Another thing I’ve been working on. I’m still outlining, but into the stage where I’m also writing chunks. This one is going to be Cthulhu mythos detective mystery with a side of queer monster romance.
Plus! Ira art, a gift from switchvale.
Prologue: The Dream
The dream came again, the same as it did most nights. Different each time in details, always the same in its essentials.
Ira woke up in his bed. The room was dark and the light from the moon through the slats of the blinds fell in familiar diagonal stripes across the wall.
But something was wrong with their shapes at the footboard.
He watched, unable to move, unable to make a sound, as they shifted with the motion of some thing standing in the dark at the foot of the bed. And then it began to move toward him.
One smooth pointed leg emerged from the dark and stabbed downward through the mattress to heave its bulk up onto the bed. Another followed, next to his ankle, and he couldn’t scream as the heap of it dragged itself up over him so he could see it, like a shapeless lumpy spider whose details had never formed.
He couldn’t scream when its next sharp leg, like a cone of polished sheet metal, stabbed down through his hip. All he could do was lie there, unable to so much as twitch even though in his mind, in his nerves, he fought with everything in him to thrash, to scream, to get away as another came down through his right shoulder, pinning him to the bed with the great dark bulk of it crouching over his body, eclipsing his sight of the room, unable to see anything except the nightmare of the shapeless hole that opened on its underside and began to lower itself toward his face. When it swallowed him, it would possess him. He wouldn’t be able to die.
He woke up thrashing to sit upright in his bed, choking on the scream that was still trapped in his throat. The shadows looked normal. Everything looked normal.
He turned on the bedside light and dropped his head into his hands, shaking, in sheets damp with his sweat.
His hip and shoulder hurt like a bitch.
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