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Something comes to Robert in his dreams. Or rather, when he sleeps, as the things it does to him feel extraordinarily real and decidedly non-dreamlike. When it comes, he can’t do anything to stop it. In fact, until it’s done with him, he can’t move a single muscle. And after, when he wakes up a second time, somehow there’s no physical evidence that anything had happened. Which is weird—it feels so real.
It comes every night. He tried everything to make it stop. No matter where, when, or with whom he sleeps, it always comes. It’s even worse when he drinks or takes sleeping pills. Then, the experience drags out, less intense, perhaps, but it goes on and on and on until it’s too much, anyway. Lately, he’s become known as one of those rare university students who don’t drink alcohol or smoke pot. Hell, he doesn’t even take painkillers or cold medication as long as he can avoid it, and most of his friends think he’s in some weird cult or has a secret disease. He almost wishes it was true; at least then there would’ve been things he could do. There is nothing—after all this time and trying and denial, he finally accepted that. Given up. These nightly visitations aren’t something he can escape, no matter what he does or doesn’t do. Nothing left but to give up and give into it. That’s his life now.
A little over a year ago, that’s when it started. In his mind, it’s connected to a guest lecture on pagan mythology he’d attended at the beginning of his university career, more because of the timeline matching than for any valid reasons. He can’t think about any other unusual event taking place around that time, but he also can’t pinpoint a specific thing in that lecture which may be responsible, nothing obviously similar or related, and he’s researched it thoroughly. He can’t explain it. Can’t stop it. He’s tried and tried again, but nothing worked. Nothing will. It’s just going to keep happening. Night after night after night.
The funny thing is, it’s not taking a toll on him physically, like, at all. At first, he was extremely reluctant to go to bed because of a very valid fear. But, after the first few nights, Robert has sort of accepted he can’t just stop sleeping unless he wants to die. Since then, he falls asleep with no trouble. He also always wakes up all perky and refreshed, and it even seems like his overall condition is better than before. That fact is, in all honesty, inexplicable, confusing, and a tad disturbing. How can he feel no ill effects of the horrifying things which are done to him whenever he closes his eyes? At least his supposedly deteriorating psychological state should negatively affect his physical condition. He should be depressed and exhausted, at the minimum. Except he’s not. He’s fine. More than fine—invigorated. Even his grades went up.
Still, it is terrible, and he wants it to stop. He even went to a psychiatrist, like, once. Which was no help. The guy told him it’s a textbook case of sleep paralysis, and to change his sleeping habits and diet to something more healthy and well-balanced.
Yeah, riiight. As if it hadn’t been the first thing he’d tried.
Of course, he didn’t tell the doctor the whole truth, only that sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t move, and it feels as if something is in the room with him, some presence that feels ominous and other. He didn’t exactly explain what that presence does to him in great detail. It touches him, like, sexually—that’s all he could stutter out, face hot from embarrassment. He couldn’t get out anything more, even when the psychiatrist didn’t belittle him and just nodded with understanding.
Instead, the doctor said it’s a common case of “atypical hypnopompic state” which, contrary to popular belief, isn’t even all that rare. He then explained that during REM sleep, when one is dreaming, the mind cuts the signals to the muscles, virtually paralyzing the body. It is a normal state that serves to protect the body; it prevents you from moving in accordance with the dream. But, sometimes, the process malfunctions. When it doesn’t work well enough, people sleepwalk. It can also work a bit too well, and that’s when sleep paralysis happens: your mind is already half-awake, but your body is still unresponsive. Plus, people often hallucinate upon waking. On the verge of consciousness, the dream-mind tries to make sense of real-world sights and sounds, often interpreting them based on the dream, mixing all of it together. This means the visions and sensations the dreamer is experiencing are likely to be influenced by their subconsciousness, sexual fantasies, belief system, and even pop culture. Also, there is this psychological phenomenon where most people with this affliction report feeling some malevolent presence in the room with them and having difficulties breathing, their chests feeling heavy or crushed. That’s where beliefs in sleep demons such as succubi or incubi come from; some even attribute reports of alien abductions to it.
Overall, it all sounded very logical and scientific and made Robert feel relieved nothing was terribly wrong with him. In the bright light of day, it was reassuring, knowing that what’s happening to him is a straightforward affliction some people experience because of simple biology.
Of course, his relief evaporated the moment his eyes closed for the night, and he fell asleep.
Or rather, the moment he woke up into the dream.
It always starts the same. No matter what position Robert fell asleep in, when he’s aware again, he’s lying face down on his belly, his legs slightly spread. He’s naked. Since he can’t move a muscle, he also can’t see what’s in the room behind him. What’s there with him.
