite work, but after a few hours of scrubbing the smears down with each product, you manage to beat the mess back to a stain on the wall that you can halfway convince yourself might be ignorable. Beneath the lemon-pine reek of the cleaning products, you can still smell a bit of the stickiness on your hands, a dark heavy scent like leather and hot cola. You wash your hands, not for the first time, and to no better effect than before. Sighing, you strip, hit the lights, and collapse onto your bed, not even bothering to climb under your blankets.

As exhausted as you are, your body refuses to give way to sleep, leaving you with nothing to do but stare at the blackness above you where your ceiling must be. You try not to think about work, you try not to think about your ex, you try not to think about whatever might be growing in your walls. You just focus on the air around you, hot and thick in the summer night. It almost feels like it’s pulsing, expanding into your skin before pulling back, over and over. You imagine it as a kind of breathing, heat flowing up along your body and then flowing back down again. You breathe along with it, relaxing into the waves of heat until you can almost hear it breathing along with you.

You can hear it breathing along with you.

In an instant, all the relaxation is replaced with tension. That’s definitely breathing, just to your left, between you and the light switch. You’re wide awake, but you dare not move. You want to scream, but it’s trapped in your throat. The breathing comes closer, close enough to feel, a hot wetness rolling over your cheek. At first it doesn’t seem to smell like anything, but then you realize it smells like a stuffy room on a hot summer night only more so, the scent of your sweat and minute rice and clothes you should have laundered rendered overwhelmingly intense.

The breath moves from your cheek to your collarbone. If you reached your arm up, you could touch whatever’s there, but that would mean acknowledging that this is real. You flinch involuntarily as you feel something touch you, something soft and wet, and as it works its way over your collarbone and along your neck, long and sinuous, you realize it’s a tongue. Your neck tingles where it licks, and you hate yourself for the pulse of desire you feel between your legs. 

The tongue moves its way down to your chest, lapping up the layer of dried sweat from your arduous night. You feel a single wet exhalation on your breast and your muscles clench in anticipation of the tongue that follows. As if responding to your mingled fear and desire, it worms itself into the fold under your breast, supporting it like some obscene bra, and then snakes up around the side, squeezing gently. You grind your thighs together, wetness building despite your fear. The tip of the tongue touching your nipple finally breaks your silence, but what comes out is less of a scream than a moan.

It toys with you, squeezing and stroking your breast with its tongue, until you can’t stand it any more. The same arm that you’re still unwilling to touch whatever’s to your left instead moves to the right, flashing to your clit as your other hand plunges deep into your insistent cunt. The pressure within you builds and builds as the monster toys with you, your movements get more and more frantic, but no release comes. The tongue lazily uncoils itself from your breast, eliciting a more pathetic sound from you than you knew you could make. It retraces its path back up your chest, up your neck, and moves onto your chin.

You know what it wants. The sinuous tongue is revolting, but you need release and you need it, so you tilt your head down and kiss it. Gently at first, but then fully, you allow it entrance to your mouth like a lover. As soon as you taste it, like leather and hot cola, orgasm rips through you. As wave after wave crashes over you, the tongue squirms slowly in your mouth. Your own tongue explores it in return, its texture smoother than a human tongue but also strangely sticky.

Finally, you come down from the orgasm, and before a single thought can blossom in your mind you continue down, down, into a deep black sleep.

Your alarm wakes you, and the first thing you notice when you open your eyes is the black streak on your ceiling. You curse, then look down at yourself to find the same black slime in a line down your bare chest, mirroring the goo on the ceiling. You shudder and curse again, furious with yourself for passing out and letting whatever this stuff was fall on your bare skin instead of a blanket or a pair of pyjamas.

You’re too distracted to dwell on the weird sex dream you had last night, its details already scurrying from your mind.

You look at yourself in the bathroom mirror. You’ve been avoiding it, always afraid you’ll see more than just yourself looking back. You already had to move everything that could look like a monster looming over your shoulder. The towel rack hangs empty, towels instead left to dry on the open bathroom door, safely out of your reflected view. Even that didn’t help entirely.

Today, though, you’ll have to make an exception to assess the damage. The sticky trail starts at your lower lip, and you fervently hope you didn’t swallow any of this surely-toxic substance during the night. It runs down the left side of your neck and chest to your breast, which is positively covered in it. You swipe a glob off your nipple and smell it. Same strange, heady scent as before. Strange, but not bad exactly. In another context, you could see yourself appreciating it.

