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_The innocent mansion of a panther's heart! It crumbles, tick-tick time drags it in Till now his arteries lag and now they start Reverence with the frigid gusts of sin. ** ** _ _________ Allen Tate, "Idiot"

Caleb was his sin and Caleb was soul. He could not escape: he was the protagonist of a ghost-folk tale of his own doing, he was trapped, look at this tangle of thorns, look at all this blood. It was the stupidest fucking way he could have reduced this situation to its primary parts and yet - and yet - here John Thomas Anderson was, playing out the role of the old man from Tailypo, a story he first heard told by a masterful raconteur when he was in elementary school and still young and pure, in the far-off time before he sank his teeth into vice, boys, ephebophiliac delight. The tale went - John Thomas remembered it, now, cold words recited in his brain out of his own drunken fear, reaching an exquisite, infarction-like peak - that the old man in the woods was cornered and alone in his cabin and the furry little haint of the wood, Appalachia incarnate, Tailypo, scratched at his door, stalking him, come to take back what was rightfully its own. Just like John Thomas now was. There he was - John Thomas Anderson, the victim you shouldn't feel sorry for, getting what was coming to him, creeped upon by a horrid monster. Tailypo, Tailypo, give me back my Tailypo! Isolated from the world on the third floor of a Comfort Inn in Wytheville, Interstate 81 heading to Roanoke coiling around him - it was not a cabin in a woods, but it was lonely, lonely enough, with his whiskey that couldn't erase memories. And the creature after him was no furred goblin that could be passed off as a metaphor for the latent, insular evil of the mountains, no, he - he_was the most beautiful thing in the world. _Caleb. Too sleek and too feline already to be Tailypo, he was an agile cougar - he had been a Pulaksi Cougar and now he was a real cougar - a prowling panther, a Cattywampus...centuries-old settlers must have shivered at by their campfires thinking, seeing, in the fire that reached to a benighted welkin a future vision of the boy himself: He was perfect - perfect. John Thomas kept using that adjective to describe him because it was truer than anything else he could say: five foot ten, some inches shorter than John Thomas himself, bristly champagne-colored hair, longish for a swimmer but fine for a diver, and with a diver's body - every segment, every sinew, every muscle, toned to something so statuesque it approached the figure of a Greek divine. The smell of whiskey was thick on John Thomas' breath as he gasped back, choked back - and, then, cursed - not two months before, as the world grew cold and Caleb first came into his life. Back then it was the middle of October, and Pulaski County had just hired him - fresh out of Virginia Tech with a business degree, but with the stock exchange going apeshit and the finance sector pouring gasoline on itself and lighting matches, John Thomas figured that an MBA at Radford and gig at a high school coaching swimming would get him through this rough patch until he get an actual job later on. He had at excelled at long distance swimming - his best event was the 3000 - and Pulaski County, not picky and caring only he had a Bachelor's and a decent record on the Hokie swim team, hired him at once. The crispness in the air made getting out of the pool the Pulaski Cougars practiced at - barely heated - be greeted with a cascade of shivers on youthful skin...John Thomas, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, handsome face, the preppy Southwest Virginia package, was comfortable in his North Face fleece and jeans and he would grin and tease them, boys and girls, nothing improper, just enough to be a friend while still being a coach. "Can't be that cold!" he'd call out, to be answered by good-natured groans. Not everyone started out with the practices those weeks - they were still putting together the diving team, there were tryouts some Saturday that John Thomas couldn't go to because he had an MBA class that day. His schedule was full and he was always commuting, but Coach Swope, the bearded redneck behind big mirrored aviators who talked with a grating Kentucky drawl but who was tolerated for his near-magic ability to coach champions - he seemed to like him, cut him some slack. Diving wasn't what John Thomas was hired for, anyway, the long distance swimmer whose glory days were a very recent memory. There were a few - four, to be exact, three girls and one boy - that had made the diving team and would be joining the swim team for practices later, and John Thomas could see where they would fit, their names on the spreadsheet on the clipboard where he kept his handwritten swimming routines: warmup 10 x 50 free, 4 x 200 bfly, 4 x 100 bstroke, and so on. He would look down the list of names, the ink smeared and the paper wrinkled with up-slashed water, to keep track of who was there for practice those mornings and those nights and who wasn't - who was on diving, who was on swimming, who was on both... ...and for some reason his eye would drift to a name in the middle of the page, the only boy who didn't make the swim team but made the diving team instead: Jones, Caleb. He puzzled over it, this anonymous figure - who was he, mysterious boy not good enough to be positioned in any one event but good enough to be a diver? The smell of poolwater hit his nose in a wave over the choppy roar of so many swimmers in the pool practicing at once - he would tap his finger on the name. Jones, Caleb. Why did it vex him so? It was the weirdest thing... A few days later Coach Swope, who really did think highly of John Thomas, his rapport with the kids and his work ethic from being on the Hokie swim team, took him to eat in some diner in town, and John Thomas used the opportunity to ask about the diving team, the four new members...stirring the ice in his sweet tea, he slyly asked about Caleb Jones, in particular. Coach Swope nodded back, said something non-committal about Caleb being a quiet kid whose dad owned Toyota dealerships in Dublin and Blacksburg and Christiansburg, never talked to nobody but did exceptional at diving tryouts. John Thomas' inexplicably agitated curiosity - it bothered him that_it bothered him, it bothered him he could tell nobody about it - was not sated, but he figured that was probably it. But he saw Coach Swope's face tense just slightly as he was about to take a sip of Coke: "His mama, though..." He shook his head. "That _witch..." John Thomas raised his eyebrows, leaned forward, wanted to know more - but another shake of Coach Swope's head and that was all. It caused him no end of anxiety back then - weeks, months, how long had_it been? - when he was a respectable Tech graduate and an MBA student and a first-year swim coach, how much Coach Swope liked him, how much the athletics department at Pulaski County High liked him, how they all thought he was an upstanding young man or however the bullshit phrase went, how much they didn't know about his hidden thoughts, the rampaging perversion that rocked his head every second of being around those precious, pristine, irresistible, high school boys. In his heart only could he keep the livid temptations that tormented to himself, _for himself, he would let his eyes linger long, long enough, to study the Boys of Winter, just for him, their developing cocks perky and perfect and bulging in their Lycra packages - no religious man he, in Tantalus' Hell all the same, so close, too close to touch, just out of his reach. Their memories would haunt him like ghosts that glowed like his own generous doses of spent sperm that wetted down his sheets at night, dreaming, wishing, wanting, to taste their sweetness, to drink their piss and please them and coax their cocks bigger, bigger yet, watching them mature just enough that they were still hairless and perfect but even more primed to drive deeper into his ass, splash more of his face with urine, letting these creatures of water and chemicals use him as only they could see fit. The smell - the stench - the aphrodisiac, of chlorinated poolwater... His comforter would be painted with the passion of a sinner who was too far gone, late at night when the outside was dead quiet and the lights outside Fox Ridge Apartments were too woozy to care - bodies, bodies he longed to hold and press against him, wet, ready, still youthful, everything where it should be, a hard, indefatigable, sexual prime. They were all passing things - not disposable, but not permanent, each one, each boy who he had deceived into thinking was his friend, his coach, his mentor, taking a turn depending