And there is something there, waiting.
He can feel the presence acutely, although the Thing is entirely silent. That sense grows and grows until the air is heavy with it. Every millimeter of his skin, every hair on his body, is aware that something unimaginable is going to happen to him. His toes tingle and the feeling slowly creeps up, up, up, over his calves, under his knees. The tingling slides like a slimy feather along the back of his thighs, then inside, right up to and into his groin. His balls tighten, and there’s a tremor growing in his lower spine that can’t get out—he’s unable to move even that much. He has no power here. His heart is beating like crazy, and his breathing is quick and heavy, yet every muscle in his body which he should be able to control consciously is relaxed and unresponsive. Only the reflexes he has no control over still work. His heart is beating. He is breathing. Blinking. His balls are tight.
His penis is slowly growing hard.
It builds and builds and builds. At some point, there should be a peak, then a sudden drop soon after, but he’s never that lucky. The crescendo of tension reaches the top and then flattens, stays there, nestles inside an inner tremor he cannot release. It’s not physical. His muscles are loose; it’s just his soul that’s pulled too tight, buzzing, vibrating. There’s an imaginary ache throbbing behind his balls, in his toes and fingers, inside his teeth. His skin is so sensitive.
He waits, trying to get used to the semi-physical sensations. His fear gradually becomes less immediate, although the underlying anxiety swims unimpeded in the sea of tense anticipation his insides have melted into. His cock loses some of its rigidity, and he imagines how the freed blood spills and spreads under the skin of his crotch, making the entire area hot and oversensitive.
Somehow, the first touch is always both less and more of a surprise than it should’ve been. It has to happen at some point, it always does, he knows this—has always known this—the sense of inevitability heavy in him.
Never the specifics, though.
This is the moment it starts to differ from one night to the next.
Today the point of contact is tiny. It’s between his legs, in the dip where the flesh curves and the tight becomes crotch, on the left side. The ice-cold, dull point, no bigger than that of a click ball pen with a retracted tip. It stays still for long moments, exerting the tiniest pressure; Robert’s cock grows rock-hard again, its steady pulsing a counterpoint to his heartbeat.
Then, with no warning—just like a tip of a click ball pen—a tiny needle shoots out, pierces his skin, injects something, withdraws again. The flesh in that place is very delicate, the skin thin, and it stings something fierce.
The contrast of the coldness on the outside with the burn of the injection overwhelms him. He imagines himself shaking.
The touch retreats.
Somehow, without its coldness, the place hurts more. The sensation is concentrated and asymmetrical, and Robert almost wishes for a tiny burn on the right side of his crotch to match.
His almost-wish isn’t fulfilled. Instead, when the cold worm returns, it positions itself in the very center of his anus. It does it so steadily, so careful to avoid the flesh, that at first, Robert feels nothing except for the air getting colder there. When he finally feels its freezing touch, it’s shockingly focused and deep. His sphincter contracts involuntarily around it and hugs the tiny appendage tight, soaking up more of the coldness.
Tears gather in the corners of Robert’s eyes. He would’ve liked to concentrate on his breathing. Knows from experience it won’t let him.
The Thing penetrates him deeper, just to where his muscles are the tightest, then its tip curves sharply to the left. Freezes there. Waits. The very tip of it seems even colder than the rest. It pushes sideways into Robert’s flesh.
Minutes pass slowly.
The pressure builds into a weird feeling: he knows he hasn’t moved an inch, and yet it’s as if the gravity shifted and now the left is down, and he’s falling.
Usually, the Thing is pretty unpredictable, but this time he thinks he knows what will happen next.
He’s right.
There’s a quick sting that makes his tears fall. A minuscule flame blossoms under the cold pressure. The worm-like appendage stays for a while, pushing into the burn, then leaves.
Now, he really wants it to do the same to his right side. The imbalance is unbearable.
But it’s not doing anything, again. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
The burn spreads, slowly, until it’s not just two pinpricks anymore but small nut-sized spheres. Unmercifully, the intensity of the feeling doesn’t decrease as it grows in size. The tears in his eyes overflow again, and another hot drop slides along the ridge of his nose, then trickles onto the bed.
His breath trembles when the tiny frigid worm finally returns to press firmly into his left testicle. More tears fall.
He would’ve wept if he had the capacity.
No. Please, no. The other side. Please, on the other side!
Because the Thing doesn’t hear his mental begging—or because it does—it keeps pressing. Robert’s left ball is so cold it shrinks, and the Thing follows it up.
