Creed

by James Herbert

  ‘Come on . . .’ he urged her dryly, but she smiled and kept him there, the pressure on his legs firm and uncompromising. She released him only so that she could feel her own naked breast. Her eyes half closed as she fondled the nipple, and her smile became more inward. She freed her other breast, cupping both in her hands, stroking them, arousing herself and arousing Creed even more. He tried to reach for her again, but she warded him off, swaying back on her haunches, not allowing him to touch.

  She remained leaning back, her legs apart, and slid the skirt up to uncover stretched, milky thighs, the most erotic thighs Creed had ever looked upon, thighs so beautifully rounded, so wonderfully taut in their posture of openness, the dark valley between so enticing . . .

  He moaned aloud when she drew the hem higher and he saw the deeper darkness there, the unclothed hair like some large jet arrowhead pointing in the direction he wished to travel.

  Too much. It was too much for Creed. He sank to the floor so that he was kneeling before her, his knees outside hers and touching, his back against the edge of the couch. She had not tried to stop him.

  She dipped her hand into herself and shuddered, her eyes closing completely for a moment. Her fingers came away and she smeared his lips with her own wetness. A tiny stab of repulsion jarred him, but it was soon overcome. Creed licked his lips.

  Laura dipped again, and this time his hugely erect penis took the wetness and it mingled with his own seeping juices. She spread the mixture down his full length.

  Her moistened hand left him and she ran her fingers along her own thighs, teasing herself, up and down, reaching higher with each stroke until finally she plunged into the shadowy recess with both hands, arching her body backwards so that her vulva was thrust at his face. She gasped repeatedly and Creed, goggle-eyed and slack-jawed, panted in time with her gasping.

  Around them, the room darkened.

  He could bear no more. He flung himself at her, springing the top button of his jeans and jerking them down as he did so.

  She let out a cry as they fell together, her legs straightening, one kicking the couch so that it banged against the wall and released a shower of dust.

  His right of passage was hindered by her hands, for she still covered herself, she still caressed herself, her movement at once hard, and then soft, hard and then soft, the tips of her fingers more and more lost from view. Creed grabbed her wrists to pull her hands away and briefly she allowed him access. He was in – fast, forever the opportunist – and the exquisiteness of sinking deep into the damp yielding opening made him yell and slaver and grip her waist beneath the flimsy dress so that he could be inside her to the very limits and he thrust and thrust until the fluids roiled and began to erupt . . .

  But Laura spasmed her body and tossed him from her as his liquid gushed; it spilt itself over her thighs, over her dress, sputtering more as he fell away, to plop in milky drops across the carpetless floor.

  The room sank darker still.

  Her breasts rising and falling in heavy shudders, she rested on one elbow and watched him.

  For his part, Creed was confused. Discharged, but confused. And disappointed. But intoxicated, too. And not entirely satiated.

  She began to laugh, a giggle at first, proceeding to a chuckle. He grinned inanely back at her, the grin wavering when she let loose a graceless snort, followed by an inelegant bellow of laughter.

  It ceased abruptly and her gaze left his to wander down his body, stopping only to rest upon his nakedness. She studied his dripping penis and Creed felt its ugly head rear again in a small flicker of excitement. He moaned yet again, thinking this was not possible, not so soon after, that although not fully satisfied, he was certainly fully spent. But no, his wayward member twitched once more, started to stiffen with free-willed resolve.

  Laura smiled and a shadow, like a veil, shifted over her face.

  In a languid movement, she dipped her fingers into one of the white pools left by him on her thigh and touched the moisture first to her lips and then – the movement tantalising in its slowness – to her vagina.

  Something rose from that second orifice, curling in the air, something nebulous, ill-defined, but nevertheless a shape; it ascended to the darkness above her, more than just a wispy vapour, for something moved within it, a form inside a formless sac.

  More protoplasmic tendrils began to rise from other semen pools on her legs and the cloth of her dress. A minute shape floated like steam from a mother-of-pearl speckle on the floor between Creed and the woman.