which night, which desire...transitory ways to get off. It was the darkest of dark thrills, a little chuckle as he groped his dick until it chafed with pent-up sexual frustration - sometimes it would be slick-soapy in the shower and he would beg gods he didn't believe in to let it happen, once, just once, just to touch, lick, put his mouth on an underage, still-growing cock and taste it. The tremors of pleasure were all the more intense because it was so abhorrently forbidden - actually, probably statutory, something he could get fired over, imprisoned for, yet in his head, his hands on his own dick, he was safe, he could do anything he wanted...and he wanted to do it all. So it could be, that in the anonymity of a pleasant extra-collegiate apartment complex in Blacksburg, Virginia could he be the monster he always knew he was - an irony, too disturbing to be real, because later, much later, he would discover the same about Caleb... ...not yet, not yet. There was a ways to get there, but he had to recount how. Before Caleb, he would sit in traffic the morning after with his Starbucks - soy latte, nothing fancy - with dozens, scores, hundreds of people and none of them, not one, could guess he was a pervert. He'd listen to the rattle and hum of his newish Explorer, wondering if anyone could tell that something was amiss, how worried, how sick he looked. The guilt would come - a slow burn, the fire of his passion down to its component embers, the smudging smoke of a piecemeal conscience too hard to shake out from his head. What was wrong with him? What the fuck was wrong with him? Liking underage boys - he could get fired over it, he could go to jail for it, all the crazier, all of the more out of fucking nowhere, was that no one knew, no one could guess, not from looking at, talking to, seeing him. He looked, he seemed, so normal. They'd say that, too, if they ever found out: how upsetting it would be for just another Hokie fratboy who was indistinguishable from any other freshly-minted college graduate in the NRV to have a secret obsession for smooth teenage boys, healthy teenage cock. He had taken this job for logical reasons, but underlying it all was a secret, acted upon only in shame - all the more addictive. So the charade went on: the cycle, the temptation, the fantasy, the remorse...on, on, on... He felt he was safe this way, being able to get a handle on his sickness, this coaching thing wouldn't last forever and neither would his mouth watering at the sight of chubbed-up high school freshmen dick in wet Speedos. And he was safe - he was - until he met Caleb. It was an important after-practice meeting, because it was the first time that the diving and swimming teams would be together, practicing at the same time. John Thomas hadn't been around for the diving tryouts and he only knew the names from the clipboard - tapping his finger on Jones,Caleb. He was late that night because a frat brother of his - Jesus Christ he couldn't even remember his name anymore - had been in town from Baltimore and drinks with him at Sharky's ran long, but Coach Swope had told him to take his time because this was the first joint practice and it, too, would take longer. As he came to the gathering crowd of the team, Coach Swope gesticulating to two girls about how to improve their reach on their Butterfly, John Thomas could see there were still laggards in the locker rooms taking their time showering or getting dressed - the lingering smell of chlorine was in the air and it stirred John Thomas' loins enough that he had to shake his head to shake the images away, a little hard to do with the receding buzz from the beers he'd had. Sighing, he took his place against a wall, leaning against it, nodding at some of his kids who said hey or waved at him, letting his eyes float along the heads of the Pulaski County Swimming and Diving Team, girls and boys, peak of their lives so far, in a buzz of giggles and conversation, coming off their collective highs of endorphins - John Thomas knew the feeling well, and there was a thought, inchoate, never completed, that maybe his insidious sexual desires for teenage boys was a jealousy, a keen reaction to his own declining youth with nothing to look forward to at all of twenty-two... ...and then he saw him. He came out of the locker room last, the door swinging open, his face looking vaguely worried, vaguely anxious, a rime of showerwater glistening faintly on his hair that he was rubbing off with a towel - a long-sleeved shirt hung on his slender, sinewy frame, not fully on him in an apparent haste to leave, so that it was easy to see his firm, toned stomach ripple as he breathed. John Thomas was taken back - such a paltry, hackneyed, inadequate phrase for how time seemed to dilate, slow, then stop, all around him, and how his mouth fell open in frank, abject awe at this boy, this angel, this seraphic specimen of heavenly humanity unaware of John Thomas' own sullied, worthless existence. Love at first sight - if such a thing existed, it existed then. He knew, somehow, immediately, who it was. John Thomas leaned in to nudge the nearest kid, a girl who was trying to straighten her chlorine-desiccated hair with a comb: "Is that - is that Caleb Jones?" And the kid had nodded with a smile. "Yeah, that's him." And John Thomas moved back to the wall, nodding to himself, a feeling of resolution creeping into him, an eerie sense that something he could not, should not, understand was at work here. Why had he fixated so much on Caleb's name, only for him to discover that the name belonged to someone he - someone he had to know? It was too much a metaphysical question for someone like John Thomas, who would barely go through the motions at his parents' church in Christiansburg - the thought, like maybe why his sexuality need be so well-hidden, went nowhere. Well-timed enough, it was at that moment that Coach Swope started calling out his welcome: "Aight y'all, aight, now y'all settle up and listen--" John Thomas didn't hear a word he said - he was introduced, and he gave a profound nod to those gathered, but other than this, the whole time, the entire time, he never took his eyes off of Caleb Jones. Sometimes he would have to dart them away if the boy, perhaps somehow psychically sensing that he was being stared at, would turn his sad, distracted head to John Thomas' direction, across a cluster of his sitting classmates. He waited, patience instantly thinned, for Coach Swope to hurry the fuck up, droning on in that stupid Kentucky accent about practice schedules, meet schedules, how and when to buy uniforms and hoodies, all that noise he had already shared with John Thomas weeks ago, he felt like...all the while, the entire time, studying intently, Caleb, the boy, the mystery, the thunderbolt of desire thrown out of some invisible cloud to strike John Thomas dead and resurrect him to a world where only the ability for them to be together, however remote and however risky, remained. Back in the present - the misery-drenched, whiskey-sodden present - John Thomas let out a strained, choked shudder. He remembered - now, now he remembered - the very first time that Caleb and his eyes met, how Caleb had turned his head one final time, slowly, and John Thomas had been careless not to look away. And as he did - as Caleb looked at John Thomas and John Thomas looked at Caleb, the boy's eyes, an unshowy green, had glittered faintly, so faintly, a light that was thrown off so small and fleeting it was easy, if you weren't sure what you were looking at, to think it was a trick, an optical illusion, a momentary lapse of the way the human brain processes colors and shades. But it wasn't. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't a trick, it was real, a hint at something more fucked up than he could have ever brought to life in his own stupidly depraved fantasies - and he had been too blinded by Caleb, Caleb, everything about Caleb, to understand the danger, before it was late enough that there was nothing he could do but hide. But then - then, then, then, that magical cessation of space in which there was only he, only him, only them - but then...he smiled, his best, confident, college graduate, Facebook-ready grin, right straight into that boy's green eyes, what he was doing was predatory but in the act it was rustic charm, what he'd learned across not one but three Virginian counties. And Caleb's mouth went one way, then another, but - he smiled back. It was the smile of something already broken, a music box that only knows its own song and twinkles out the melody pleadingly, asking, asking, but never telling, because it doesn't know the answer, a puzzle that begs to be solved with half the pieces missing. It enslaved John Thomas as nothing else ever would again. Caleb was a - boy. That magical, limitless word - boy. Youth, beauty, infinite -boy. From there it was simple - as soon as Coach Swope had finally shut the fuck up it only took a hello, it only took a few more words after that, disingenuously asking Caleb where he'd been all this time, his absence from practices. "I been - um, I been s-sick, sir--" the boy said, his Pulaski County twang, that humble little noise, melting John Thomas' heart. "Well what kinda sick?" Caleb smiled again - the humility, John Thomas knew without really knowing, of simply being paid attention to at all. He shut his eyes and again that illusory greenish glitter was thrown out from his eyelids before he answered: "I can't - I can't rightly say, sir." "Don't call me sir, okay Caleb?" John Thomas grinned. It was predatory - that grin could have had razor teeth to devour Caleb with - but John Thomas wanted what he wanted and he was going to get it. "Well - what should I call ya?" "How bout Coach, for a start?" He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and kept grinning, not caring that the crowd of other swimmers was dispersing and this was beginning to look a little odd, not caring that his skin was thrilling in the electricity of just being able to connect flesh to flesh with this masterpiece, this Adonis, this Caleb. Already he was losing control even when it seemed like he was keeping it together. "O-okay C-Coach," Caleb stuttered, clearly unsure of himself, trying to force a poor smile. "I - it's - I can't really talk about it..." His voice trailed off, and his face lost all expression before collapsing into something worried. "I ain't - um, even talked to Coach Swope - I - I dunno..." John Thomas would never forget it - could never forget it, the fire that was lit under him to protect this precious jewel, this angel in flesh, that no matter what would happen to him he would be there and he would heal his every wound. They had barely met when John Thomas dropped his hand from Caleb's shoulder, leaned in, whispering: "You can tell me anything, okay Caleb? Anything - anything at all. I'm your coach, right?" Caleb's eyes seemed to search him, and John Thomas found himself with an erection growing in his pants - how easy this was, how wild was his success! "It's - um--" A very small twinge of guilt came to John Thomas as he realized that he was using his own station as Caleb's coach to get close to him, to hopefully get sexual with him, that this was an entirely new galaxy of wrongness and he should be ashamed... "It's real complicated si--uh, Coach, it's--" ...but he wasn't - as Caleb kept hesitating he leaned in closer, an action that pressured the boy as well as comforted him. "See, I been real w-worried, and my dad don't really--" "Do you need to call me?" Caleb frowned - even when he looked upset he was still precious. "Ain't that against the rules?" He thought for a second. "Some - some_rules, gotta be--" "Don't worry about that," John Thomas pressed gently. "If you need someone to talk to - I can do that." He smiled some. "It's important to have someone to talk to." Caleb seemed to consider the idea before nodding quickly. "O-okay - I have - um, I have an Ntelos phone--" "Me too - free nights and weekends." John Thomas chuckled, and Caleb, taking the cue, forced a giggle back. "Lemme give you my number, okay? And you call me tonight, or - anytime you wanna talk." He lifted his eyebrows. "Okay, Caleb?" Caleb nodded, a confidence he clearly did not have, but was trying to summon. "O-okay, Coach." John Thomas waited until everybody had left that night, and, alone in the parking lot, hidden by the shadows of his lonely Explorer's interior, he masturbated furiously in his excitement and his euphoria - in the afterglow, trying not to get the cum on the seat leather, he sat, wracked with something that approached, but never became, the guilt he should have felt earlier that evening...it was beaten back by waves of selfishness, of finally deciding that this fifteen year old boy was worth the Hell that would surely come. And Hell would come indeed - the first licks of its fires burning John Thomas' soul that very night. His phone vibrated in its cupholder and John Thomas started violently at the noise - he looked down and on the caller ID, and there he was. He smiled, a happy, nervous laugh escaping him - he swiped to answer. "Hey, Caleb!" "H-hey Coach." "Are you okay? Talk to me." "Y-yeah, I'm--" There was a silence, a series of sad, short breaths. "N-no, I ain't - f-fine at all." A feeling John Thomas had not expected - like having a bucket of ice water poured overtop him, a plunging feeling of _genuine concern - overtook him. "Well, I - I'm - I'm here, Caleb. I'm here for you." "You promise, Coach?" "Yes--" He sighed. "Yes, yes of course. We only known each other a little, but--" He did not hesitate, did not stop to feel the first sparks of the flames of what would send him to Hell. "I'm your coach - you can trust me." "Okay - okay. Here goes." And then he told him, he let it all out. For some months now Caleb had noticed a change in himself - he had already gone through puberty, but suddenly he felt, he knew, that things were happening to his body that were not at all normal for a boy his age...or any age. His foreskin was thickening, losing its elasticity, and bit by bit it was attaching itself to his lower belly...but worse than that, way worse, was how his cock was growing backward-facing spines on it - like a cat's, John Thomas noted from somewhere. It was easy to hide, for now, but how much longer until something weirder, something less easy to hide started happening to him? And why was this happening at all? What he did do to deserve this? John Thomas listened to it all, gripping the phone so tight he was sure he could bend it. This was unreal - this was almost too hot, too sexual, for mere human words. And yet at no point could he ever tell Caleb to stop. Caleb's dad tried to seem interested in Caleb but really he wasn't and he never was...it was always his business - cars and selling cars and sales orders and clients and money - and the possibility of getting back together with his first wife, who divorced him twenty or more years ago because back then he had been a cokehead and a piece of shit by his own admission. If anything, Caleb had raised himself, and so John Thomas was filling a void - so John Thomas rationalized - but their relationship was incestuously paternal even when they weren't related by blood. Caleb was John Thomas' son as well as his sin. All of this was why Caleb was so shy, why he was so unsure and so fragile and so brittle inside himself, the soul that quivered within his body that nobody seemed to want to love - but he, John Thomas, he loved him, as unequal as it was, as much as it reeked of taboo, as much as it posed the perfect advantage to take. That night that Caleb told him all that became the first of many nights Caleb would call him, after practice or not, and vent to him, everything, everything about his body and his dad and his future - everything. Suddenly, problematically, John Thomas found himself caring far more about Caleb past the perfect body, the freakish penis. There was a blurring, somewhere, of whether he had just wanted to get in Caleb's pants, or whether he wanted to marry him - but this called to mind an awful question, whether would he grow tired of Caleb when he aged, when he became a man and shed the morning's dew of youth that was still fresh upon him. Never, John Thomas thought. Caleb had passed into something eldritch and abominable, a disease of the blood after all of a few hours. Caleb had told nobody else - he was afraid to, deathly afraid, that they'd treat him differently, that he'd be branded a freak. "Do ya think I'm - I'm a freak?" The question cut into John Thomas and gave him pause - his agitation was so great that Caleb thought he had hung up: "C-Coach? Hey - hey are you--?" "Caleb, I - I would never think you were a freak. From what you told me--" He paused, and he should have chosen his words more carefully, but he didn't. Stunned silence - then a little cry. "Are - are - are you sure?" John Thomas shut his eyes, trying to steady himself against his own emotions - he nodded, and though Caleb couldn't see it, it was giving him a kind of self-affirmation to answer back. "Yes. Yes I'm sure." And then Caleb cried, again, harder - a sob of relief, of joy, of a trust that John Thomas had earned only because he had wanted to abuse it. From then on, John Thomas was utterly enslaved to Caleb, his every word, his every fear, taken personally so that John Thomas would be his protector, his defender, his vassal, their deep talks over the phone a