The beach was a magical place for people of any age, he thought; it had to be. The shoreline was hypnotic, listening to it gasp, and pound, purr and hiss chiding, and watching the waves crawl up and back and collapse into foam put him again and again in an altered state of mind.
This was an in-between place, a where that was here and not here, and whether you left by boat or by foot and car, it was a place where the rules were decided. Magicians in books had spoken to him as he sat attentively in their workshops in his imagination, of the fierce and wild creatures that occupied in-between places, and the way they always sought a gateway to the real world through which they could slither and their perverted conquests then begin. The dead sea beasts all around him put him in mind of frightening and alien gods.
“How could you be like that?” Brian asked a dead horseshoe crab, gently turning and dissecting it with a piece of light driftwood. Those legs, and that tail: how could something so unlike him even share the same planet? “Eerie,” he said. It was a natural monster in his overactive mind, a thing out of a nightmare, horrible by every human standard; but really it was only a fellow earthling that had been bred in a much different environment. With the right kind of eyes, eyes large and bright with thought and possibility, the boy could turn anything into an adventure.
He continued walking, letting his mother and the children grow smaller, until they were flecks of several colors, then flecks of one color, then sand. The sand had eaten them!
He smiled.
As he came upon a deserted section of beach, his interest was aroused. He stood between the wide blue lapping ocean, now, and an obviously empty house that was barred from him by CAUTION tape. He didn’t need his very busy mind to feel that he was alone. He was alone in a profound sense, a feeling deepened by the scent of recent death, a scent that no science could explain since it had nothing to do with smelling, but with a psychic grasp that violence ending badly had been performed, and stained a place. He shivered. It had gotten cloudy, but the sea air was still sweet and warm. No cold, slimy monsters.
His eye tripped down the row of empty and decaying beach houses before him on his left, and he saw the glimmer of other strands of tape jumping up and down between wooden posts like jump ropes, barring entry. Others had come loose and simply played on the beach like living animals.
What had happened here, he wondered? Why hadn’t it been in the paper? Sure, this was a bit of a tourist town, but even the mayor in ‘Jaws’ couldn’t hide the truth from the public completely. What was killing these people?
“I’ll walk past it,” the boy said, and his feet began to carry him nobly into the dark zone, though his heart jumped a little faster inside of him. “I’m not afraid.”
He thought that could protect him.
After he’d gotten past Death Row, as his playful mind had christened the unfortunate spot, he was walking on the beach before a restaurant. The rich and mostly dim people outside in the fenced in eating area stared at him and remarked somewhat excitedly about him to each other as he stoically walked past them with his head bowed. That they were talking about him might have been his imagination. He felt more unsure about his surroundings than he usually did, as he entered yet another portion of the beachfront.
This one seemed to be the end of the line for those walking on foot, since everything was rocky on his left, and the ocean that his been only on his right now dipped into a bay in front of him. He looked around a moment, noticing speed boats tearing up the sea in the distance, and sat down on a rock, crossing his arms. He was somewhat pleased with himself as the sun returned from behind the dark canopy, feeling he had traversed a danger, or at least his own fear. This spot, he mused, looked a bit like the one where he had found the horseshoe crab, and look, someone has even left a blanket for me to lie on. There was even an umbrella planted beside it, for shade. He stood up a bit, hunched as he looked around for its owner, and then sat down on the blanket. It had an apparently exotic pattern of blue and red and black, and was thick but very soft, almost like a huge towel. He relaxed and stretched his feet out, holding his torso up on the arms planted behind him, and watched boats whiz past along the horizon through eyelids made lazy by the sun.
Better not fall asleep, I could get a burn, was the last thing he thought before he passed out.
As the sun beat down upon Brian around the beach umbrella and the surf pounded a short distance from his feet, the sleeping boy shifted with the uncomfortable awareness that someone was watching him, standing above and behind him a bit, and wishing him no good. He woke, eyes crunching shut as far as they could while still letting light in, and looked around.
No one. But there were footprints. They terminated just at the edge of the blanket, heading toward him from a very rocky dune, so Brian assumed that they were old and had been partially erased by the tide. He grumbled a bit, and then settled back into a sleep, unaware of the sand shifting slightly beside him as he nestled in the shade and warm folds of the heavy bed he’d found.
