0UCH1E

It was while he was in the process of preparing his menu. His LAST menu.

He still has a long way to go in the way of planning and the second course is eluding him. It's on the tip of his tongue, he just can't quite grasp the idea. In his house, he sits and looks at the photo of him in that burger joint. Look at him, so happy, so free from the shackles of society sucking the life from his art.

He starts to reminisce; his first week, his first dinner rush, and his first time fucking a fellow employee in the kitchen after hours.

He was still new, but quickly on the rise. You waited tables and had been there only a little longer than he had. Your company helped him settle into the new environment and eventually... It was the summer of 1987 at Hamburger Howie's.

You both were tasked with closing procedures; cleaning the dishes, changing out the frying oil, and taking out the trash and such, but somewhere between wiping down the counters and cleaning out old produce, you grabbed him by his "Kiss the Cook" apron and pulled him to you. You two kissed and on each other's tongues you could taste the remnants of the fries and house made ketchup you two grazed on throughout the day. You can smell the grease that sticks to the fair stubble on his chin and he kisses you like you're the meal he's been craving. He had just earned employee of the month and feeling on top of the world so he didn't think twice about turning you around and bending you over the counter (away from the stove and fryers of course). He fucks you fast and hard like a young buck. The counter rocks and shakes with each thrust and you don't bother keeping your voice down since it's just the two of you; both still in uniform. Plates clatter and those red san plastic cups rattle with the sound of your panting and his moaning. Julian is torn from his trip down memory lane as he suddenly lets out a strangled groan. He comes hard and stains his slacks. A heavy sigh as he removes his hand. He's not young anymore, but just remembering you made him feel youthful again.

He picks himself up out of his seat and changes into some fresh lounge pants.

Oh, he misses the days when you two would work during the lunch and dinner rush; the smell of fresh burgers and the sound of the sizzle on the griddle and the fries dropping in the fryers. You called out orders better than a Texan auctioneer called out bids.

Animal style, hockey puck, BLT, axle grease on the buns and-

Wait.

Buns.

That's it.

Not caring that he's in some lounge pants and a t-shirt or that it's the middle of the night, Julian grabs his keys and leaves his house.

He needs to get to the kitchen and begin working on his second course.

Even your maid, Sadiya, seldom interfered during the height of it. She was always the first to get you into a hot bath the following morning, holding one of your hands while pressing a sponge to your naked body, her expression wrenching in disgust when she saw the red, purpling bruises beginning to bloom across your skin. She never said much about it. It wasn't her place.

Tonight, you locked your door and tucked a silk scarf in the long crack below it, hoping to keep the shadow out this time. You weren't confident it would work because nothing ever did. If it wanted in, it always found a way to do so, at any time it pleased, despite how terrible it made you feel.

You pulled a sheer cloth across your shoulders and studied the placement of the silk scarf below the door for a moment longer before going to your desk and lighting a lantern. There, you lifted the lid to reveal writing utensils and beautiful, soft paper. A long envelope already marked with your name and the recipient lay to the side.

Just then, from somewhere within the house, you thought you heard your name called. Deep. Guttural. Ravenous. It hardly sounded human, even as it moaned out your name in a miserly way. You thought it reminded you of a cat in heat yowling for attention.

But there was little time to look for humor in this situation. If you were going to discreetly write this letter, it needed to be done now before it found you again.

To the esteemed Father Marius DuMonde,

Forgive me, Father, for I do not have much time to write to you, but I hope you will read this letter and consider with great urgency an unexpected trip to this household. I have enclosed money for your traveling expenses and any amenities you may need. While you are here, you will be accommodated most exquisitely, and your every need thoroughly tended to. I only ask—no, beg of you—to hear me!

Over the past eight months, I feel as though I have been slowly exposed to a worsening evil that I cannot hope to ever comprehend. It is a heavy shadow that is always upon me, watching me, touching me, and, horribly enough, defiling me. It is inescapable, and I fear that it might be driving me mad.