nightly, expected occurrence, always ending the same way: "Night, Caleb." "Night, Coach." ...yet all the while John Thomas could not connect how totally fucked up it was that a boy his age would make the claim that parts of him were turning cat-like, feline. Never once did he seek medical help for Caleb and Caleb never once sought medical help for himself - John Thomas chose to believe Caleb from the hints that he saw, the glowing in his eyes that would hypnotize him when they struck the light just such a way, the teeth that really did look a little sharper. This way, they both knew he was changing, they both knew there was some kind of insidious second puberty, but they just let it happen, let this hideousness boil over and steam. Maybe because John Thomas could recognize this was changing Caleb's inner as well as his outer body - how horny the boy was getting, how frankly sexual his talks with John Thomas were becoming, pushing the boundaries farther and further. Caleb would say things like how his penis was getting bigger, the barbs getting sharper, how they felt against his fingers and how his shaft seemed firmer, like a bone was growing inside it, how his whole cock was now attached to his belly in a kind of sheath, how his tongue seemed rougher than before and his teeth sharper too...all because John Thomas pressed him to say it. He knew that it all made Caleb more self-conscious and more shy and even less likely to speak up, but with the result that it made John Thomas all the more his mentor, his secret-keeper, his guardian, in the absence of his completely absent father. John Thomas was being selfish again, had found a way to be even more grotesquely selfish than before, but he justified it in his head, that anyone else would treat him as a freak - just like Caleb had said. John Thomas the only one who could really be trusted with this - right? What he would never, ever admit - in other, deeper, more unexplored parts of John Thomas' psyche, having a monster boy made his own love for boys just that less monstrous. In the present - only a month after, maybe - John Thomas was shaking again, his breath ragged again, his hands to his head in existential agony...again. John Thomas knew it would happen somehow, but did Caleb? Was Caleb always gay and was just too inexperienced to know what being gay meant? It was inevitable, it was inevitable like some wars are inevitable, a collision course that everyone sees and everyone watches but nobody stops, nobody says a word. What a stupid way to think about it - it was just Caleb, it was just John Thomas, it was just the locker room, one night after practice, just them, awkward, tense, inside a bubble neither were too strong to burst. The rest of the boys had left but John Thomas had chosen to stick around, knowing Caleb always undressed last, so nobody could see his changing, morphing genitals - he had come in the locker room and rounded the corner, Caleb was naked, his smooth, muscular ass turned toward him. He turned around with a start - the light caught his eyes, the green glitter appeared and vanished in the space of a breath. John Thomas' heart wouldn't stop beating, any harder and it would have leapt out of his bones and flopped to the floor. Caleb turned and kept the towel he was using clutched, tightly, to his chest. "C-Coach!" he exclaimed. "I didn't - I mean I--" "Caleb - buddy, listen, I think we need to talk." He saw Caleb's ears perk up, unsure. "Wha - whattya mean?" "You've, um--" He swallowed hard, surprised at his own apprehension. "Well all this time, you've told me about - how you've been changing, and--" "Oh, y-yeah, I mean--" "I'd like to see it." Caleb stared at him, his face turning a rosy pink. "C-Coach, I really--" "I wanna see it," John Thomas insisted, willing his heart not to burst then and there. "With - with my own eyes." Caleb turned away, his bare rear still bare - he shuddered, in his virgin purity he was a perfect animal already, in his nakedness he was a work of divinely-inspired art. He hung his head - he shook his head, halfway - before looking back up and, as John Thomas had done, swallowed, hard. "Ya - ya promise ya won't f-freak out or nuthin?" John Thomas nodded his sincerity. "I promise." Caleb shut his eyes - he hesitated, he hesitated again, and then, in one motion, threw away the towel - coming forward to show the only man in the world he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he could trust, who he really was. The sight made John Thomas salivate. It was indeed something bestial, something animal on a human being - a heavy, plump sheath, fleshy and thick, attached to his lower abdomen, just before his stomach. Blooming from it was fine, barely noticeable hairs - grey, the color of stormclouds that rest aside a mountaintop. John Thomas fell to his knees - Caleb started, but John Thomas jerked his head up to silence him. "I want - I'd like to touch it." Caleb looked at him with a fear of something new, a fear of the dark in the light. John Thomas' mind was an absolute blank, his decision absolute - he nodded, once more, his decision. "I - I - o-okay..." His cock stirred in its sheath, bigger, bigger, until its sharp tip peaked through his heavy foreskin. John Thomas watched it, his own penis tenting inside his jeans - he reached out, he held it in his hands, paralyzed with an ecstatic need for it, the cock, the boy, the beautifully demure animal caught in front of him. His eyes were still locked on it when he heard Caleb whimper: "I know, I know it - it looks so w-weird--" "No," John Thomas said, barely a word at all, dying on his breath as he spoke it. "It looks awesome." "Coach? What are you--?" John Thomas could take it no longer - he needed this, he needed this more than however dire the consequences would be, he needed this and he needed it right now. Acting on raw instinct, John Thomas parted his lips to let his tongue drag up the side of Caleb's growing shaft, lapping at his foreskin before he took in the head of his cock. When was the last time he had done this? Years - years ago. His sexuality was still stuck in the pathology of his first times being sexual with anybody...but you never forget how to do it. Not ever. As Caleb let out stifled moans, John Thomas indulged himself: he kissed the cockhead, pushing back the foreskin with his lips, letting his tongue lap across the underside. He took his time, slurping back and forth over the fat ridge of Caleb's felinid phallus. Caleb let out a strange noise - like a hiccup, his palms splayed against the lockers - it coalesced around a single word: "Coooach!" Caleb's dick thickened in John Thomas' mouth to become fully hard, stretching his lips to keep it in. He knew what was coming - what Caleb had said, that little article on feline reproduction he'd read just in case Caleb was lying - he knew what was coming and he braced for it, the barbs that flared across the head of his penis. They were smooth when Caleb suckled them, only flaring out in sharp strike when he drew back. He knew what it would do to Caleb just from an educated guess - and he was right: his taut, youthful body became near-flush to the lockers in euphoria. "Coach - oh - oh God I love you Coach, I love--" The phrase made John Thomas' heart implode with happiness but he had mere seconds to enjoy it: Caleb lost control, John Thomas' mouth too perfect a home for his cock - he let himself give an immodest cry as he spurt his semen, greyish and smelling weird already, his second puberty making what should have been his sweet boyhood instead something wild already, something animal already, musky and woodsy and strange...and delicious. John Thomas swallowed it all, greedily, hungrily - all to absorb this boy, all to be in union with this perfect demi-human creature. Caleb's knees grew weak, his legs threatened to collapse and in a spare second he did - John Thomas caught him, the boy's oversize, almost-feline dick belching out one last glob of grey, musk-laden cum. Now they were truly alone - together, in each others' arms. It was hard for John Thomas to ever wrap his head around how good pool chlorine smelt, aromatic chemical cleanliness - it had been implanted in his head from the time he knew what sexuality was, over a decade ago: frankly, unapologetically sexy, the scent of boys, wet boys with ripe, polished physiques stretched onto lithe frames, dripping damp with that caustic chemistry-set that passes for recycled pushed-suction water. It mingles with the steam of hot showers and passes cloud-like into the hollow reverberations of voices, teasing youthful laughter, there in the locker room, the percussion of shutting metal doors a constant rhythm...few would ever compare it to a chemically engineered kyphi, a voluptuous