You absentmindedly lick your fingers clean as you hop in the shower. This shitty building barely has water pressure, but even so removing the black tarry stuff from your skin proves to be easier than removing it from a wall, although it leaves behind a strange dark spiderweb texture which seems to make the skin it sat on more sensitive. You force yourself to stop demonstrating this to yourself by stroking your boob, and instead dry off and get ready for work.

There’s no time to clean the stuff on the ceiling. You spent more time in the shower than you realized—there’s barely even time to get dressed. You don’t want your boss asking awkward questions about the strange rash on your skin, so you throw on an uncomfortable turtleneck and boot up your laptop.

. . .

The entire day is filled with a sense of being stalked, despite sitting in the same spot on your bed the entire time. You’re not seeing things out of the corner of your eye anymore, and maybe that’s what’s got you scared. If the things you saw are gone now, that means they were really there before. That means the monster has your scent now. That means it’s taking care not to be seen.

You don’t miss today’s Zoom meeting. Your boss talks about how your work has been slipping. You’re missing targets. You nod and apologize, but you’re not really paying attention. You’re sniffing the air like a prey animal hoping to catch a predator’s scent, knowing it will smell like leather and hot cola. You’re pulling at your collar to try to keep it from chafing your neck and collarbone.

“Do you understand?” your boss asks.

“Yes, absolutely,” you lie. “Thanks. Have a good weekend.”

You close the laptop and pace around your small apartment, trying to figure out where the monster could hide. You don’t find anything.

The next day is mercifully Saturday, and you resolve to take another walk. The turtleneck is miserable in the summer heat but it’s all you have to hide the rash. You head to the park again, where the trees loom over you, their darkness oppressive despite the hints of sun that make their way through the canopy. You make turns at random, and you can’t tell whether you’re purposefully trying to get so lost you can’t get home or whether you’re just an idiot.

Every rustle in the bushes startles you. When strangers pass you, you avoid eye contact and scurry away as quickly as you can. Your turtleneck feels like claws raking against the tender line on your skin, and your bra feels like it’s made of sandpaper.

Finally you find a path you recognize and follow it back to your building. As soon as you’re home, you rip off the shirt and your bra to instant relief. You’ve got to see a doctor about this rash. Maybe they can help you figure out what the goop is, too, since your landlord seems to be in no hurry to text you back. You touch the rash on your neck to see if the texture has changed at all and find that it immediately feels better. You stroke gently down your jaw and along your neck. The tender skin that was so aggrieved by the harsh fabric exalts at the touch of your fingers.

You stroke that line twice, three times, allowing the heightened sensation to soothe you. You lie back on your bed and allow your fingers to travel lower, stroking down your chest and onto your breast, covered in the strange spiderweb pattern. It feels good. You cup yourself in your hand and squeeze. It feels really good. You know it’s bad to mess with a rash but you can’t bring yourself to stop. As you start playing with your nipple, you find your other hand reaching almost of its own volition into your pants. You know you’re nasty for getting turned on by your own skin condition, but by the time your fingers are inside yourself you’ve decided you don’t care.

You feel like you’re being watched, and you decide you don’t care about that either.

Hours later, you only stop because you notice the light dimming. Groggy after so long on your back and so many orgasms, you look around your room and see more dark stripes oozing their way out of your wall. There’s one on each side of the door, three on the wall opposite, and one above the window that seems to be smiling hungrily at you. You start blearily heading towards the cleaning supplies when you realize the three you first noticed the day before yesterday have come back. You decide it’s hardly worth cleaning them if they won’t stay cleaned.

You send your landlord another, more sternly-worded text and decide to microwave yourself some dinner. You wonder if it even counts as dinner if you haven’t eaten anything else, and then shrug. You’re not particularly hungry anyway. In fact, once you find yourself staring at the bowl of reheated rice and beans, you realize you hardly want it. You halfheartedly eat a few spoonfuls, but the flavor turns strange in combination with the scent of leather and hot cola that pervades the room. You toss some cellophane over it and put it back in the fridge. If you get hungry later, you’ll just eat it cold.

You pull out your laptop, but you can’t get yourself excited about anything. Your usual video games bore you. Social media is full of people you only half-know and you can’t bring yourself to care about them. Your favorite fan fiction all seems trite in comparison to the actual shit you’ve been going through. You decide to go to bed early and face your problems fresh tomorrow.

