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I stare at him through the dim candlelight across the dinner table. The darkness nearly conceals him beneath the cloak, but we are both well aware of the failings of his body; a sweet, intimate secret binding us together.
He believes that he has something far more substantial kept safe from me, but this secret, too, I know – perhaps better than he does. Not many strangers want to meet someone over dinner to discuss a two-hundred year old plant listed on eBay as “haunted”.
He’d made quite the effort on our first date. I, already deeply familiar with eccentrics who lacked all social mores, was perfectly aware that none of them would insist on inviting me to a quiet, opulent shisha lounge at their own expense to begin with. From there, he diverted our discussion far from my pitcher plant that he had promised such a keen interest in. Suave, he had eased out of the conversation with silky, meandering talk of his unfortunate circumstances: a tragic accident in a house-fire, leaving him disfigured, and from that foundation, coaxed from me the story of my grandmother’s untimely death and the particulars of her collection of Pagan artefacts.
More damning yet was the calculation he’d performed upon realising that any romantic affections between us would subject him to my own predilections: he nonetheless considered the price to be within his favour.
It is to that end that I brush my thumb over the button of the remote control in my pocket, waiting for the moment that might tempt me to press it.
I begin to take hefty, raw cuts of my steak, the juices glinting upon the plate under a flickering orange candle-glow. I moan low and thick as I chew them greedily, a soft rumble melting the texture further upon my tongue. He – the Master – has limited himself to soups, stews, and liquid broths for as long as I have known him, and I don’t need to see the fixed, expressionless rictus of his face to know his hunger, his humiliation. He plays the tireless role of an interested gentleman, and I play the ingenue, each of us dancing around our truths.
I extend my throat, swallow, and finally depress the button. The Master remains insistently silent, but the deep shadows of his orbits shift, the light catching those wide, milky eyes. I don’t hold the vibrations for long, only enough to allow his surprise to pass and the pleasure to swell. Too long, and the device nestled between his legs might threaten damage to his fragile form. The Master is singularly fascinated with his own mortality, in all senses.
‘I find this indecent,’ he rasps, a skeletal hand taking the stem of a wine glass in a sudden grip, and brings it beneath the hood of his cloak. ‘A crude parody of touch, simple trickery of the nerves, where a fine meal and wine can entirely suffice for the sensual pleasures.’
I consider proving him vulnerable to such trickery once more, but the performance of witticism that volleys between us has become equally enjoyable to me. ‘Consider it a prosthesis,’ I comment blithely, ‘What sort of man would describe sensual pleasure as sufficient?’
‘A refined one,’ the Master replies. His voice, or what is left of it, hasn’t much to carry in the way of tone, and I have noticed him pleasantly overcompensating for it with verbosity. ‘Despite my ghastly appearance, I have never hid myself from the finer luxuries, or held them in your contempt of inadequacy. Tell me, child, what do you know of pleasure beyond playing with mere toys?’
I know a great deal, but I am unlikely to ever tell him. I switch on the mere toy and allow it to resonate into the deeper nerves of his cock, which I am certain are still undamaged, because he hisses a long, slow sigh. He cannot close his eyes, but his chin sags, and I see him arch his back in the way his shapeless cloak shifts. In only moments, his breath grinds out an irritated, ‘Enough,’ but I don’t yet want to relent. I need to know how far he will let me go before I can commit to reigning myself in.
Another twitch, and he jerks a hand along the table, his fist leaving an unpleasant smear of exudate upon the white cloth. ‘Enough!’ he snaps again, ‘You insolent—’
I know, then, that he is afraid – not in the sense that I, nor you, might have felt the emotion – but alarmed that the disguise hiding his vulnerability has slipped free. And so, I release him from the vibrator.
‘You were explaining to me,’ he says, unclenching his grey fingers, ‘about the Necronomicon you came across.’
I had invented the Necronomicon fantasy some weeks ago, now. As the Master had nearly finished wheedling a mental catalogue of the paraphernalia my grandmother had left me, I knew he would quickly discard me if I could not provide him with more interest. I had then described in great detail a suspicious, black tome, written in an unidentifiable language and attributed to it various other gaudy, mythical properties. It seemed like the sort of legend which might have some seed of truth behind it, and to my delight, the Master had seized upon it.
It was proving to be a great mistake: he simply would not let it go.