incense of a fabled harem brought to the Industrial Age - and yet:_the steam, the laughter, the echo, it all merges into a solitary image of drugged erotica. Caleb's hair smelled like it. John Thomas inhaled it, letting himself linger to savor it, so exquisite...his cock was hard and his inherent guilt - being here, alone, in the locker room, pressed against each other, with this perfect boy, younger than he yet separated by the impassable gulfs of high school, college, _being his coach - burning, still, a glowing ember that would not die. He pulled back - Caleb had risen, nudging him away, standing once more back against the locker, his breaths were small and worried, the panting of a fearful animal, the animal John Thomas knew he truly was and swore to protect, swore to hide away. Yet - his eyes were bright and liquescent and they glimmered, the eyeshine, the noctilucence of the prowling cat inside him, only because it was dim enough, only because the light struck the surface just right, green star-gems plucked from a night sky. Then as now he was grizzle-bearded, still wearing his Northface jacket, fleece, that brushed against Caleb's bare skin in the growing chill, surrendering to the still cold a short distance outdoors. They regarded each other like this - John Thomas in a fever of arousal, his throat dry, heart pumping deafeningly through his ears, and Caleb, his lips pressed together, an enigmatic expression, breaths through his nose coming in blasts of quiet panting. "Are you okay?" John Thomas whispered. Caleb nodded, briskly. "Yeah - yeah." And he smiled - a faint, hesitant thing, unsure of its own existence. His lower lip quivered. "That - that was really - I never knew s-sex could be--" John Thomas smiled warmly. "I'd do anything for you Caleb." "I - y-ya told me that and--" Caleb giggled, but there was a choke of emotion in the middle. "I - I - I love ya, Coach..." A flush of warmth, a squeezing euphoria around his heart - John Thomas let his hand come up and gently scratch the back of the boy's head, pulling it down, a commanding but comforting action, to his chest, to feel the beat of the cardiac rhythm that sang in blood for him, Caleb, the most beautiful boy in the world. "I love you too, Caleb," John Thomas whispered - and then, with a self-effacing chuckle: "And don't call me Coach." He heard Caleb giggle, his face buried between John Thomas' arms... ...the memory hurt him - physically, physically hurt him, a sore that would not stop oozing. The bottle of Jack clinked off the desk, he pressed to his lips to it - warm, unrefrigerated, the taste hit him, the Southern bitterness that defined his family only recently, that defined him in this too-cheerful Wytheville motel room completely, now, right now. John Thomas swallowed hard, he slammed the bottle down, and his bleary eyes - damp with bourbon, salty with tears - blinked wetly as he saw the view, a scattering of sodium-vapor streetlights that shone drowsily on a near-empty parking lot, and beyond it the blank voids of I-81, a dark river interrupted by the muted roar of cars, tractor-trailers. "Caleb..." he murmured under his breath - the familiar feeling, his chest tightening, eyes shutting, fresh tears that reeked of fermented corn streaming thickly down his cheeks. That first time in the locker room was how it all began for them to have a sexual relationship - a passionate, decadent orgasmic trainwreck that neither could, or wish, to stop. John Thomas ate Caleb's cum as some people would eat a rare delicacy - the rank woody musk, thick and virile and grey like a rare and delicious gravy. He'd go down on him often, too often, his stomach would hurt, as he sat in traffic some mornings, again, he'd burp, he'd taste Caleb's cum and shut his eyes and breathe heavy and wonder if any of the perfectly normal, perfectly conventional people all around him could ever guess - could ever guess what kind of nightmare lay before them, in utter plain sight. John Thomas now remembered - he did not want to remember, but he remembered - the first time they really made love, the outrageous violation of the coach-athlete trust in the name of what they thought was something purer than what it really was... "Am I hurting you?" Caleb had whispered, and then he must have felt the trickle of blood, because John Thomas heard him whimper, the sound of a cringe screwing up his face. "T-too - too much?" "No Caleb..." John Thomas murmured back. "You're fine." He wasn't, of course - his asshole was, this time and every time, raw as Hell when they'd fuck. Caleb's cock too large, too sharply barbed to ever be comfortable - each time was agony, each time was ecstasy but brutality also, the way of the cougar, wildcat, catamount, in the Appalachian wilds beyond their hills and into the mountains. But John Thomas kept doing it - kept submitting, it felt good to submit, knowing his body was relieving this boy of wild animal stresses and urges that were tearing him apart, knowing that this would keep Caleb closer, closer to him... ...he clutched the bottle of Jack so hard it felt like it would shatter in his hand, and he wanted it to, he wanted it to slice open his skin and let him bleed, let Caleb - the boy, the cat, the smell, the memory - bleed out of him, pool down into an anonymous puddle and let him die in peace. But it didn't. He slammed the bottle down, arose from the tasteful motel chair, deep breaths, more tears, and paced back to the hotel's dresser - the large mirror caught his reflection, startling him when he saw it. It was him - what passed for him, these days. He was unkempt, he was gross, he could have been homeless - the same wild, crazy stare, that bums have, the same one, possessed his face, indwelt in his eyes, it left him changed, changed like Caleb had changed...the same man, the same boy, but with some inner taint, some noxious creeping poison, that was making him something, someone else. His plain VT shirt was matted with stains - some of them alcohol, some of them food, some of them vomit, because he had been drinking til he puked but he was also puking on his own, and he didn't want to think it was symptomatic of something else other than the booze, but maybe - Jesus, maybe, maybe... ...it was his shirt that told people where he went - how normal, how successful he was. Not the monster he lived a double-life as. Not the monster he longed to live with. Monster - should he really call Caleb that? His Biology classes at Tech, the absolute best in the Commonwealth - or so went the reputation - never prepared him for falling in love with a teenager who was mutating with a second puberty. Those classes, the people in them, the professors...they were a vanished blur that he badly wished he could remember - something about mutation, something about evolution...Hell, a lot of people around here didn't even believe in evolution but here it was, something, something happening to this boy in late-stage puberty, a riot of alien hormones that was causing him to evolve - but to evolve into what? A man? A cat? A cat-man? What the fuck had his mother been? What had Coach Swope meant - that witch - was Caleb's mother really...? Whatever it was, it wasn't normal, Caleb knew it wasn't normal and that is why he came to John Thomas in the first place, John Thomas tried not to alarm him by just how really fucking abnormal it really was...all he could do was listen, listen as intently as he could and then let Caleb's sexual urges overtake him again, the shortness of breath and the hard swallowing and the weird low noise in his throat that sounded like a purr, then here it would come, John Thomas would feel that equally abnormal need to let Caleb use his body, again... It got more and more dangerous, less and less controlled - each day passed as something truly twisted, John Thomas could never shake that sinking, wretched feeling this was actually bestiality, not to say something to quite literally fuck his career into an undiggable hole, but he kept on with it, day after day after day, and why? Really, dammit to Hell, why did he just - just go along with it? Why he couldn't ever say no...? ...because - because he was in love with Caleb. Deeply, passionately, obsessively in love with him, his name whispered out in ecstasy in his one bedroom apartment, his sheets stained nightly - the age difference wasn't that big, what of it? Couldn't he go public? Couldn't he tell someone else and not have Coach Swope's suspicious eye linger on him - just - long enough to make him think he knew, he really knew, the truth? Whatever anybody, teachers, parents, students, coaches whispered about, if they cared at all and if they whispered at all and Caleb was so shy and lonely they probably didn't care either - whatever