As soon as you walk over to your dresser, you feel an intense gaze upon you once again. You whirl around, heart in your throat, but as ever there’s nothing there. You feel a spike of anger at yourself for believing in any of this, and then at the monster you’ve conjured in your imagination.

“Is this what you want to see?” you say a little too loudly into the empty room, cupping your still-bare boobs. “You want to ogle me?”

Despite knowing there’s nothing there, there can’t be anything there, you still feel like an exhibitionist. You hate yourself a little when you realize you kind of like that feeling, and a little more when you decide not to resist it.

“Ooh, get an eyeful of this, you fuckin’ thing,” you say as you do a clumsy impression of a striptease, unzipping your jeans and pulling them slowly down while gyrating your panty-clad ass. You try to step out of them gracefully and fail, resorting to kicking them off your feet in a decidedly un-sexy way.

Still, you continue the show, pulling down one corner of your panties and drawing your finger up the crease with your thigh. You’re good at lying to yourself, but even you can’t deny that you’re enjoying this. You’re decidedly wet, the scent of your arousal mixing with the heady scent of the slashes on your room. You pull the other side of your panties down just enough to show off the top of your bush, then turn around and bare your ass to the room. The empty room that doesn’t feel empty.

You bend over, showing more athleticism than you have in years, and pull your panties down far enough that you imagine your labia are visible through your legs. You feel yourself dripping down your thigh. Finally, you toss the panties away and bounce onto the bed, running your fingers up your sex in a kind of triumphant finale. Your hidden audience emits a rumble of approval as a wave of its hot breath flows across you.

It scares you to hear and feel this beast that you can’t see, but you’re as horny as you are scared. In fact, you realize in whatever part of your mind is still more subject to human cognition than animal instinct, the fear itself is kind of hot. As you stroke yourself, you think about the monster looming behind you and it makes your hips buck. You grab your vibrator and shove it inside yourself and think about the monster hovering over you as you sleep. You visualize yourself being chased, clawed, grabbed, and you cum like you never have before, screaming out an emotion that is both terror and ecstasy.

You wake the next morning to an apartment crosshatched with dark, sticky slashes. Across every wall, all over the ceiling. You get out of bed and realize you’re standing in one that’s opened on the floor. You don’t care anymore. You just laugh. At yourself, for thinking you could solve this when you’ve failed at solving every other problem in your life. At the monster, for doing so much to catch someone as pathetic as you. At the world for the sheer absurdity of existing.

You go to the shower, noting absently that the bathroom too is covered in dark sticky slashes. You turn on the shower and it coughs and splutters but only a few drips come out. You text the landlord about that, too. You don’t expect to hear back.

You decide to get dressed anyway, but as you pull on your bra it feels like knives against the rash on your left breast. You instinctually throw it across the room, then cradle your aching breast. Your touch immediately soothes its pain, then blossoms into pleasure. You lean back against the wall as you pinch your spiderweb nipple, only realizing when you pull away that your back and butt are now covered in the tarry black stuff. Without a shower, you suppose, you’ll just have to live with it.

Out of curiosity, you reach back and squeeze your ass where the sticky substance clings to it. It feels great, although naturally your hand comes back covered in it as well. You go to wipe it on your pants before realizing you aren’t wearing any pants, and you’re just wiping it on your bare leg. You laugh at yourself for even caring, then lick the stuff off your palm and fingers. It tastes like it smells, but saltier, with a musky tang to it. It’s strange, but not bad, you decide.

Your fingers are covered in the spiderweb rash too, now, and you try experimentally rubbing them along the wood of your bedside table. It feels nice, but not as nice as your more sensitive parts. You scrape some more of the goop off the wall and massage it into your other breast. It feels amazing. You realize you can feel a tingling as it seeps beneath your skin, a kind of vibrating eagerness to be touched. You assent, touching it, smearing the tar all across your chest. Once it’s done its work, you lazily lick it up, leaving dark, sticky stripes on your face.

You’re toying with yourself and you know it. You smear more of the sticky substance on your stomach, on your feet, on your thighs, but you’re just delaying what you really want. Finally, you relent. You grab a handful from off the nearest wall and smear it all over your pussy. Much of it sticks to your bush, of course, mingling with the fluids you’ve been leaking all day. But you rub it in until it meets skin, and then you lose all track of time.