He didn’t know this was possible, for only one of his balls to shrink, when the other one still hangs there, warm and heavy, undisturbed. If only he could turn on the bed, move his left side just a bit up, he would’ve been able to lessen this overwhelming sensation of cold pressure.
He can do nothing but imagine doing so.
He is helpless.
It pushes longer and harder than two previous times. The pressure builds. The cold is terrible. His left testicle aches deep inside. He’s breathing in short, quick gasps. The veins on his temples pulse, the blood flow in them forceful enough he can hear it.
It’s going to happen soon.
The knowledge does nothing to prepare him. There’s a lightning-fast stab, and the heat explodes, sharp and concentrated, in the middle of his testicle, surrounded by aching cold. Synchronously, a twin explosion of tension-pain pulses behind his temples. The skin just above his hairline hurts and prickles.
He wants to scream.
He can’t.
The pressure leaves, and the scorching nodule of heat slowly eats at the surrounding cold. There’s a sensation of swelling, of unfolding, of tremendous weight. His ball has a core of molten lead, with too-delicate nerves woven through. It pulls him down. The familiar sensation of falling-without-falling to the left is there again, even more terrible.
Somehow, through it all, his cock remains hard.
He’s not given much respite this time around, and he’s shamefully grateful for that. Maybe if the Thing does more to him the sensations will spread or blend, and his entire consciousness will no longer be reduced to the three epicenters of hot, throbbing pain between his legs.
His breath leaves him in relief when a freezing point connects with his butt-cheek, smack in the middle.
Left, obviously.
Something is different, though; it takes Robert a few long seconds to pinpoint.
This time, unlike before, it doesn’t start pressing immediately. It just lies there instead, annoyingly delicate, on the verge of tickling. It isn’t enough to take his concentration off the sphere of pain radiating from the crease between his thigh and crotch, from the fiery ache half of his sphincter has turned into, from the molten lava of his left ball, and the longer it lasts, the harder he wishes for it to do something—anything.
When he remembers he probably shouldn’t make wishes when he’s awake inside a dream like this, it’s already too late.
Another tiny, terribly cold appendage touches the very bottom of his buttock. Then another—high, almost at Robert’s back. The next one lands on the side of it, an inch below his hipbone. Suddenly, simultaneously, there’s a straight line of four, parallel to his crack, halfway between it and that first freezing point in the middle of his cheek. The Thing puts the last one in his crack, just below and to the left of his tailbone—the thin skin there seems far too vulnerable, so this one scares him the most.
This time, he doesn’t have to wait long before all of them press in. The cold of it contrasts sharply with the burning heat placed lower, between his thighs. It feels as if the entire left half of his body is slowly sinking into the bed, then melting through it. Even his left leg and arm feel heavier, despite them not being touched once. His heart keeps punching his left breast from the inside—even his own organs want to push that side of him down, down, down.
A numb hurt radiates from all nine points of contact on his buttock, although the severity varies. The one in his crack feels the worst—its chill soon reaches the bottom of his tailbone, then starts sluggishly climbing up.
As he waits for it to strike, he starts sweating. The salty water his body produces is plentiful, and it drips down his oversensitive skin in tiny rivulets which are rapidly cooling in the air. They gather in the dips above his collarbones and in his armpits, then tickle on the way down his chest. He’s acutely aware of quickly filling small pools of wetness on the back of his knees. The spaces between his fingers and toes become uncomfortably clammy. The sweat on his temple finds the road of least resistance and flows into his right eye, stinging something fierce.
Wet drops are rolling down his crack. The tiny epicenter of pressure isn’t really in the middle of their road, but by the time they reach it, it has sunk deep enough that the moisture can gather there. The water in the miniature lake doesn’t freeze, but it’s a close thing. Then, suddenly, the lake overflows, and the tiny river of impossibly cold fluid spills down—and somehow that’s the worst thing that has happened to him tonight. His nipples tighten as the wet coldness washes over the aching side of his asshole and down his left ball.
It hangs lower now, huge, full, skin pulled tight. Burning. The icy water should have helped. Instead, the contrast between the molten heat of the core and the freezing fluid on the surface makes it feel so much sharper.
When all of it finally drips off him onto the bed, it’s such a relief he cries again.
The Thing strikes that relief right down, all of its needles releasing at once. Every point of contact feels intense, yet the one in his crack is the worst, exactly as he feared. Somehow, the scorching heat spreads faster around that particular pinprick. The ache is going up his spine, then pooling into his lower back; it connects with the solid ball of pain in his sphincter, then with the line of four needles that landed in parallel to his crack. Together, they radiate intense heat into his muscles—muscles which are, by some unholy miracle, still loose.