You might already be thinking that I have lost my mind, that I am a lost cause. I beseech you to hear me, believe me when I say that: I am not a lunatic. I do not suffer from hysteria or delusions of the mind. I have always been as well as I could reasonably be given my circumstances and upbringing in life, and I know reality from fiction of the mind.

What I have been seeing and experiencing is true and raw.

I believe it has possessed my husband, who has been home from handling the affairs of his late uncle's estate for nearly eight months—the same time when this all began happening! I do not think it's a coincidence, and neither do you!

He is not the same man that I knew. My husband is a scholar, reticent, and the most intelligent man that I know. Who he is now is completely changed. He is now far more outspoken than I, and has utter disinterest in everything he once treasured! He even destroyed his own garden, one that he's grown, maintained, and researched for twenty years. He no longer studies; he seldom reads. His only interest now is in something that I cannot disclose to you, for it is of a most indecent nature.

Father DuMonde, you must—

"My, you're certainly occupied. Who are you writing to this late, my love?"

You reflexively threw the ink pen away, slammed the lid of the writing desk so he could not see the contents of your letter, and stood from your chair. Of course, this would all be useless if he asked to see what you had written, because as his spouse, you could not deny him. But, as he came away from the bedroom door and closer to you, into the dim, flickering light cast by your lantern, you could not distract yourself from the thought that he already knew.

"How did you get in? I locked the door, Solomon," you said.

He closed the distance between your bodies and stroked the side of your face where the bone of your eye and cheek met with his knuckles. You started from his ghostly touch, freezing hands that felt as though they'd never known the warmth of a fireplace or a body. Even though you'd known him intimately in every way imaginable, the ruthless cold that radiated off of him never faded.

Solomon smiled down at you serenely. "Why did you lock the door?"

"Because—" the words hit a snag in your throat, stealing them until you cleared your apprehensions with a quiet cough. "Because I wanted a little privacy for a while. I was given my own room for exactly that purpose, yes? It's the same reason why you have every space that you do in this house, isn't it? There isn't anything wrong with that, is there?"

"Is that really it?" asked Solomon, who then tucked his nose against the crook of your neck and kissed your skin. His lips traversed to one of the throbbing arteries under your jaw, where he focused his efforts and pinched you lightly with his blunt teeth. You flinched again, struggling to swallow around a mounting wad of anxiety in your throat, anticipation beginning to knot your insides in ways that made it hard for you to let him touch you slowly.

"You can tell me what's on your mind, I'll listen," said Solomon, though you did not believe him. That was one difference that you missed most between this imposter and your real husband: The real Solomon would've listened to what you had to say, even if he did not particularly care for it. This version of your husband—this thing—would be satisfied if he only ever ripped screams of ecstasy from your ripe, pink lungs.

It was when he peeled off the thin fabric from your shoulders like a second skin and unfastened the ivory buttons on the front of your nightclothes that you decided to tell him the truth. "I feel watched, Solomon. I always feel like something is looking at me, no matter what I'm doing. It likes seeing me scared. It likes knowing that I know it's there. I've seen it from the corner of my eye sometimes."

Solomon shucked the shirt from your body and immediately placed a wet trail with his tongue and lips up along your breastbone, hands sinking below the waistband of your drawers and undergarments to squeeze your ass. It was your instinct to wind your fingers in his hair, twisting black rings of it tightly with your knuckles as he worked on you.

"What does it look like to you?" asked Solomon between hard breaths, lips and hands never leaving your body as he spoke. He would never tire of your sweetness, of the salty brine that slicked your skin as he fucked you out of your mind, of being the reason for your greatest pleasure and greatest agony. "Tell me, my little love, what does it look like to you?"

"Terrible," you said.

A groan rumbled in his throat, leaving a hot tickle on your skin as he exhaled and kissed and sucked a wet path up to your neck again with the fervor of a man who'd only ever known lust, yet never held something warm in his arms. His hands kneaded your ass dexterously, fingers teasing, prodding you lower and higher to elicit a soft sound from your lips that you tried to mask by biting your teeth and tugging the black hair on his head.