anybody whispered about they never knew how deep it was going, how weird it was getting. As Caleb kept on changing, his symptoms getting weirder - soft hair coming up on his legs that he'd shave off and then watch rapidly grow back after a day or two - he confided to John Thomas that now, now he was getting afraid, fearful of what was happening to him, fearful enough that he thought if he went to the doctor they'd do awful things to him, and he was probably right, so he had to just keep it all to himself, and not tell anybody. Anybody but John Thomas. He was already shy and Pulaski County High was not exactly known for educators that were compassionate or observant - only John Thomas, he felt like, and then only at practice, saw how much more withdrawn Caleb had become, even more shy than he was already. When he was out in public John Thomas would watch with a steadily growing apprehension the furtiveness_in Caleb's actions, the flash of discomfort when his roughening tongue - which would be scraping John Thomas' ass, making it bleed worse, _what have I gotten myself into? - would brush against the still-tender roof of his mouth...the reluctance in going back to the locker room after practice because he'd have to put on clothes over his sopping-wet jammers for fear anyone would see what he looked like naked - and afterwards Caleb would complain over the phone to John Thomas how weird he felt, how he felt hot and would get sweaty when they turned on the heat in now that it was December and it was getting way too airish and chilly, how he'd get angry, so angry, for no reason at all, and then cry about it alone at home... ...it occurred to John Thomas in the back of his mind that if he hadn't seen Caleb's penis, if he hadn't watched Caleb's eyes turn green in the right light he'd think that Caleb could just be faking all this, a kid acting out because his dad never really paid him a whole lot of mind with his car dealership business and his mom dead in circumstances his dad apparently paid a_lot_ of money to hush up. Other kids noticed his eyes too, John Thomas overheard, but Caleb had lied to them saying he had to wear contact lenses now for some reason he never elaborated on - it was easy to lie that way, it was impossible to lie the way that John Thomas and Caleb were now. They should have been way more gullible. John Thomas' parents were from New York and they had moved to Christiansburg awhile back, he was born on Virginian soil but Yankee, foreigner blood trickled out his asshole every time he let Caleb penetrate him - Virginia, this part of Virginia that gets darker and spookier and weirder than the D.C. suburbs or out east like Richmond in the Autumn and Winter, never made much sense to him...maybe the other kids, maybe even Coach Swope, had a better understanding, even a tiny bit, of just what in the fuck was going on around them all. Now - back in the present, once again - he blinked. He blinked and the lights, the lights outside in the parking lot gave off a keening edge to their illuminating beams and he realized how drunk he was, how his hand was shaking and he was unsteady on his feet and he just - no, he should sit down, he should sit back down in the chair, another drink, maybe, something, something to take the fucking edge off... ...he blinked again and he could see I-81, the inky stretch of nothing that came from nowhere, vanished to nowhere. Beyond it were hills - forests - mountains. Now he remembered - but why now, why like this? - now he remembered awhile back he had, at Tech's library, bored and waiting on a tutor, picked up one of those tawdry collections of regional ghost stories published in the 80s that are played up to be spine-tingling and_bone-chilling_ but are really just chaotic dumps aimed at kids. He'd thumbed through it - it was all about spooky weirdness localized to Virginia and West Virginia, creatures that supposedly crawled all around the hills - forests - mountains of these parts. He had thought at the time it was sourced to some bumpkin bullshit scrawled down by gullible anthropologists who didn't understand what basic science was - Virginia never made sense because Virginians_never made sense, with their hushed rumors all the time about wraiths that haunt shopping malls, and giant monster catfish the size of Volkswagens that live in lakes, and loping naked things that eat corpses. One of the monsters - was a cat, or looked like a cat, but it wasn't really a cat, didn't sound like a cat, and that's the great thing about the nonsense people believe, they can't really agree on any of it, just that it _maybe might be something. Back in the present, John Thomas took his hand and buried his face in it, elbow digging into the table. He was thinking - he was thinking, he was making a connection, his eyes were shut and he was trying, sunk in a misery that had no name, to not really know as much as he knew, to not understand as much as he understood. Tailypo - mountain monsters that looked like cats and had glowing eyes and weird tails and scared the first settlers totally shitless...cats, cats that were bigger and stranger and meaner than any big cat out here, mountain lion or cougar or puma. They were monsters in the original sense, gruesome and ugly and horrible. Like - Caleb - had become. John Thomas shuddered, he slouched back in the chair - that wasn't fair, Caleb was still Caleb, he was still precious and still beautiful and he couldn't be, couldn't be a monster, even when...even when he started to act different, was different... Caleb had changed, and then Caleb had changed - he turned obsessive, his need for sex was unquenchable, his need to be around John Thomas and with John Thomas the stuff of a sick, sad kitten - abnormally clingy, disturbingly close. He felt like at any minute Coach Swope would do a whole lot more than let his gaze linger on he and Caleb, that he would have to do some explaining, but it never happened - never. If they - anybody, anybody at all - only knew... One of the last times they were together, it was a motel room like this one, and Caleb had been insatiable - he had fucked John Thomas like he meant it, like there was something in him he needed to get out, raw and savage and brutal and John Thomas knew he was bleeding badly from it but didn't care, he was enthralled, the barbed cock wounding him, making his hole suitable only, only for Caleb. But then - and then they had taken a break, they had been cuddling and John Thomas had let Caleb's teeth, that had grown much sharper, more feline, graze his neck...there was a vampiric thrill when he drew blood. He could hide his teeth, he could clip away his fingernails that were getting sharper and longer no matter how hard and how much he tried - but now - here, with John Thomas, he didn't have to. John Thomas saw the change in Caleb's face - it got serious, it got concerned, there was determination drawn up in his mouth. "Caleb, what's - what's wrong?" Caleb hesitated, hesitated badly, before he could answer. "I want--" he stopped, he swallowed hard, and he blinked, and in the fragment of time it took him to do so the light hit his eyes again, just right, and the green nebula-like shimmer overtook it: cat's eyes, glowing in the dark, radiant in the light. "I - I want--" "What do you want, Caleb?" John Thomas shifted underneath him, adjusting in the covers, the discomfort he felt earlier getting worse. Caleb knelt his head down so that his mouth was level to John Thomas' ear: "I want - to - make you - pr-pregnant." John Thomas felt his blood run freezing cold, and he pushed Caleb off of him, flinging him backward - the boy corrected himself and straightened, gripping the sheets of the bed tightly to stare at John Thomas as he rose somewhat against the pillow, agitated, his eyes widening in strange, gnawing fear. "Caleb, what are you talki--" "I don't know," Caleb whispered back, his voice low but shrill with what sounded like panic. "I just, I - I keep thinking about it, I keep--" "I'm a guy, Caleb," John Thomas interrupted coldly. "I can't get pregnant." Now the boy hung his head, his breaths deepening. "I - I know - I guess I know, but I--" His head jerked up again and his eyes, which glowed again, brighter than before, the last thing a small animal sees in the wild before the cougar eats it up. "I - I keep seeing it, seeing - you - l-like that, w-with your stomach big and - stuff - when I..." His lip trembled. "M-masturbate..." John Thomas felt a chilling pall spread from his head to the rest of his body. The worst part - the part that made him shuffle awkwardly away, scoot to the edge of the bed, not even able to look at the boy anymore - was that John Thomas believed him. After everything he had seen and after everything he had