  She watched them climb into the air with a rapturous expression, as a child might gaze at a release of bright balloons.

  Creed felt cold, a sensation so immediate and acute that he shivered violently. ‘What are they?’ he asked in a slow, quavery voice.

  She didn’t answer right away, but continued to watch as the cloud-forms smoothed out against the ceiling, spreading so that their ragged edges began to join.

  ‘Phantoms,’ she answered after a while, still without looking at him. ‘The phantoms of emissions.’

  ‘. . . the fuck . . .?’ he said.

  ‘Weanlings,’ she added, as though that would explain all. She sighed in regret. ‘They won’t amount to much.’

  Creed fumbled with his clothing, deciding he’d had enough. He tried to scramble to his feet with jeans and underpants still gathered around his knees, and lost his balance, collapsing on to the couch.

  Laura calmly turned to him. ‘You’re not leaving, you know.’

  ‘Like hell I’m not!’ he yelled back at her, tugging at his trousers and attempting to rise at the same time.

  ‘But we haven’t finished.’ Pleasantly said, a gentle coaxing.

  She rose and stepped out of her dress to stand naked before him, tall and long-limbed, shadowed interestingly by the insubstantial light, her legs firmly apart, her arms stretched towards him. The forms on the ceiling floated down and prowled around her. In one Creed thought he saw a tiny pain-racked face, a gaping hole for a mouth, dark smudges for eyes; stumps that might have been Lilliputian arms appeared straining at the mist-like sac in which it was imprisoned. He noticed another such form, then another. Soon, several.

  They circled her, gathering speed, looping between her legs, some disappearing into her, emerging a split second later through her open mouth.

  Creed headed for the door.

  It was shut. How did it get shut? It shouldn’t have been shut! He hadn’t seen anyone shut it! Worse, he couldn’t open it.

  Clasping his jeans to his waist with both hands, he turned to face her.

  OhmyGodherheadwastouchingtheceiling!

  And her head had changed also, her face had extended! She had a snout! She looked like a fur-less fox – no, a vixen! A naked, grinning vixen! And her breasts were long, drooping udders. And the hair between her legs was like a beard, trailing on the floor. And her legs were pipe-thin, and they were knobbled and scaly and her toes were long and splayed and curling at the ends . . .

  He blinked, unable to believe his own eyes, and then it was the same woman standing there, bare and beautiful, skin unblemished and not in the least distorted. He blinked again and the creature had returned, and there were grotesque faces spinning around it, weaving patterns in the air. Small ill-formed voices derided him. He could hear Laura’s laughter.

  He turned away and he heard her say, ‘Wait.’

  She was a woman again, standing in the centre of the room, alluring once more, tempting still, even though he was so bare-arsed scared. ‘I promise not to do that any more,’ she assured him.

  The vaporous shapes had gone, too.

  ‘How . . .?’

  ‘Just fun,’ she soothed. ‘Just a silly game. I promise I’ll behave. If you stay . . .’

  He shook his head, to clear it more than as a rejection to her invitation. ‘You’re fucking with my brain,’ he said with angry resentment.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  She smiled sweetly a
nd her skin began to expand.

  ‘Oh Christ . . .’ he complained.

  This time Laura did not elongate herself so much as stretch herself into a kind of thin phlegmy mess. She retained a head of sorts, although her cheeks attenuated until they became transparent and then holes, holes that joined with her grinning mouth to become one hugely spacious wound in which a pale-glistening tongue squirmed like a mother maggot (if such things existed). Her eyes had drooped forward because the skin around them had become too squishy to contain them, and her nose seeped to become one large dewdrop. Her hair still looked good though.

  The skin between her outstretched arms and body became webs so fine that he could see grey light from the window behind shining through. Her breasts had diminished completely into her elasticated torso and her pubic hair now brushed the floor between feet that were no more than spreading puddles.

