The Wank

Nigel had lived in fear his whole life. 

Fear of other people. 

Fear of the faithless. 

Fear of straying from the path.

Fear of hell.

Fear of sin.

That all seemed so long ago. Like someone else had lived that life. 

He laid back on the motel bed and stared at the ceiling. His hands fiddled with the Gideon bible resting on his chest. He raked a fingertip across the closed pages, fluttering them, and making a rhythmic zip zip zip sound. It was a lifeless ream of paper to him now, but comforting nonetheless. A security blanket that he knew would no longer keep the monsters out. 

He thought about the woman at the diner again. He couldn’t keep her from his mind. 

The way she smiled at him, and the way her little plastic name tag hovered above her enormous bosom. 

“Deidre” It had said, perched prominently. 

His finger stopped its zip zip zipping, and he shifted uncomfortably. 

She was always so nice to him, and even in the short time he’d been visiting from his hotel down the street she had learned his name and his order. 

How old was she? Thirty? Fourty? He had no idea.  

Under her yellow and cream-colored uniform, he bet she was perfect. The very picture of femininity. 

One hand, the zipping hand, drifted and came to rest on his stomach. 

Had she worn a brassiere? Surely she had. What color would it be? Did they come in colors? His underthings had only ever been utilitarian white cotton briefs. 

He bet it was yellow, like her uniform. He closed his eyes, and listened to his pulse behind his ears. Rerouting blood. 

His hand itched. 

No. His mother had always warned him against such action. He’d spilled his seed while he’d slept before, but he’d never tried to touch himself. Even the accident had terrified him for months afterwards. Each day spent waiting for an invisible axe to fall across the back of his neck. Each day praying with twice his usual zeal for God to forgive him for the betrayal his body had committed. Even at his 23 years of age, he still felt a tinge of that looming threat. 

“If you touch yourself, the wank will come and eat your willy off,” she had chastised him one day when he had dared to ask about his penis during a childhood bathtime. 

“If you play with that thing, the wank will eat your guts while you watch,” she had fumed just after she had learned that the school had been teaching sex education. 

“If you spill your seed, the wank will find you and tear you up like a bit of paper,” she’d cautioned, looking up from her sewing machine.

“I know the wank personally, and I told him all about you. Leave yourself alone or it will put your eyes out,” she’d warned.

“The wank can smell your unclean thoughts. When you are thinking impurely, it will find you,” she’d said angrily, sucking in excess saliva as she did when she had her false teeth out.

Surely he was having them now. So where was it? He’d believed so many ridiculous things up until so very recently.

He couldn’t shake the memory of when he thought he’d seen it. He’d woken from a dream in a sticky pool, and had seen a long, gangly shadow shuddering against his bedroom wall. He eventually convinced himself that it was just a jacket on a hook, and fell back into sleep reciting scripture in his mind.

He stared at the ceiling, bookended between thoughts. So much of what he had learned. Believed. It was meaningless now. Surely this was, too. 

The zipping hand defied its purpose, and unzipped. 

His hardness shamed him, but a tingle thrilled him through as he reached under the elastic waistband and began to probe cautiously. He shimmed ineptly until his trousers and underpants were about his ankles, and then he began in earnest.

Nigel gasped as he encircled himself, awkwardly tugging and teasing. His breath quickened as his zipping hand found a new rhythm to play. The bible jiggled on his chest. His mind was too far away to notice, but he was still gripping it with his other hand. Keeping it in place like a shield. 

He shut his eyes tightly and curled his toes inside his socks. Deidre, with her smile and her breasts and her name tag, flashed through his mind. 

As he climaxed, and propelled rope after rope of his seed into the stale air, the door to the room’s wardrobe creaked open suddenly.

The door swung wide, and a jagged, vaguely humanoid figure huddled within. The shape was pressed uncomfortably into the furthest corner of the wardrobe. It appeared to be folded, or crushed back into a single mass. Two small, glossy circles seemed to be sunken deep into it.  

Is that... hair? Nigel thought madly. He quickly wiped his hand on the bed.