been put through, put himself through, with Caleb, for Caleb - what other choice did he have? Involuntarily, back in the present, back in reality - gritting his teeth, feeling tears ooze out of his eyes - he pressed a hand to his belly, the little pooch there from being somewhat out of shape but Jesus, Jesus Christ was it hardening? Was something in there? Was Caleb right? And what would it be, if he was? Another thing like whatever Caleb was - Tailypo, or something worse, a mountain monster just like - yes, fuck, why bother denying it any fucking more? Just like Caleb was. As though his name were some dread power to summon something, John Thomas heard it - a sound at his door, on the wood, something at the surface, on the outside. Scratching. He leapt up out of his chair, the bottle of Jack knocking to the ground, the whole room awash in the acrid smell of the fermented corn. His eyes were wide as they could go, a cold sweat bursting out of his skin. Scritch-scritch-scratch-scratch. Quiet, deliberate noises. Mocking noises. Like what was on the other side knew that John Thomas was listening, it knew what John Thomas was feeling. John Thomas breathed in, breathed out, deep and rattling breaths of a terror that struck to the utmost primal fears of all humans: darkness, devourment, harm untold, a song of blood spurting from the rankest, most ancient parts of mankind's imagination. This was how the old man felt in the Tailypo story - this was how John Thomas had felt all night, hiding, hiding from Caleb who had kept calling and texting and texting and calling and wouldn't leave him the fuck alone, so John Thomas had smashed his iPhone and holed himself up trying to escape, like a little prey-animal trying to avoid the inevitable... This was how the old man felt in the Tailypo story - an outsider, stalked, cornered, by a relentless, purely Appalachian predator. They never found the old man, in the story - they'd never find John Thomas, either, Caleb too. He hadn't shown up to practice in a week, same as Caleb - it would get the attention of somebody, they would incompletely piece this mystery together and nothing would ever come of it, no evidence, no trail, just two people that, for no reason at all, disappeared into the night like a sliver of moonlight in shadow. He sprang to the door, he swung it open, he stumbled out into the hall. Nothing. He stood there, still panting, still drowned in adrenaline, that it took seconds, minutes, to realize he was alone. Nothing. There was nothing there. In his abject desire to still be Caleb's he had imagined the scratches, had imagined the noises - he had been the hunter, but his depravity and his neurosis had made him the game. He sank to the floor, next to his open hotel room, his chest heaving, and in his drunken oblivion with nobody to hear and nobody to see - wept. Caleb was still out there - somewhere, somewhere close, he could feel it, he didn't know why but he could feel it. He rose - shaky, unsteady, a rickety mess of a man - but he rose, he took the door to his hotel room and he slammed it shut, he staggered down the hall, to the stairwell, down - down - each step an impossibility in his drunken stupor but he did it, eventually he reached the bottom and he straightened himself up, he combed his hair over with his hand, he would nod at the nice lady at the front desk and make it seem like it was the normal fucking thing in the world he was leaving the hotel at this time of night and in this kind of weather in nothing but a messy shirt, jeans, and shoes. Good for him - good for him for still pretending to be as normal as possible. Still. From the hotel he went outside, he stumbled about the parking lot, aimlessly, looking, searching, for something - someone - it was Caleb, it had a name and it had a face but he was so drunk, so desperate, all his senses misfiring and betraying him, that it lacked shape, lacked words. His eyes fell on the hill next to the hotel and he sprinted toward it, stopping to catch his breath, unwilling to feel the snow crunching and melting into his shoes, biting them with the cold, the breeze harsh and chapping on his face - the hill hosted some woods that got unusually deep only some yards inside it, and he ventured into them with the same blind instinct. Deeper, deeper - he moaned aloud as he smacked against a tree, crying out as he fell to the ground, the snow, the ice, the dirt, piercing the skin of his face. He breathed like a dragon, steam from his mouth and his nose...in his drunken fancy he thought that his tears - for his life, his whole fucking life - would freeze to his skin. The night was silent - no insects, no animals, that dull roar of cars and trucks a distant note of a dying dream. "Coach." John Thomas yelled out in panicked surprise - he whirled around, thrashing on the snow, this way, that way - until he saw him. "Coach..." From behind an elder pine tree whose evergreen branches made whitened brushes with refrozen snow, he appeared - Caleb, the boy who had been Caleb, now Caleb the monster, Caleb the animal, Caleb the Appalachian, Caleb the Tailypo. From above the waist he was nominally human, his shoulders and arms dusted with greyish fur that mingled in with the blond he had been born with - his fingernails were long, sharp claws, cruel and ivory like a crescent moon. His pupils, his irises, the whole of his eyes had been swallowed by the devilish green-glitter eyeshine, glowing bewitchedly in the dark - his ears were long and pointed, elfin and eldritch, tipped, like a lynx, with fur. His body was, somehow, even more toned, even more perfect than it had been - every sinew, every lean muscle, perfectly flexed, perfectly scuplted. But below the waist he was all an animal - neverminding his penis, which had grown even more, a feline lance with razor barbs that jutted well above his navel, bright pink like rose quartz above fat, plump, fur-covered testicles. His feet, which had devolved into something like paws had, like his hands, long, sharpened claws. And then there was his tail - easily the size of him, four feet long if it was an inch, gorgeously plumed and dexterous, stirring up a frigid breeze as it wagged...Tailypo, Tailypo, now I've got my Tailypo. John Thomas stared at him, trembling, shaking with bewilderment. This was Caleb's final form. He would transform, he would change no further - he had finished his second puberty, and he was beautiful. "Where - where've ya been? I been lookin for ya--" "What the fuck," John Thomas managed flatly, his throat dry, his lips parched in his maelstrom of disbelief. "Coach - hey - it's just me, it's just Caleb--" "What the fuck is going on," John Thomas repeated. "This can't - this can't be - real--" Yet it was real - this was no dream, this was no inebriated revelry, this was the blurring of reality as it truly exists: the dark side of normal human existence come into being, with the presence of a hidden, endangered creature that for too long was thought of only as a legend. There was a painful silence between them, which Caleb at last broke: "Ya - d-didn't answer, Coach - I th-threw away my phone, ya wouldn't answer--" Now an unthinkable, balled-up outrage built inside him - a fury at himself, at Caleb, at his sexuality, at his life, at every bad decision that ended up in such a way to climax exactly like this. "Be - cause - dammit to Hell I - I - I_want you to _leave me the fuck alone!" He screamed it, he flung forth every last bit of anger he could muster - but he stopped, he stopped as he saw the shock, the flash of sadness appeared on Caleb's face: "No - n-no way, Coach - that's not true..." John Thomas shut his eyes tight and jammed his teeth together so Caleb wouldn't hear him sob - it didn't work, the sound came out and he too sounded like an animal, him, a cornered, wounded animal. And then, high-pitched, ashamed, an apologetic squeak, came his answer: "I know." He felt Caleb leap upon him - they went backward, he crashed into the snow, Caleb atop him, his fangs bared, glinting, pearlescent, in the half-light of the woods. "Then come - with me!" he growled, at last the transformation complete in his voice, the shroud across the Moon, the human Caleb had been snuffed out. "N-no," John Thomas groaned. "Please, god, no--" John Thomas could hold it in no longer - the abject misery, the guilt, the wrenching anguish that had been killing him from the inside - he sputtered, shutting his eyes again, feeling the tears well up and push out behind his eyelids, the first heaves of unutterable sorrow making his chest do a slow bounce. How long Caleb held him down like this he could not be sure, for time did not seem to pass, as he felt the boy who had ruined him, who had taken him as his own outside of every