Like a monster’s tentacle, a feminine hand emerged from the dune beside the sleeping boy’s head, and began to pet his hair lightly with its gold spangled fingers. He shifted again, this time comfortably, like a sleeping child being kissed by a parent returning home at a late hour. His fears and doubts were washed away by the gently stroking fingers of the golden woman’s hand that sprung loosely from the ground stone like a snake. He sighed, entering a deeper state of unconsciousness, and the arm drifted down beside his shoulder, and its short, thin fingers curled about his forearm like the mechanical parts of a grappling hook.
The arm then retracted, drawing Brian’s arm away from his side, and then having taken up its slack pulling his entire body slowly, sliding it across the blanket to the sand, the boy remaining docile in his magically induced trance as he was abducted. When his light form was completely stretched across the sand with nothing else underneath it, the arm, still holding his own, was pulled down into the shifting, swirling beach, and then with an ease unpredictable to an observer who could have been watching, drew the comatose boy underground with it, like a lion would draw a dead beast into a cave.
Brian drifted in an intoxicated state through the process of this reverse-birth, this return to the womb and the earth he and all men had sprung from. Sand coursed up around him, filling the gap his body left as it forced and was forced into the ground, into a depth of the earth that man was not meant to dwell in.
When air, warm, stagnant air first touched his hand again, he was conscious enough to crane his head about in the rushing sand, perceiving nothing, and still too far gone mentally to feel any alarm or distress at being compelled into the earth and trapped there.
His body was finally laid out in a corpse pose on giant tasseled pillows, which, he would discover, formed the floor of his new environment. He began to toss lightly as he was conjured out of sleep by his mentally dominant captor, and on his path to full consciousness he thought he felt, subliminally, sublimely, breasts and warm belly and folding, promising thighs urging him from the depths of inactivity, accompanied by whispers and evasively caressing lips that brought forth from him a hard on he didn’t welcome as he sensed it rise and was becoming aware that he was not alone.
Brian awoke in a lowly lit and low ceilinged chamber, in an assortment of joined, stretch igloos made of tan stone that glistened before the lamps hung on their curved walls. Luxury was all around him. Pillows crusted with gems formed the ground, and baubles of gold and finely colored glass decorated the small pleasure dome. These treasures, he noticed, were not all that was glistening.
In a cat stance, arms out at her sides and her haunches high and balanced on one bent leg supported by toes, and one straight leg supported by a heel, a golden woman with straight dirty blonde hair sparkled with sand and tight tan muscle before him. In her animal form, she was aroused, not alarmed or afraid. She was brilliantly, mind-bendingly naked. And she was beautiful.
He let his mouth drop open, a pubescent fantasy brought majestically to life in front of him, stalking on soft, yielding pillows that had only one obvious purpose: that being, to support their love.
“What...” Brian began, but didn’t stop because she’d made any effort to interrupt him.
She finally reached him, and one at a time flipped his sandals off of him with her hand, past the toes, so they crashed lightly on the wall.
“Please, I’m not ready,” he said, but she kissed him, seemingly knowing what it would do to him, to silence him, fire his head and penis with blood like fire scathing a gorge, and she was gorgeous, a waiting, beckoning gap that demanded filling and would take no refusal for an answer.
She gripped the cuffs of his shorts between thumbs and forefingers, and he frantically pulled them down the same way from his waist, still kissing her, feeling her, sharing her need if not her composure, and in only a moment the reluctant abductee and his abductor were both naked.
He was essentially lying back and she was kneeling with her hands before her like a sitting cat, and he stroked her arm under the shoulder to desperately convey his want, as though she needed more conveyance of it, and his eyes begged for advice on how to proceed; if he should advance on her, and take the top, or simply lie back and let her give it to him. He knew the different ways it could be done; he had seen cable, after all.
Rather than simply climbing and fucking him, she touched his dark shoulders with her fingertips, and pushed him back into the horizontal, and carefully kissed the lean expanse of his bare body, up and down, from the jaw down to the knees. His cock throbbed, and she felt an oncoming statement from him, so she mentally shut down his ability to talk.
What she did not do, however, was rob him of the ability see what she’d done to him, and he started up terrified at the way she’d pressed his Mute button.
She put her whole hands on his shoulders this time, and leapt like a frog onto his pecs, which stilled him instantly, filling him with both fear and desire that tugged at his dick from the inside with tension and urgency. She kept her hands still, but slid her sex down his chest deliberately, coating him, marking him, finally at the base of his abdomen, devouring him.