The thing shuffled forward, and half-revealed itself in the meager, sputtering light of the room. 

It wasn’t hair, Nigel saw. Not quite hair, but brown fur, and it was covered head-to-toe in a shaggy layer that sagged off its bones. Its pelt was matted like a timeworn and forgotten teddy bear. Where once the fur had likely been long and soft, it now clung in tangles as if gummed together by years of staining.  Embedded at the end of each of its shapeless puppet arms were glints of wicked metal arrayed in a mockery of fingers.  Worst of all were its buried button eyes, held into deep sockets by loose crosses of white thread. One eye dangled merrily as the thing slunk, jittering, out of the shadows in the wardrobe. It stepped out ponderously and extended to its full height, never taking its gaze from Nigel.

Nigel scooted backwards into a sitting position. The bible tumbled down his chest and landed in the humid crevice of his crotch. He could smell the thing now, it was terrible. Fetid and sodden, like a drowned dog fished from a culvert. How had he not smelled it before, even over the odor of cigarette smoke that was baked into the squalid room?

In the center of its rounded face, there was no nose, but instead a tiny circular mouth. Just a hole surrounded by filth-encrusted fur. A wet slurping sound sucked noisily from inside it, like it was struggling to finish the dregs of a thick milkshake with a straw.  

Nigel snatched up the bible and hurled it at the creature. His aim was good, and he struck it square in the chest. The book connected with a thud but bounced harmlessly onto the floor. 

The thing did not move. 

It did not react at all. 

It only stared. 

Nigel sat nailed to the bed under its lifeless button gaze. His guts churned and adrenaline poured into his veins. 

Ambling with a stutter-step to the foot of the bed, it laid its hands upon the edge and hoisted itself up until it perched there like some foul gargoyle. It reached forward with both arms and began to crawl on all fours toward Nigel. 

Over Nigel.

He was frozen in place. His back was up against the headboard, his eyes were agog, and his hands laid limply next to his bare crotch. 

It hovered above him at arm's length. Its face, so close to his now, was wretched. Nigel could see little dreadlocks of grime worked into its fur in more places than it was orderly. A tendril of drool snaked out of its stinking, sucking mouth and splashed hotly into the hollow of Nigel’s neck. It stayed this way, arms and legs surrounding him, for many moments. The whole while the sucking sound never abated. The stench from the thing was overwhelming, and somehow familiar.

At once, it sat itself back and came down bodily onto Nigel’s knees. He yelped at the sudden brush of motion but stayed where he was, rooted onto the threadbare motel blanket. 

Once seated, the thing began to scoot itself forward an inch at a time. Each motion rocked the bed and knocked Nigel’s head gently against the headboard. 

It scooted its furry bottom up his thighs, and then his crotch. It smeared Nigels mess as it passed over his flaccid member and then came to rest on his exposed belly. The sensation was vile, like donning a cold, wet sweater. 

Its fur was rough and scratchy, as if spilled glue had been forgotten and left to dry in its fibers. It sat astride him and loomed above, all the while continuing the insectile jitter in its limbs. It flexed and closed its claws with a chorus of metallic clings and clangs. 

Nigel sat transfixed. Disbelieving. Reeling. He thought he noticed something around the thing's neck. Not a necklace. Not a collar. Not quite, but close. A thin glimmer of metal shone out between snarls of fur close to its neck.

The thing gathered its claws into a bouquet of barbs at the end of each arm, and drove them down hard into the sockets of Nigel’s eyes. His occipital bones cracked and shattered apart as the creature pushed its full weight behind the attack. Hot blood and flecks of tissue erupted over his cheeks and poured into his hair. Nigel opened his throat as if to scream, but only managed a gurgling whimper. 

As Nigel’s vision fell sharply into black, his final thoughts drifted back to the thing’s neck. What had he seen?

Two rows of interlocking tiny teeth. A jangle and a clink. 

Had he seen that? 

Maybe. He might have.

His zipping hand slackened, and zipped no more.