  He was barely aware of the woolly shapes – his own seed demons (although he wasn’t cognisant of that particular fact right at that moment) – that skimmed around the darkened room, dainty wan faces within them, some grinning, some tormented, all of them absurd.

  The quivering tacky mass before him reared up, began to fold over at the top like an ocean wave, more gapes peeling open in the flesh (could it still be called flesh?) as it stretched condom-thin. Creed stood stock-still, mesmerized, petrified and even scandalised (it was so disgusting!). A small voice inside his head instructed him to flee, but another small voice argued that the door behind him was locked. Creed paid attention to neither one for he was too shocked by the thing – the apparition – which was looming over him, spreading like an oozing, tattered blanket with a grotesque parody of a head near the top and weird appendages at various corners.

  It dropped. This great spread of runny mucus dropped on to him like a net over a paralysed animal, draping itself over him, smothering, clogging his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils, sliming over his skin, filling his cracks. His scream was muffled, the tensile substance thinning over his yawning mouth so that air from his lungs ballooned it like bubble-gum. The stuff was heavy, but not heavy enough to drag him down. It was smelly, acidy, like seminal fluid. And its velvety touch was perversely sensuous although, fortunately for Creed, not quite enough to gain his favour.

  He punched his way through, tearing an opening in what must have been the thing’s gut (for sinuous tubes were visible there, coils of transparent rubber that could only have been intestines). Viscous lumps and strands clung to his arms as he pushed himself forward, but they broke away easily, having no unity, no texture to bind them. He stepped through to the other side, not cleanly, not as though through a paper hoop, but messily, bits going with him, sticking to his skin and clothes. He stumbled further, ever-thinning strands stretching with him. He came to a halt and brushed frantically at himself, clawing at his face, his eyes, spitting gob-like bits from his mouth.

  The thing had collapsed to the floor as if punctured, and was lying in a dishevelled heap, a large part of it, a part that might have been shoulders, heaving as though drawing breath, regaining strength. It began to form into a proper shape again.

  Creed ran to the other door, the one he had assumed earlier led to an adjoining office, left hand gripping his jeans, right hand reaching for the doorhandle.

  Please God don’t let it be locked, he pleaded.

  It wasn’t.

  Thankyouthankyouthank—

  He staggered back as if pushed.

  Someone was standing on the other side of the doorway. Just standing there, not moving. Not smiling. Not scowling, either. Just standing there.

  The raincoat man just looked at him.

  Creed backed away until he was in the middle of the room. The peculiar thing was (in this day – in this week – of peculiar things) that the office in which the graveyard crazy stood was totally and utterly black, as if he were in a void, a place without light, a place of absence. There was nothing there except the man himself.

  With a strangulated whimper, Creed ran for the other door, hopping over the rising slimy mound that was forming limbs again, a woman’s shape again, although it still oozed and curdled tendrils still sucked at the floor. Arms folded across his head, Creed smashed into the frosted glass of the door’s upper half.

  The aged brittle glass shattered easily enough and he tumbled through, his hips catching against the lower wooden section so that his feet lifted and the rest of his body toppled over. He landed headfirst in the corridor outside, rolling forward so that his heels chipped the wall opposite. Winded and fearing he’d been mortally wounded by glass shards, he nevertheless lurched to his feet and tottered away, gathering pace as he fled, having no idea in which direction he was headed, but not caring either, simply wanting to be far away from that horrible room.

  The corridor ran out, but there was a door tucked away in an alcove to the left, an exit door with a bar-lock across its middle.

  He crashed into it and the door gave way. Creed was blinded by stunning white light. And suddenly he was falling.

  22

  He hung there from the bar-lock, yelling and kicking, seven floors of space between him and the rubbled earth below. Had it not been for the cacophony of pneumatic drills and bulldozers the workmen down there might have heard his cries for help. His jeans had gathered below his knees, but that didn’t embarrass Creed at all; he wanted to be saved, and not only from a nasty fall.

  ‘Help meeeeeee . . .!’