The flaming points around his left buttock—the one under it, above it, and the one by his hip—feel like a frame. That frame reshapes him, makes half of his backside into a separate entity. Never before in his life was he so aware of where a part of his body began and where it ended.
It’s so much.
For a moment, Robert gets lost in the awareness of it, in trying to track every individual strand of muscle that is suddenly so distinct. Then he realizes something is yet again different from before.
The last prickling feeling of the needle right in the center of his buttock hasn’t withdrawn. In fact, it keeps digging in. It’s so slow that—with so many sensations vying for his attention—he didn’t notice it before. Now, that gradual progression becomes the center of his focus.
He is being penetrated in a very unusual way.
The thought sets his cheeks ablaze. The heat spreads down his neck and onto his shoulders. His cock pulses, and he would’ve hated it a little for that tiny betrayal if only it was its first and not just one among many.
The needle goes in deep, and the second it stops, the sharp feeling heats, then starts steadily spreading. It’s injecting him with something, as it did before, only this time there’s a lot more of the mystery substance. It goes on and on and on, until half of his ass feels just like his left ball: heavy, swollen, filled with heated, molten nerves—only on a much larger scale. That sensation should overshadow everything. But even as intense as it is, he can still discern all the individual points of entry, every one of them a tiny bit sharper, hotter, more. The one in his crack still radiates pain up his spine. The tissue on top of his left thigh burns deep. The side of his anus, only half of it—which is another level of weird—contracts and pulses as if it had a will of its own, and the feeling in his left ball has crossed from overwhelming into unbearable a long time ago.
Tears roll from his eyes in a constant stream now.
God, but he wants to be unconscious so, so badly. He wants unawareness to swallow him whole. Alternatively, he wants to be able to move. To curl into a ball. To push his fingers into the abused, alien flesh of his buttock, into his hole. To squeeze his balls between his legs. To be able to at least shiver. He wants some relief—something, anything.
He can’t take it anymore.
He knows he will.
Just as his breathing evens out, he feels it touch the underside of his cock.
Oh God. Oh God. He can’t take that. Oh God.
But something is different, again. Instead of a minuscule point of contact, the freezing worm flattens parallel to his urethra—to the left of it—and starts sliding up.
He prays for the coldness to make his penis go soft. It doesn’t. It pulses a bit, even. He’s terrified. That traitorous cock of his pulses some more. Once. Twice. Again.
The tiny appendage has no trouble following the movement, like it’s glued to him there.
Robert is sure it’s going to sting him on the glans next.
He is partially right.
It reaches the glans and slides right over that incredibly sensitive bit of skin underneath—the feeling makes Robert’s eyes go blurry again—then goes to the very top.
Then in.
Robert forgets breathing is a thing. His mind goes blank, his entire world narrowed to a single point. He even stops perceiving all the other hurts that seemed so impossibly overwhelming just moments ago. There is only the tip of his penis and the cold invasion within. Nothing else exists.
It... It moves.
In there.
Small, circular undulations. His glans aches and pulses, a living creature separate from him yet not. An alien. A parasite. It’s going to belong to the Thing from now on, more than it does to him.
The icy worm folds in two, doubling its thickness, and makes him burn inside despite the cold. The tip bores into the side of his urethra—left—which makes the stretch feel so much more terrible, and then he knows.
It’s going to do it.
It...!
The sensations explode again in his body. So very suddenly he’s aware of absolutely everything—searing burn of sweat in his eyes; wet hair tickling his forehead; the dampness of the sheet under him; his stiff nipples; goosebumps on his skin; fluid dripping slowly from his armpits; the ghost of ache in his teeth, fingertips and toes; his quick heartbeat and his too shallow breath.
And, most of all—
Most of all, he is aware of what the Thing has done.
To him.
He’s lying still, yet he’s falling. To the left. It’s the weirdest vertigo he’s ever experienced. The most painful one, for sure.
What he feels between his legs and in his ass defies description.
The Thing rips itself out of his cock.
He wakes up, screaming.
For a moment, he fears he didn’t wake up at all. The phantom aches of the dream imprinted on his mind are so intense that it’s like it all really has happened. But he’s laying on his back now, instead of on his belly. The room is bright with early sunlight. His clock emits a steady tick-tock, tick-tock, and it’s not dead quiet anymore. Robert’s breathing is still heavy, but it’s also deep and easy now. As per usual, he feels relaxed and incomprehensibly well-rested. He has his pajamas on.
The fabric is wet. Most of it is sweat, but there’s a thicker, slicker dampness surrounding his groin.
He came so hard his cock still pulses with the aftershocks.
Traitor.