Bonus: Stink Bomb 1957 (Patreon)

Hugo rubbed his belly and sucked on his pipe as he surveyed his kingdom. Just a small, windowless bar for now, decorated in a gothic sort of Victorian way, but his influence would expand. Everyone in his domain was a man. Just the way he liked it. As he stood on the small stage at the far end of the room, there was a cute beatnik servicing his cock and a Madison Avenue ad man tonguing his hole. These men knew who was boss, and they showed it. It was heaven.

He just couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. He remembered emptying garbage cans into a truck, and then he was in this bar. Dream logic. How long had he been here? A week? A month? With no windows, time had grown murky. Even now, it felt like there was something else happening at the same time, like there were two film projectors trained on the same screen. Except, he couldn’t see the second picture.

He exhaled a nicely creamy cloud of smoke and stroked the beatnik’s greasy mop of hair. His own arm was fascinating to him. He was certain he hadn’t been so fat until recently, or so hairy. Since he’d found himself in the bar, he’d packed on well over two hundred pounds. His flat stomach had ballooned into a firm, beachball-sized belly, and then into a sagging apron of a gut. His neck had puffed out and drooped giving him a triple chin. He outgrew his uniform. Just as well, since the fabric had developed more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese. Almost like it was rotting. He was obliged to walk around in the nude. Meanwhile, his modest body hair had thickened into an ursine pelt.

His body had changed in other ways, too. His plain brown eyes had gone neon green. His fluids had turned green, too. Piss, sweat, saliva… all of it as verdant as crème de menthe. Even the smoke he exhaled was tinted green by his lungs.

The men here didn’t mind. On the contrary, they were drawn to him. They offered him drinks. They ordered food for him, and then the delivery men stuck around to crave his approval. They given him cigars to smoke, and reefer, too. But he found that he preferred pipes. He was rarely without one, these days. He enjoyed the classy, sophisticated aspect of them as he waddled around, unwashed, in nothing but his birthday suit.

The men wanted him to fuck them. That had never happened before. He’d been a skinny nobody, confined to spying on handsome guys from a distance and thinking about them later as he’d jerked off in the shower, weeping. Not here. The men demanded to be violated. He was gentle with them at first, but a voice in his brain pushed him to take a firmer hand. To be rough. Cruel, even.

The citizens of his domain clung to one another in pairs and threes and fours, stroking one another, suckling on nipples, lapping at armpits. Hugo saw soldiers and businessmen, burly dock workers and wispy aesthetes, a prominent television personality and a dilapidated bum. Too a man, they were disheveled and soaked in perspiration, adding to the bar’s glorious odor.

A sudden urge struck him. He needed his mandolin. It was like the one he had at home, but black and inlaid with an intricate, thorny pattern suggesting bats and skulls. A snap of his fingers and it was in his hands. The lustful crowd, driven to a frenzy by his musk, grew quiet as he plucked out a tune he’d never heard before. They began to sway.

One of them was slow to respond. A young but wonderfully hirsute sailor in a pea coat and a watch cap. He sat next to a cab driver at a table in the middle of the bar. A few locks of pale blonde hair protruded from the wool cap, contrasting with his bushy brown beard and dark, shaggy eyebrows. Scandinavian, perhaps. He was tall and obviously quite fit. The pea coat was unbuttoned, showing hints of a bare and extremely tattooed chest. A full bent pipe was clenched in his teeth, beneath a broad and gently curling mustache. His ice blue eyes were dull, like the eyes of everyone else in Hugo’s kingdom. Hugo wondered what he saw. Was it anything?

A growling voice in his brain ordered him to keep an eye on the sailor. He couldn’t imagine why. The beatnik was working his shaft like a pro and the ad man’s bristling stubble was rubbing against his hole in the best way. He felt his eyes flutter shut as his fingers strummed the instrument, inventing new chords, new melodies, creating a new kind of music. He’d bring it to the world. He’d be hailed as a genius, a trailblazer…

Something was moving. He could feel it in the displacement of the dense, moist air. He opened one eye. There was the sailor, swaying stupidly like the rest of his minions. He was sitting near the stage, next to a mechanic in oil-stained coveralls.

Hugo’s fingers stopped moving over the strings. On its own, his right arm shot straight out and pointed at the sailor. The growling voice in his brain emerged from his mouth. “Get him,” it thundered.

The sight of three dozen horny zombies in various states of undress trying to overpower a huge, clear-eyed sailor was almost comical. With his eyes locked on Hugo’s, the seaman sloughed off his coat and dashed it onto the ground. It vanished.

Instantly, invisible waves surged outward, sending tables and chairs and zombies flying. Ashtrays and candles and drink menus floated upward. A few hearty souls tried to swim in the phantom flood, but they found themselves smashed against the walls like everyone else.