  He was losing his grip in more ways than one. His fingers were beginning to uncurl, his own weight dragging him down. God, if his hands weren’t so damp he might have had a better chance. He was slipping, the door he clung to was swaying, and the debris below was anticipating. Even the winter sun that should have been vapid conspired to sting his eyes.

  Half-mast clothing prevented him from swinging a leg up to gain some kind of purchase. He attempted several bar-lifts, the muscles of his arms throbbing with the effort; he managed to hook his chin over the iron rod and he stayed that way for a while, letting his neck take some of the strain. It was useless though: his jaw began to tremble; then it began to tilt. It slid off the bar like a boat from a ramp and once more he was relying on his increasingly weakening hands. He started to go . . .

  . . . when a hand above him grabbed at the bar, a gorgeous, pink, slender hand, one that he would have kissed right there and then had he the strength to reach it. The door began to swing inwards, but painfully slowly, his weight and the strong breeze hindering its progress. All he could do was remain still (according to the voice that shouted in his ear) and so he concentrated on not letting go, that single consideration driving any others – like the notion that it might be the freaky Laura who was hauling him in – from his mind. He realized he wasn’t going to make it; the rescue process was too ponderous, the guardian angel pulling at the bar not strong enough. His lower lip quivered at the thought of what awaited him. He clung by his fingertips.

  But then he was sandwiched between the door and the floor level, concrete lip digging into the small of his back. Hands were beneath his shoulders, hauling him up, and he helped as best as he could, using his last reserves of strength to hoist himself.

  The edge of the concrete scraped his butt as he was dragged in, and then he was sprawled inside the corridor, gasping for breath, tears of fright and relief streaking his dirtied face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he tried to say, but it emerged as a blubbery burble.

  Cally was on her knees beside him, looking anxiously into his eyes.

  Between broken breaths he said, ‘You . . .?’

  Her tone was sharp. ‘We’ve got to get away from here.’ She tugged at his arms and, after a moment’s hesitation, Creed rose with her. He was unsteady, but he managed to hitch up his jeans and zip them. That, at least, improved his morale. The girl attempted to lead him along the corridor, but he resisted.

  ‘I’m not going back there.’

  ‘It’s the only way out. We’ve got to move, Joe.’

&n
bsp; ‘They’re down there. I’m not going.’

  ‘It’s all right – trust me. We’ve got to move fast, though.’

  He tried to shrug her off, but Cally held on to him.

  ‘There’s no alternative,’ she insisted.

  ‘There never is with you.’

  ‘Joe, I’m going to leave you. You can either come with me, or you can stay here ’til they’re ready to come after you again.’

  He looked at her quizzically.

  ‘She’s gathering her strength. I don’t know what you did to her, but you’ve damaged her in some way. She’ll soon get over it.’

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘If that’s what she called herself. Now shift!’

  Creed went with her, albeit reluctantly, his feet dragging. ‘What about him?’ he whined.

  ‘He won’t touch you. Not yet. Please, Joe, hurry.’

  As they neared the door with its broken glass window, Creed pushed himself against the opposite wall, sliding his back along it, never taking his eyes off the jagged hole. Inside there was the same utter blackness he’d witnessed earlier, as though the darkness of the adjoining office had snuck out and swallowed its neighbour. Inch by inch he crept along the wall, Cally gripping his wrist and drawing him forward as if against a fast-flowing current.

  ‘Come on!’ she urged, and the desperation in her voice almost did the trick. Creed jerked himself off the wall and adopted the sprinter’s start; he was locked into that pose by a roaring that came from the black hole opposite.

  It was as if the room had belched.

  The wind caught Creed and the girl and slammed them back against the corridor wall. Objects came crashing through – empty file books, pens, a shower of hornet-like paper clips, a waste bin – smallish objects that hit them like shrapnel, cutting and punching them, forcing them to protect their faces with their arms. The roar ceased, leaving them cowering against tattered wallpaper.

  At first it seemed there was no noise; then they became aware of what sounded like a repeated sighing.