"Why don't you tell me more?" He insisted, using his hands on your backside to bring you flush with his chest and hips, his smiling mouth cool against the shell of your ear. All of the tiny hairs on your body rose like needles, a shiver chased the length of your spine, and the thrill of it all made you throb between your legs. "What does it look like? Tell me just how terrible it is, darling. I want to envision the thing that watches you every moment, follows your every step, haunts your every breath."

His words were sinister to you; caring far too much for something that frightened you, looked at you through hollow eyes and pinpoint pupils. You recalled a time when it had been watching you from the ceiling as Solomon fucked you into the mattress, your nails clinging to his back desperately. You had noticed it and tried to speak to your husband, but you could not find your voice, so you whimpered and moaned underneath the thrusting man, clenching around him so tightly in your fear that he came inside of you.

"A horrible pale face," you began, which prompted Solomon to nestle his face into your neck again and slowly grind his hips against yours. He was aroused by your discomfort, your reluctance to recall the awful specter obsessed with your very existence. As he guided you through the motions, you felt the bulge in his pants rising, pushing hard against your core and setting your blood ablaze. "I… a horrible pale face; a grinning face with teeth as thin as needles. Its skin looked wrong; pulled too tightly; decaying; shredded. It was cloaked in black. I remember it being so dark that it was darker than the rest of the room."

"Go on, go on," he spoke lowly into your skin, pulling one of his hands away from your ass to unlace the drawstring bow on your drawers so the fabric pooled at your ankles, revealing you to him and the dim room. "Go on, go on. I know you've noticed more."

You thought about how the apparition knew you just as intimately as Solomon did; how it had observed the beauty and oddness and blemishes and perfection of your body just as closely as your own husband. Would it know, then, how to make you unravel just as well as the man who touched you now?

"I remember—I remember the eyes; I remember how they stared into me. Even though its eyes looked empty, something was glowing inside its sockets. It was evil, Solomon. Those eyes were pure fucking evil," you explained with a wispy voice, unsure of how much he could've heard while he was distracted humping you and sucking your neck raw. But, you continued: "I think I remember its head the most. It wore a crown. The most horrible thing I've ever seen."

"A crown can be horrible, you say?"

Solomon's face was under your jaw while his fingers pushed divots into your hips, controlling the friction between your bodies. His clothed cock was nearly erect and stroked your sweetest spot, blurring your vision with searing pulses of white that wrapped around your head like a hot halo. You reached for his belt between your gyrating bodies, but he wasn't finished hearing your talk and grabbed your hands.

"Ah, ah," he sighed into your ear, "the crown, tell me about it."

This surprised you as Solomon seldom denied you in the moments when you plucked the courage to initiate something of your own accord, rather than being hopelessly dominated by him first. He used the pad of his thumbs to caress the insides of your wrists, an impatient gesture meant to coax you into talking more, talking faster.

"It reminds me of what black icicles would look like covered in…"

"Yes?" Solomon pressed.

You told him it looked like flayed skin and viscera tangled into the seven immense spikes on the crown. Sometimes, you believed you were able to detect the entity's presence before ever seeing it by the way it smelled: The malodor of rotting flesh and the tang of blood. On the night when you had seen it watching you from the ceiling, you had thought that the skin seemed fresh.

Solomon gave a satisfied smile and released your wrists to unfasten his belt, the other little, frustrating barriers on his trousers keeping him from what he wanted. He pulled out his cock and gathered the precum weeping from the reddened tip in his palm to smear along the shaft, stroking himself to full hardness. You saw it twitch in his hand, his hips bucking forward in anticipation.

"On your knees," said Solomon, to which you readily obeyed.

