My Beast

Growing up, we were told stories about wild men in the woods. Our parents said to stay close to the house when we were outside and not to go out at night under any circumstances. If we were caught by these beasts of men we would be dragged into the trees, never to be seen or heard from again.

There were stories they liked to tell of young children, mostly girls, who’d been taken before. Some were indeed found later on. Their butchered bodies lay in the dirt, barely covered by dry brown leaves, the blood staining their flesh no longer glistening in the sun. Their clothes had been removed, and their bare chests had been torn open as if by some animal. Jagged flaps of skin hung from their bodies, and lifeless eyes stared at the sky, accusing God and their parents of neglect for allowing them to wander.

I later realized none of it was true, but as a child, such gruesome details were terrifying and sent many of us scrambling into bed with our parents on cold winter nights when the wind howled past our windows like the ravenous creatures circling our small town behind the trees. We nestled in between our protectors, hidden away from the shadows in the yard and the nightmares in our sleep. But most of us never strayed.

Eventually, I grew up, and the horrible tales my parents told to make sure I behaved as a child line my bookshelves and pay the bills. There were no wild men out in the woods, at least not where I moved. There may have been a few deer, a handful of bears, and maybe even a wild boar or two, but no wild hairy men standing seven feet tall and wide as a barn door with fires burning in their eyes and hunger dripping from their jowls.

They just weren’t real.

After writing several successful novels based on the scary stories folks in my town told, I sat down one night and decided it was time to tell the story of the wild men. Appropriately, it was a winter night, the kind of night that would have sent me to my parents’ room as a child. A front had moved in, sucking away the unseasonable heat we’d enjoyed for a few days, and the night had fallen cold. The wind roared and howled outside, whipping around my small home. I glanced up at the window above my desk, expecting to see snow – it would have snowed back home on a night like this – but I laughed at myself when I saw the rain-slick street running by. It didn’t snow down here.

A fire crackled in the fireplace. A warm cup of coffee sat next to my keyboard. The lights were down low. I did everything I could to set the scene, to remind me of how terrified I had been as a child, with only the warmth of the fire to keep me safe from whatever lurked outside in the dark. My eyes strayed as I worked, checking outside every few minutes to make sure I wasn’t being watched, tracked by something just beyond the shadows. If I wanted to scare my reader, I had learned I had to be scared, myself.

I lost track of time. I hadn’t looked up in a while, caught up in the story of a mother trying to save her child from one of these monsters. I was running through the woods, screaming, crying for my daughter. Tears ran down my face, blurring the already darkened landscape as limbs and branches reached greedily for me, pulling at my hair, my clothes, my flesh, tearing more and more of me away the deeper I ran.

Up ahead, a howl shattered the night. I looked up from my keyboard, fingers stopped mid-word. My heart came to a crashing halt. I didn’t breathe. I was stuck somewhere between the woods of my story and the desk in my study. The branches sat quiet and still under the moonlight, hushed, not wanting to alert the beast that they knew where I was. The rain stopped. The wind stilled. The night outside my house had fallen silent.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I told myself, hitting SAVE and closing my laptop. I let the blinds fall in the window and got up from my desk to refill my coffee.

“Maybe you’re just not ready,” I told myself as I walked into the kitchen.

“Oh, but that’s exactly why I need to tell this story,” I replied.

Yes, I have real conversations like this with myself on the regular. It’s how I work out plot details, characterizations, and sometimes my own motivation behind my work. I don’t change voices or pretend I’m talking to anyone else, nothing like that. I just think out loud. It’s easy to do when you live alone. Well, not entirely alone. There are the nightmares still living in my head. They keep me company. They stand in for pets or children, or whatever other people have.

“See? All in your head,” I told myself as I walked back into the living room to crash on my couch in front of the fire after not hearing another peep from the monster lurking in my story, and apparently only in my story.

Sometime later, I heard it again, faintly this time. I was back in the woods. The swaying branches above me clacked together. Leaves underfoot rustled together as they were tossed by the wind. I held my arms up by my face as it was lashed by the limbs grabbing at me. Soon, I could hear its breath. The ground shook beneath its heavy feet stomping after me.

The last few steps crunched on the leaves and twigs littering the ground, grinding them in, the sound unnatural, like that of glass almost. The hulking monster stood before me now, and I could see that this was no man. Not entirely. Covered in fur, he stood on the hind legs of a dog with a tail jutting out behind him. His hands had long, cracked and dirty claws. The front of his face had extended some to resemble a snout, and gnarly teeth shot out from beneath his lips.