Something else was happening at the same time. Hugo could see it now if he squinted. The sailor was a giant, crowned in coral antlers, his hair and his beard both waist-length, but floating gracefully in water that nobody could see, and ornamented by shells and seaweed. His legs were covered in iridescent scales, his immense cock fully erect, his cannonball testes bouncing against his muscular thighs.

“One of the Magician’s boys,” the growling voice sneered. “Fine, then. Send me back. I’ll find my way to this plane again, and soon.”

“No,” the giant said, calmly. “Not soon.”

The vision fled. The bar was a wreck, with pieces of another room’s architecture trying to assert itself. A chrome railing here, an asbestos vinyl tile there. A door upholstered in magenta silk flickered in and out of existence over the stern ebony wood portal he was used to.

The zombies, groggy and stupid, clutched their cracked skulls and bruised limbs. They didn’t matter, anymore, Hugo realized. There was just the half-clothed human sailor and himself.

The man groped his very impressive bulge and walked calmly up to him. “My business isn’t with you,” he said, soothingly. “You were just lonely, weren’t you? But you have an infection. I just want to get it out of you. You understand.”

“I understand,” Hugo repeated.

He moved closer. “Forcing people to want you, that’s no good, Hugo.” He was only a few inches away, now. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Look at me. I’m not under your control, and I think you’re very cute. I’d have fun with you anytime. After you’re not sick anymore.” The sailor leaned in. His breath was hot on his neck. “Would you like that?”

The voice in his brain raged at someone. Not him, not the sailor, but the other thing the sailor was. The giant merman. They were fighting, it seemed.

“I could suck the infection out of you,” the sailor purred. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Hugo stammered his agreement. He could feel a hot tear running down his cheek and lodging in his beard. He’d forgotten he’d had whiskers. He didn’t have them when he was a sanitation worker. But he liked them. They made him stand out. Of course, they weren’t nearly as impressive as the sailor’s beard. He could only imagine how the man’s magnificent mustache would feel atop his cock.

The sailor knelt before him and latched onto his dong, sucking and teasing it with his teeth, rubbing his beard and mustache on the tip, slowly but surely working him up, edging him.

With a shower of sparks, a jukebox established itself in a corner. The battered tables turned shiny and new, with boomerang laminate tops and chrome trim. He recognized none of it. Not that he could concentrate on much beyond the pleasure boiling up inside of him. It was different, he thought. Better, because the sailor was offering it. He knew men who played at power games, and he understood that. What he had done was different. Nobody here had willingly given themselves to him. He was a monster.

“No guilt, Hugo,” the sailor said, firmly. “You were being played with, the same way these men were. But I’m making you better.”

Hugo nodded. A tingling energy was dancing up the veins in his rod, making him lightheaded. He could feel himself getting close again. He hoped the sailor would let him cum this time.

Once again, the sailor seemed to have read his mind. He stood up, still working Hugo’s shaft with his warm, calloused hand, and planted a long, deep kiss on Hugo’s mouth. He tasted of rum and pipe tobacco. Dark and rich and manly. At last, Hugo felt himself release his load. The sailor continued to kiss him. None of the zombies had ever kissed him before; he had never even thought to ask. He could feel his whiskers and the sailor’s beard brushing against each other. Hair on hair, so perfectly perfect. The way it should be.

Chattering voices, all laughter and sweet nothings, tickled Hugo’s ears. He heard the clinking of glasses. Nearby, the jukebox played a record of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Midnight Sun.” He drew back and peered at the room. It was filled with men, clean and put together, most of them happy, a few rapturous, defying the melancholy of maneuvering through the world with a heart that was differently made. There was no stage. Everyone was on the same level. The smoky air was cool and dry and still. The sailor embraced him and kissed him on the forehead.

Hugo looked down at himself. He was still fat, still hairy, but he was clothed now, in sanitation coveralls made to fit his inflated form.

“You were an excellent patient,” the sailor grinned. “Would you like to see it? What I took out of you?”

Hugo wasn’t sure. He scratched at his beard – another souvenir of his strange dream – and stared at the sailor with his mouth agape.

The sailor tapped at a tattoo on his bicep. It depicted a crude woodcut image of a small animal. Something with small ears and a broad tail. A squirrel maybe, or a skunk. A scroll emerged from its mouth like a speech bubble. Written on the scroll in thick Teutonic letters was a word: Mefitik. All the man’s tattoos were like that. A thing like a long-legged dog with the head of an ox identified itself as “Vinegar Tom.” A rabbit was labeled “Sacke and Sugar.”

Hugo leaned his head on the sailor’s chest. “Will it come back?”

“Not as long as I’m alive,” the sailor told him. “When I’m dead and buried at sea and the tattoo is eaten away by fish… then it’s allowed to come back. But that won’t be for another fifty or sixty years.”

The answer was enough for Hugo. They found a booth and sat there, spooning, fondling each other and swapping smoky kisses, until it was time to go out and do battle against an unloving world once more.