The floor was painful and, without the fireplace going, leeched the warmth from your bones. You felt vulnerable in this position for an unexpected reason: You were closer to the darkness in the room now than the light starting to suffocate inside your lantern. It wasn't enough to take the edge off of your urges, of how mesmerized you were by his cock as you began to stroke it and kissed along the underside, letting your tongue taste the sweetness of the precum he had spread.

You dragged your tongue across bulging veins and followed the curve of it to the weeping bulbous head. Solomon sighed in relief when you finally took him into your mouth, coating him in your saliva, swirling your tongue around the tip before taking him deeper into your throat.

In these instances with Solomon, you never truly felt like yourself. You were spellbound by a haze of lust so potent that the world ceased to be, time lost meaning, and you would forget that upon awakening later during the day, the pain would be absolute and untreatable. Bruises thudded dully, appearing as broad, dark red ink-spots across your body, and you'd be bedridden and inconsolable in agony.

Yet, during these long, dark hours of night where your husband belonged to you alone, you wanted him to ravish you, rut you like an animal in heat against any surface he could find, leaving no part of you unknown. You wanted his hands on your throat and his nails pushing crescents into your skin as he split you apart, all the while whispering of terrible obscenities and fantasies that were dizzying and made you want to shrivel away in confusion of him and yourself.

"What are you thinking about, darling?" asked Solomon with his hands wound tightly in your hair, to the scalp, knowing that you couldn't speak around your throat full of his cock. You struggled to keep the pace that he wanted, to keep from choking on him as he thrust his hips into your face and buried himself deeper inside your hot, moist mouth. "Let me guess: You're thinking like a filthy whore, aren't you? You're thinking about everything I've done to you; what else I could do to you. I want you to know, I've felt you clench around me when I've mentioned that slut of a maid of yours, and even my manservant. Perhaps we could invite them in with us one night, yes?"

Of course, you could say nothing, do nothing but whimper miserably as he fucked your mouth, and your own pleasure was limited to what you could accomplish with vigorous strokes on yourself.

Solomon watched you do this from down the length of his sharp nose, through darkened, glassy green eyes that flickered gold in the waning lantern light. He had leaned back into your writing desk to steady himself as the tension built, harsh breaths and moans gliding out from his lips like silk. His sounds were as beautiful as they were lewd and voracious, of a man who could never be satiated, who would always hunger for this.

And then, he stopped abruptly and pulled his cock out of your mouth, one hand wrapped around it as he rapidly brought on his climax from impatience.

"Look at me," said Solomon, coarsely, breathlessly. "Look at me as I cum, like the little whore that you are."

Where had your shame gone? To think that at one time, such vulgarities spoken by a man to you would've made your anger blaze out of control. This nefarious version of Solomon had whittled away your soul bit by bit until you were left an amoral husk who sat at his feet, tongue lolled out of your mouth, waiting for what came next.

Solomon's hips stuttered, cock throbbing in his hand as he came in hot, white ropes across your face and chest. The thick stuff had a milky glisten in the flittering light, cooling quickly as it made contact with your skin, exposed to the cold, airless room. It crawled down the length of your face, slow as a snail, filling the seams of your lips and drying on your hardened nipples. You felt as disgusted as you did aroused, imagining how Solomon would respond if you swept it off of your cheek to smear between your legs, beckoning him to consume you, fuck you until you could feel nothing at all.

He saw the desperation in your eyes shine like tears rimming your lower lashes and took a calming breath as his knees struck down to the floor before you, his cock still half-hard and rising again. Then, he kissed your lips for the first time that night. His tongue traced the soft shape of your mouth, gathering his spend on it before pushing through your teeth and mingling the briny taste of him with your saliva.

"What would everyone think to see you like this, I wonder?" asked Solomon between breaths, between impassioned kisses that made the thoughts in your head whirl. Your answer was to swipe the cum from your face into your hand, smearing it along the length of his cock, feeling it pulse in your grasp as you stroked him stiff. "What would the staff think if they could see you? That bitch maid that you keep around? What would that fool of a father of yours think to see this was awaited you when he gave you away to me?"