He gasped at his first taste of the inside of a woman, though he wasn’t entirely sure that this was a woman; it didn’t matter. She fucked him at a gentle rate, letting his breath blossom and expire emotionally, holding his face in her hands so she could kiss his lips blindly whenever she wanted to, and printing her lips all about his neck and shoulders with slight pressure on his skin that soon faded in her slowly building ecstacy.
His knees buckled, and she aided them by using her own thighs to slam them together and letting them drift apart, only to force them together again to share the warmth she was generating on him as his breath raced and she worked him smoothly like a water pump.
His head became light, a balloon suffering a thousand pinpricks, but not being given the chance to deflate, only wanting a release from the pressure more, and (gently) more, and (gently) more. His stomach muscles heaved, as if trying to displace the weight that was torturing him. He cried out, dumbly, through an agonized throat.
The one strong thought that passed through him during the process was the question of whether or not she was enjoying it as much as he was. She never tossed her head back in ecstacy, and every move she made seemed designed only to heighten his feeling. She kept an intensely focused gaze on him, knowing lips pursed beneath, and steadily controlled the radius that her ass leapt out from her as it massaged and beckoned to fulfillment his ever tightening erection.
His toes curled, and she smiled at him, her first civilized gesture. She took his dark hair firmly in her fist, and pulled his head back. He offered little resistance as the methodical washing of his cock was pitting all of his muscles against each other, and she kissed his parted, sighing lips with a loving, if bemused succinctness.
As his eyes closed, telling her she was about to finish him, she took a basic posture and let her head finally fly back indicating a certain abandon, or carelessness, and framed her arms straight out beside his ears, her loving, healthy thighs now working with a common lack of grace toward the conclusion of their animal task.
He inhaled deeply, and then shot into her, and she purred, eyes still shut up tight and pointed at the ceiling, teeth gritted and framed by a grin, her full ass still grinding into his waning sun. His shoulders dropped (he was unaware they had been tensed) and a curdling feeling in his stomach told him that his busy day was over. Sand seemed to creep into his eyes, budging him again to sleep.
He dozed.
His last memory before the world’s blackening was watching the woman dive into the sand-filled opening of the structure as though sliding gracefully into a swimming pool, like a fish into the open sea, as cool air brushed his passion-moistened forehead from a small and unseen vent set in the wall.
At least, he knew, he wouldn’t suffocate.
When he woke, he was alone, but he felt a strange alert in his mind, as though his waking had triggered some psychic reaction that was depicted in his imagination as birds flying. He was feeling a bit weak, and in a daze.
The woman almost immediately reappeared, and he realized she’d been telepathically monitoring him from afar, and that the birds flying were what she saw as she started upon learning that he had woken up. She’d come through the doghouse style opening in the wall, that was apparently completely blocked up with sand, and she’d been carrying a bundle. As she unwrapped it before him, almost as an offering, his mind drifted to wondering how she could swim through rock so easily. Sensing his thought, she looked up momentarily, and smiled. Seeing her smile, he focused on her bundle.
When she’d finished unwrapping it, he saw a dead fish, uncooked, but apparently hunted and gathered for him for eating purposes.
She took a half, and sat back against the wall in a squatting position, running the fetid meat across her lips as though it were a corn cob. He was disgusted, glancing back up and down between the huntress and the kill, but decided to avoid insult, and began feasting on the present with the illusion of relief.
When her half was finished, she remained naked, still squatting, now with her elbows on her glorious tan thighs, looking somewhat, he thought, like a cave girl.
“Mm, mm. Couldn’t eat another bite,” he said, placing the barely nibbled fish-half back on the cloth in which she’d brought it to him.
She smiled, meditatively, still saying nothing, but apparently reflecting on the pleasing feelings he’d given her. He matched her gaze, sitting in the lotus position on a pillow, and felt relaxed and happy in her presence, in the dim light of her lair.
She quickly raised her right forefinger, and he dropped asleep.
Brian awoke on the beach in his swim trunks and sandals, and he felt very, very refreshed from his sleep. In fact, his mind felt acutely quick and penetrating. A dead horseshoe crab festered beside him. He gagged, a little, and got up and away from it, quick.
He saw his mother and his cousins, and walked over to them slowly in the light and heat, and when he got up to his mother’s beach chair, she asked where he’d been, and he fainted.
Seven years later, a naked mother and a seven year old daughter in a potato sack dress combed the moonlit beach for rotting fish together.