It feels exquisite. All your nerves are alight, every stroke of your fingers sending out a symphony of sensation. It’s as though there’s nothing in the world but your pussy and your hands which are its servants. Eventually, you realize the tar is getting in the way, so you scoop as much as you can back into your mouth, tasting your juices along with it. You never knew how good you tasted. No wonder the monster grabbed you.

Although the initial intensity fades into a background hum of pleasure, you’re still lazily touching yourself as darkness falls. You hear breaths in your room, blackened now both by night and by tarry slashes. Fear spikes in you, but now that fear is inextricably laced with excitement. You feel yourself tighten around your fingers.

The breath lands on your legs this time. You feel a tongue, strangely familiar though you can’t place from where, trace its way up your thigh. You couldn’t move a muscle if you tried, but involuntarily you find your legs opening, inviting this thing up into you. It snakes upward.

You feel a slap against your outer thigh. Some sort of claw, rough to the touch, is grabbing you. You can feel its nails pressing against your skin but not quite piercing. Another one lands against your other thigh. Your breaths come short and sharp.

The tongue reaches the top of your thigh. You feel it hot and wet, slithering among your folds, exploring them like it might explore newly conquered territory that used to belong to some other, weaker monster. You whimper, and you don’t know if it’s from fear, desire, or despair at how good it feels to be this beast’s plaything. The tip of its tongue plays with your clit and your hips push against it, silently begging for more.

After a long time laying claim to your vulva, the tongue pulls back and pushes inside you. Immediately, helpless to the pleasure, you clench down upon it, and it seems to expand against you as you do so. As it pushes in, you feel the same tingle the black goop gave you, but this time inside, deeper, deeper. You had rubbed it all upon your skin but you’d held back from pushing any inside, and now you know why: it was this beast’s right to do so, to ignite within you the change that had already begun without.

As the nerves inside you come alight with newfound sensitivity, you feel the tongue pulsing. Pulse after pulse runs up it and into you, and you realize with a sudden clarity that it’s giving you something. After all the gifts you’ve already received, it’s now entrusting you with its—no, with her—children. The thought of bearing monsters is so horrifying and so hot that you cum on the spot, the ovipositor pulsing back into you with every crashing wave of orgasm that runs through your cunt. You’re asleep before the last wave dies away.

You’re proud of yourself for remembering to join your zoom meeting on Monday.

“You haven’t done any work today! You know that—” begins your boss before his eyes go wide and his sentence devolves into spluttering incoherence.

You belatedly remember that you usually wear clothes to the meeting, but you can’t remember why. Your boss seems to, as he’s now yelling at you to put something on. You can’t reach your dresser anymore—you’re cocooned in your bed by glistening blackness whose bottom layer has hardened into a kind of shell around your legs—but the yelling frightens you so you scoop some of the tarry substance and rub it onto your breasts. It feels good, so you keep rubbing, until you realize you’ve rubbed it all in and your skin is bare again, the spiderweb texture that’s now spread all across your body becoming vibrantly purple beneath your skin.

Your boss is yelling something about a hospital now. The thought of leaving your nest revolts you, and you try to tell him that, but all that comes out of your mouth is a gurgling rasp. You clear your throat, and cough up something dark and only slightly more liquid than the substance that’s crawled across your walls and your bed. You try again, but still only strange wordless sounds make their way out your mouth. You decide to convey your opposition to the idea by growling instead.

This seems to offend your boss, who starts screaming at you for being a freak, a pervert, all the names you used to see hiding just behind his fake plastic smile in your one-on-ones. The screaming upsets you. You slam the laptop closed and throw it onto the floor.

And then you’re alone. The room is silent and still except for the laptop slowly sinking int the muck. You look around and realize you can’t see the door anymore behind the layers of black ooze, and for a moment claustrophobia spikes through your heart. You start flexing your legs to try to free them, clawing at the muck climbing up your torso, inhaling to get ready to scream for help—

And then you feel the eggs inside you shift and pulse. You feel something cool and wet flowing between your legs and it feels good. You feel that tingly coolness travel along each of the spiderweb lines that etch your skin, up your body, bringing a dull and pleasant numbness. The air you breathed in to scream leaves your lungs in a perfumed sigh of animal pleasure. You lie back on your pillow with the dark slime in your hair and allow yourself to drift away.