What my folks had called a wild man looked like a wolf. My waking brain fought to intervene, realizing I was having a dream and that I wasn’t actually in the woods – this was the scene from my new story. This was not how I wanted my beast to appear. My dream-eyes locked on him, and I tried to force him to shift into something more like I had imagined as a child. He wouldn’t budge. He stared back with his wolf-face, panting, his man-chest heaving, his breath visible between his jagged beastly teeth.

He howled again, this time right in front of me. The sound shook the night, and as I brought my hands up to my ears, I saw the blue-white glow of the full moon give way to dull amber warmth of my dying fire. I scrambled to get up from the couch, realizing that the wild man of my childhood fears, my lifelong nightmares, and the story I wished to tell stood in my study, having crashed through the window above my desk.

He lunged for me, more man than beast now. Thick fur covered his naked body. He licked his lips, his face more human than it had been in my dreams. No dog-snout, but he still had jagged teeth stained by the blood of his prey. His eyes were human, but something wild stared through them.

His muscular body leapt from my desk across to my couch, catching hold of me before I could gain traction on the couch. He growled above me as his hands busied themselves ripping off my clothes. He tore open my t-shirt and grabbed for my breasts. I pushed against him, frightened, screaming. This was it. I was going to be ripped open like the girls in our town stories had been.

Except it didn’t happen. He didn’t dig his claws into me and open my body like a present. He took me in his beastly grip, squeezing with his monstrous hands the way a normal man would have. His raspy panting subsided, and his eyes looked to me with desire, but not the same predatory hunger he’d had only moments before. He looked almost like he was asking if what he was doing was okay.

And if I said no? I asked myself. I didn’t want to know, but the shock kept me from saying anything. My hands had stopped fighting against him and had come to rest on his arms, holding them instead of resisting them now.

The moment passed. He roared as he let go of my breasts and flipped me over. He tore at my sweats, ripping them from me, tearing off my panties at the same time. Nervous, trembling with a mixture of excitement and fear, I pushed my ass back towards him. I knew what he hungered for. I knew what this wild man wanted from me.

He grabbed my ass and spread me open. A moment later, his tongue parted my lips and slid into me, tasting me. I closed my eyes as a strange ripple of satisfaction worked through my body. He lapped up my juices like a thirsty animal, his tongue hitting all the right spots. It ran lustfully across my clit, sending jolts of pleasure through my shivering body.

I gasped with each touch. My fingers dug into the arm of the couch. I fought to catch my breath and held on as waves of ecstasy grew inside me. I was so close, so close to letting myself go on his revolting face, and he stopped!

His hands on my hips, he grunted as he gripped and pulled me back, impaling me with his shaft. Long, hard, and solid, he penetrated deep inside me, filling me with every inch of his sex. I cried out. My pussy locked down on him, gripping like a fist, holding him inside me. He pulled back, nonetheless, the friction rolling my eyes back and sending breath sucking in between my teeth.

His hands ran up my back, big and strong and hairy, his nails dragging along my skin, leaving lines I could still feel rising into welts as they passed. He gripped my shoulders and released grunts of pleasure as he held me in place and began pounding me from behind, ramming himself deeper and impossibly deeper into me, punishing my hole.

My body convulsed as pleasure turned to ecstasy and my orgasm crashed into him in waves. I could feel him nearing climax as well. He wrapped his fist in my hair and jerked my head back, stretching my neck. He pulled my hair as he shoved his cock deeper inside me. I felt him straining, felt his shaft growing longer, harder, straighter as he neared release.

When he came, his claws dug into my skin and he howled as his seed erupted in my hole, filling it to the brim with his warmth and pleasure. He released my shoulders and arched his back, howling into the night like a wolf howling at the moon.

I didn’t want him to finish. I pushed my ass back towards him, working my hips to get every drop of this wild beast inside me. I wanted to empty his balls. I wanted him to cum again, but as his erection subsided, he slid back, letting his human cock emerge from me, covered in both my juices and his seed.

He took himself in his furry hand, rasping as he stroked, squeezing out the last few drops. I turned to face him, placing my hand on him and lowering my mouth to his sex. I caught a glimpse of his face, confused at what I was doing, that I was willingly accepting him into my mouth.

I could taste both of us on his skin. I had known my taste before, but his was deep and earthy. I took him into my mouth. Even flaccid, he ran the length of my tongue, the tip tickling my throat. I licked the last few drops of cum from his tip as he rested his hand on the back of my head.

He pulled me up from his shaft and looked down at me with something like kindness in his eyes. Then, just as quickly as he’d burst into my home, he leapt from it, jumping through my window and back into the night. I watched from what I sat on the couch as he returned to the darkness where he and his kind had always lived, hiding from prying eyes like mine. I could feel him trickling down my leg, a reminder that this had actually happened.