acceptable parameter of health, morals, and decency - his body heat so fierce and so volatile it was like being pinned down by a dying ember in a mountain campfire. His breathes were pained, and through his quiet, restrained sobs - still in his tumult of drunken emotions, still in fear of being found and heard - he remained blind to everything, to the room, to Caleb and his rank, woodsy smell, to his future, his darkened, desolated future that, second by second as it ticked by, threw him into anguish...he was enslaved, he was a slave. All because he loved a boy... ...his thoughts were loudly interrupted by Caleb leaning down, snuffing harsh into his neck, smelling - smelling for something, for something specific. "Wha - w-wha--?" "I...I dunno either," Caleb murmured, hesitant, breathless, like he had been their first time in the locker room - but mystified, deeply entranced, at something that was reaching his nose, making his increasingly feral mind alive with some new purpose, new activity. Without warning he flung his arm backward, claws appearing where his nails were - Jesus Christ, they're retractable, like a cat's - and he dove to John Thomas' shirt, ripping it, tearing it, to little cloth bits, ruined, at only a few strokes, by his savagely efficient, newly feline claws. "What the fuck are you doing?!" John Thomas hollered - but Caleb ignored him. "I smell - I smell..." He pressed his hand to John Thomas' breast, where a pressure built - John Thomas writhing at the strange, uncomfortable sensation - until something, something liquid that caught the outside light in a sprinkling glow, erupted from his nipples. John Thomas' eyes flew open. Milk. The snow melting against the back of his shirt was not as cold as the hellacious iciness that slowed John Thomas' blood at that exact moment. "N-no--" he stammered. "No - God - no!" "It happened!" heard Caleb whisper triumphantly "It happened - I did it, I - I made you pregnant!" In his drunken hysteria John Thomas let out a high whimper that encompassed in his racing, directionless thoughts a thousand theories, a thousand ways that this could have happened - that it was just such a complete coincidence he had met a half-human, half-Tailypo, a witch's son, and by an agency of biology that was clearly witchcraft, clearly nighted in the understanding of warlocks and alchemists, he, a male, was now pregnant with this boy's offspring. But all that came out of his mouth was a long, low denial of this reality, as unreal as it was and forever had been: "Noooooo..." He went limp, playing possum, stalked by a cat - he felt himself go down to the snow and remain there, motionless, wishing for a swift death that he knew, now, would forever evade him. He felt Caleb pull him, deeper, through the snow, the frozen underbrush - he felt his skin scrape against the cold, and where blood was drawn, fur was growing, he felt it, he felt his pores, his follicles, replaced with what had been sleeping inside him for weeks, latent, ready, waiting for a night like tonight, a marriage night, a night to be wed. "C-Coach - Coach - s-so happy, Coach - we'll be together here forever, Coach - you - me - babies--" He wailed as loud as he could, knowing nobody would hear him, he would vanish and he would never be heard from again - still drunk, still sobbing, his jeans ripped off of him by Caleb's preternatural strength, going down with his ass up in the air in the sacred and profane behavioral lordosis of every cat, even this cat, the Tailypo, the mascot of the Appalachians as a wild land of wooded American nightmares. In doing so, he was enacting something that had been done before, maybe something that been done hundreds of times - people like him, freaks, outcasts, becoming more_freakish, _more outlandish, answering a call they did not know the language to but heard, heard loud, voiceless though it was. Caleb would have disappeared by himself, alone and lonesome - but he had somebody with him now, somebody forever, a devil to torment a sinner for eternity. "Love - you - C-Coach." "Caleb - Caleb--" The boy's name, John Thomas' venial sin's truest name, was the last human word he would utter. Now it was time: the mutagens in his body, hidden in Caleb's semen that would have gone mateless and alone but for how it had preyed upon John Thomas even when John Thomas thought it was he who was doing the preying - the mutagens all exploded, overriding his DNA, frying his genetics, rebirthing him into a species that he would help propagate for newer generations of doom. The last thing he ever did while he was still human - was laugh. His toenails and then his fingernails grew and grew and glinted in the Winter's moonlight as the claws they were becoming, his feet swelled and burst his shoes to become paws, his coccyx burst out of his skin like a wormy hairless tentacle before blooming with fur to become a long, long, fluffy tail - Tailypo, Tailypo, now I've got my Tailypo! His teeth jutted out of his skull, awkward, sharp, misshapen, as whiskers ripped their way out of his face - his cock lengthened to taper and blossom with barbs of its own, and then retreated to a newly forming sheath. Fur appeared everywhere, hot and insistent out of his skin, brownish with the grey streaks of his new species. His teats swelled obscenely, raised feminine mounds on his torso, new fur to dust them blooming out of his follicles, wetting with glistering lactation to nurse the bodeful devils growing inside his belly. He laughed. He laughed as Caleb tackled him, biting his neck in the marital bliss of cats as they, ruining the romance by shoving his penis deep inside, ripping John Thomas' hole with his barbs, he laughed as his vision blurred and his mind warped and faded into primitive urges to submit, to be claimed, to join the forest that had called Caleb home - he laughed, and laughed, and laughed, his voice rising to something hysterical, something panicked, the ecstasy of fear that the shaking hares feel when they see the maw of the cougar open and feel the dripping jowls above their helpless faces. And he laughed as Caleb let loose, on command, with the virility of youth that John Thomas' had always craved, a spurting fountain of feline semen, into his bowels - there would be more, more Tailypo that would be the familiars of witches that lived alone and unseen amidst the maddening crowd, and would exact revenge on outsiders and would foster forever the cautionary tales that little children wrongly and dangerously laugh at as just being spooky stories. It was good that Caleb was so ferocious, so endlessly horny, his need to breed impossible to sate - it was good he was so fertile, so virile, so large with such sharp barbs to help John Thomas ovulate - it was good for Caleb, that was all that mattered. He wouldn't stop - he would never stop. John Thomas in Hell: all the Caleb he wanted, forever, but trapped in a cycle of brutal sex and reproduction, over, and over, and over, and over. How could he stand it? His ass hurt so much, Caleb was fully evolved and fully changed, his thrusts were wild and they were violent, his barbs and blades ruining John Thomas' hole, making it hardly his at all, new territory for Caleb to claim. John Thomas' nipples spewed milk helplessly as he came a second, a third time, his new teats were unruly and uncontrollable in his throes of primal arousal, they would embarrass and humiliate him by trickling and swelling when Caleb would approach him with that erect, barbed cock - he was already groping and squeezing them now... ...it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Anything for him, anything for Caleb, anything to be accepted, anything to stop being a human monster, that's why this was so funny, so fucking funny it's like he could die and he was, he was dying, he was no human monster anymore, no fucked up pedophile that other humans called a monster, but a true monster to join with the boy he always wanted, and be himself, a freak though he'd be, less of a freak than he was. It was his last thought as a man, his first thought as a baleful Tailypo - this is how he, a foreigner, naturalizes, this is how the outsider in Appalachia finally finds his home. His laugh went upward in pitch until it was a ripping shriek, a cry of something transcendently wild he was unable to ever be as a man, and Caleb joined him, and together they echoed across I-81 into the world of men that John Thomas Anderson was now divorced from and Caleb Jones had never, ever, belonged to. At the least, at the very least, they could be happy now - as monsters in a monster's world, happier and more complete than they were before anywhere else, monsters in a human's world instead. _ _ Tailypo...? _ _ Tailypo! _ _ Now - I've got - my Tailypo!