‘I believe we were talking of pleasure,’ I correct, and slip the remote from my pocket to place it on the table. A pink, heart-shaped piece of plastic on a keyring, I imagine I can feel the Master seething within my mind.
He reaches a hand forth, its curiosity hidden beneath the motion of a vicious snatch. I meet his hand by clasping it under my own, our lovers’ parody. He feels cool and slimy, at times sticky, others dry and crusty. Each time inflicts a new sensory agony, but I am too much a monster, myself, for disgust. I press my thumb into the sinew of the back of his hand, pushing his hand down until the remote’s button activates once more. From my position, already leaning across the small table, I release him in order to reach out and cup his face. His cheek feels like a piece of raw meat left too long on the counter, leaving a thick membrane of slough upon my fingers as I pull them back.
I am quite thrilled to see that the Master has not taken his hand off the remote, in a deadly show of his bitter resolve. Now, his hood has slipped quite far back, revealing the raw, weeping gristle stretched across his skull, rotting in an eternal cycle of failed healing and dying. I can sense the unspoken threat: dare to test him, and he will unleash upon me horrors even worse than what he has become.
I demonstrate what I think of these horrors: I bring my fingers back, and place all four of them in my mouth. I press my tongue down upon each one, licking curiously; he tastes salty, primarily, but if I search for it, I can appreciate the putrid sweetness, the sour point on the edge of my tongue. If I think about it hard enough, I can believe he tastes like come.
The Master has not given in: he gasps, his dry croak sliding out from between gumless teeth, the ghoulish mask of his face impenetrable to any expression. The tendons escaping the back of his hand tighten, clutching his fingers over the remote. The globes of his eyes roll back towards me. I flick my tongue between the fork of each finger, appreciating how the taste changes with the warm flesh of my own palm, the hint of blood which had, before, run down my fork as I held the bite of steak there, watching the light play over the glistening fat. If only he had tasted so rich, so sweet, I would have consumed him.
I pull my hand free, considering the saliva drying coolly on my fingers, and meet his eye for a moment. He releases the remote with a decisive flourish, retreating across the table. I follow him, chasing him like his shadow, and lean into his mouth to kiss.
The texture and smell is that of carrion, tempered only by the acidic drydown of the red wine. I reach my tongue into that putrid maw, tentative in my curiosity, savouring the shiver that jerks beneath my lips; the cool erratic breath; the moan threatening the Master’s throat.
A rush of humiliated, desperate fury coasts at the periphery of my chest, a hiss that incises the edge of my mind. My skin prickles; I push the heel of my hand into the button once more.
At a distance, I feel my body’s patient capacity for arousal, but the breath is heavy in my throat and my tongue and fingers are the sole priority. I draw the side of his lipless mouth into mine to suck on it, feeling salty-sweet liquid spring forth, the place in my stomach belonging to horror too occupied with hunger, with bottomless thrill.
I feel disgust, then. The oily aversion smears up behind my eyes, so startling that it arrests me. The button clicks off beneath my fingers. I probe the emotion with bewilderment, chasing it; it becomes fugitive as I grasp for it, dragging me through a haze of adrenaline. I hate this, I realise, this lonely execration, the excuses I have made for it—
I feel his words in my mouth and rear back, burnt.
I gather the remaining shreds of my courage for long enough to look him in the eye, and find his gaze averted. The Master’s fingers flutter along the edge of the table. His voice rattles in his throat, the perpetual growl at last serving him as he throws down, ‘You are not a saint for deigning to touch a leper.’
But I know what I have seen. Sweat slithers down the back of my neck, my hands almost certainly shaking.
‘I don’t lust for the things I pity,’ I nearly spit, fear sharpening my words. ‘Do you?’
It is the first time I have heard the Master laugh. Voiceless, it comes out in gravelly pants, is witnessed by his outstretched neck. He moves quickly, now, not the painful easing of stiff limbs through space, whose joints had perhaps been swift all along. A bony hand takes my wrist, crushing in its grip, sliding me towards him with magnetic force.
Only once our mouths are nearly touching does he release me, but not without first smothering my palm over the remote.
‘Of course I do,’ he hisses, foetid air coolly invading my throat, filling my greedy breaths.
He kisses me: foul, bitter, aching—and upon his weeping tongue, I taste that he is fond.