Page 67 of The Flesh Remembers
The officers shouted orders, voices cracking beneath the weight of their panic. They tried to wrest control from the chaos, but the cultists, oh, the cultists, they did not run. Somecollapsed to their knees, lips moving in silent worship. Others reached for their would-be captors, their hands trembling with something not fear, but longing.
Eleanor felt the balance shatter, teetering on the edge of something inevitable.
Jamesfeltit.
The ceremony had not truly ended.
The city, the cult, the love that bound them, it was all on the brink of transformation, something darker, something far more terrible than the authorities could ever comprehend.
And James?
Jameswelcomedit.
Excerpt from the journal of Lord Alastair Blackwood
I have retreated to my private quarters. It is not cowardice, it is necessity. I do not trust the subject.
His power swells with each passing hour, like a tide that does not recede but rises. The last shreds of his humanity slough off like dead skin, like the husk of something discarded and forgotten. What remains is not James, the man, but something vast, something unknowable.
Eleanor still stands at his side, though I see the faltering in her gaze, the brief flickers of doubt. Does she recognize the thing that now wears the form of the man she loved? The dark god we called forth, the entity that stirs beneath his skin, waiting, watching.
She loves him, undoubtedly. But love alone cannot save him.
Nor can it save us.
What have I done?
What have we brought into this world?
An Escape
The dreams began the moment Eleanor closed her eyes.
Heat. Wetness. The scent of sweat and rot clung to her skin. She stood in the ruins of the garden, vines slick with dark sap curling around her ankles, the pulsing remains of bodies still entwined in worship. Half-rotted cultists moaned, their hands reaching for her, their mouths forever open in silent cries of pleasure and agony. And James, James loomed above them all, his skin molten with power, his eyes black voids of hunger.
"Come back to me, Eleanor."
His voice slithered through her veins, tendrils of lust and desire that coiled and tightened around her limbs. She tried to recoil, but the garden would not let her. The vines pulledher forward, parting as she stumbled into James’s grasp. His hands burned as they pressed into her flesh, as though imprinting his hunger onto her body itself.
"I’ve missed you," he murmured, his lips grazing the curve of her throat. "And you’ve missed this."
She let out a sharp cry as something coiled tight inside her, a terrible, aching need that did not belong to her alone. His touch was not just physical; it unwound her, pulling her open, exposing the raw, aching core of her desire. The moans of the dying cultists surrounded them, a grotesque chorus of pleasure and decay, and still, her body arched, moaned, begged.
Even as she screamed against it.
She woke with a cry, drenched in sweat, her sheets twisted and damp beneath her. The echo of her moans lingered in the air, her thighs still wet with ruinous desire, consumed by phantomtouches that had never left. The room was silent, yet she swore she could hear his laughter, feel his breath ghosting against her skin. She pressed a shaking hand to her chest, her heart hammering. It was just a dream. A dream born from the horrors of the past weeks.
But as she moved to untangle herself from the sheets, something dark shimmered on her skin. As Eleanor’s gaze dropped to her arms, the ghostly imprint of fingers lingered on her skin, faint, but unmistakable. A long, slow exhale slipped from her lips as she watched, wide-eyed, while the marks gradually dissolved, vanishing just as the remnants of her dream slipped away into the ether.
Her inner thighs were wet with more than sweat.
Eleanor had left the clinic for the first time in two months. She hadn’t planned to go. She had resigned herself to her fate and was content with dying beside James in that corruptingden of debauchery and madness. On the night the police and the city officials had come for the inspection, Eleanor had returned to her quarters to rest after they had left. In his transformed flesh, James no longer needed any sleep. Still, it seemed whatever had happened to Eleanor during the insanity of the final ritual had not made her quite as inhuman as her lover.
“Go lie down,” James said softly, his pale hand smoothing the dark, sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. Eleanor stared up at him, and she felt her heart might break in two, for she could yet see him there—herJames.
James, James, James? It is not James—not his smile, not his touch, not his skin. The machine wears his face like a mask.
Touch me, James. No, no, do not touch me.