"Solomon, fuck me, please." You hoped your begging would distract him, freeing you from the embarrassment of having to think of such things. "I need you."

He let out a crack of laughter that was derisive, yet euphonious; a sound befitting a handsome face like his. Before he had returned home from his uncle's estate, you'd never known him to know true joy or laughter, but now he provided copious mockery.

"You need me? Why would I keep you waiting any longer, then?" Solomon took you by the waist, hoisting you onto his lap with the sort of ease no normal man should possess, and kneaded the weeping, dark red tip of his cock down to the base of his shaft to lubricate himself. "I'm not sure that I could ever share you in the ways that I speak about, darling. You are mine and mine alone. That ring on your finger proves it."

He brought your hand to his lips and lightly touched them to the bright red carnelian band rooted deep into your left ring finger. The affectionate gesture was met with scalding pain shooting up the length of your arm, flashing white behind your eyes, coaxing groans he chose to ignore.

"What a beautiful face you're making," said Solomon teasingly, letting your hand fall to grasp the fat of your hips with his blunt nails as he split you open on his cock, fully seating himself inside of you. He reveled in the tight, slick warmth that surrounded him, the way the tension between your brows deepened from pain to concentration as you lifted yourself partway off of his cock and lowered back down with your thighs.

You threaded your fingers into his hair, leaving featherlight touches down the nape of his neck that made him moan as he sucked raw spots into your flesh, blotches that would reveal this night to the world, unable to be concealed by any neckline or shawl that you owned. He would delight in your humiliation, your sheepish avoidance of everyone, including him, because it offered him the thrill of chasing you, earning your forgiveness time and time again, and repeating the sickening pattern that you never learned better from.

"Solomon, lie back," you gasped, bringing your palms to the front of his chest and pushing him away from you. "This isn't enough. I need more. Lie down."

"How bold of you to make demands of me," said Solomon, but he did not deny you and abandoned the marks on your neck to flatten his back to the floor. The coldness did not startle him as it did you; it comforted him. Darkness now enveloped the room as the last of your lantern light choked in its glass cage, enrobing him in black air carrying the smell of sex and something somewhat distantly foul and rotting.

You knew that the apparition had returned to observe the obscenities. How long had it been there, you wondered? Had it seen the way Solomon defiled you while you sat on your knees and accepted it? Was it seeing you now as you rode your husband and lost control of the rhythm you had built to his savage thrusts up into your body? The only thing keeping you mounted on his waist was his hands holding your ass in a bruising grip, drawing blood under his nails, watching your expression contort familiarly between pleasure and pain.

"There is no greater beauty in the world than what I see right now." His words were so deep in his throat, guttural and rough; you'd heard them before, earlier, as you had been writing your letter to Father DuMonde. "The more I see you like this, the less I want to let you leave."

Right now, you don't want to leave. You wanted Solomon to fuck you into oblivion and cum on his cock while the entity studied you, learning what made your back bend like an archway and scream the loudest. You wanted it to see how Solomon fucked you through your orgasm until your body convulsed, and no sounds could dislodge from your throat.

"Fuck, fuck fuck—Solomon, harder, harder, harder!"

He obliged, of course, bouncing you down onto him with such ferocity it left you winded and bracing yourself on his chest with one hand, the other still nestled between your legs. A white fuzz trance of ecstasy did not await you once you finally reached your climax. It was a grueling end that hurt, where your moans had dissolved into pitiful whines, sobs you swallowed down in the back of your throat. Solomon stayed inside you at his tipping point, thrusts slow but buried deep, cock pulsing hard as he filled your insides with his warm seed.

Your senses numbed to the phantasm's presence, to the fact that Solomon had yet to soften much inside of you and kneaded your thighs fondly. As you looked towards the windows overlooking the backyard, a heavy sense of dread settled over you and twisted your organs.

Solomon had noticed, too.