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Must your light like mine be hidden, Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruin'd in my ruin, Thirsty, canker'd, goblin-ridden?_________ Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"

            It gets dark out here at night, real dark, a kind of dark that sets in your bones and weighs on them until they burst into a fine powdery dust, blown up back to the sky as glowing powder - the Milky Way sparkles with your old folks at home in Heaven, watching down on you.             This is still the land of the roots of Virginia, Ol Virginny, the Confederate flag is still flown out here without a second thought because here you are only tangentially American, if you were born here and were raised here it was hard to think of yourself as anything but Southern, as anything but Virginian: the ghosts of Jefferson and Lee are done homage here as the Shang Chinese once did for their heavenly emperors. Living here is individualism nourished and nurtured by the low roll of the mountains that fade into hills, lush and sumptuous with the yield of farmers' crops.             Deo vindice - and that's the final word on it.             The Lake has made outsiders a common sight out here and every now and again one of them will go missing or they'll die in strange, unaccountable circumstances - sometimes their mystery gets solved but most times it don't. The locals shrug - there is the perfunctory police investigation, the requisite flurry of gossip, life goes on.             The hills never change.             That is not to say that out here dwell cruel or ignorant people, these rural folk in that part of Virginia, which aches in the undying of the Blue Ridge. On the contrary, they will invite you in if you are lost, they will remark how thin you are and they will feed you, think nuthin of it honey, just doin what any good neighbor would. Unlike other parts of the South where the friendliness masks an inner malice, this is genuine, this is the way of the Baptists and the Dunkards, for Christ commanded: as thy neighbor so thyself - they gladly obey it. Respect them and they'll respect you, these good, simple people.             In the very early Fall, right before Labor Day, a delicious chill grips this land - it is the first taste of Autumn, the first cold, the temperature drops precipitously and the breeze blows crisp. From the heat of Summer this is an ecstasy, a refreshing breath to wrap and coat you, it is welcome always.             In the nighttime, with the furtive, snatching noises of the insects and the shrill gibbers of swooping bats that catch them, it is that breeze that comes to your mouth and nose. The air at once smells cleaner, blown off the forests that rise like vast waves on the hills and the mountains - and there is an excitement, a tingle, that is captured with it, it is time to put on hoodies and drink hot chocolate, it is football weather, nearly, for there remains the Indian Summer, Harvest Moon.             Year to year you can expect these things - for the hills never change, each season eases into the next, greeted and understood by those that call it home.             But even they cannot control what goes in their part of the world.             The clash of Old South and New is alive and loud here but it is not taken into consideration by those who know what crawls, what lurks - the second, darker world to the brightly-lit one that humans cozily accustom themselves to. This is a picture of bucolic charm, this is the dream of rural life, but this is still a place - and there are many places all over the world, really, some just as pleasant, some less so - you don't really want to get lost in             This is a place where it pays to heed those who have lived here much longer than you.             But the whole story may never be fully told, too buried, as it is, in myth and half-truth and legend for anything to be fully believed, fully proven. Do not scientists and men of knowledge laugh these things off as yokel superstition? And well they can! For their own world - falsifiability, direct observation, empirical study - does not apply here.             There are many places that it does not, cannot. The imagination of the rural mind is everywhere forever haunted by the haints that inhabit it, but they are so ephemeral that they only remain the peculiar story, the tall tale, the cryptic warning, the ill feeling one gets, one night, and chalks up to a bad fit of nerves...and little else.             Yet - yet.             Mysteries have, and shall, forever abound.             The Fall that followed the Summer that the famous astronaut, Tom Ryan, died amidst a flurry of publicity and tragedy, Daniel Hodges, age eighteen, of Hardy, Virginia, went missing, and was never found. Several months before that, during an unusually warm Springtime, old Roland Scruggs, a respected community elder, also disappeared - and, like Daniel, his fate was never satisfactorily ascertained.             Towards the very end of the investigations, when law enforcement finally gave up and declared them both legally dead, some of the old-timers whispered amongst themselves of the Wood Booger, a Bigfoot creature which some had claimed to have seen south of Rocky Mount lowing out strange cries at sunset. Some remembered what happened - or what didn't happen, since there were never firm conclusions - to Mike Fischer, out at the Lake, many years before. And still others wondered if the phantoms of the War Between the States thirsted for blood once again, agitated at having their memorials and monuments neglected and overlooked. Jubal Early is said to mount his horse on a certain night of the Full Moon and ride down the highway that bears his name with a speed that would stun the Devil - or, so they say.             Their guesses, as ridiculous as they would seem to outsiders, were as good as anyone else's - one day Daniel Hodges was alive, if looking a bit sick, and the next, he wasn't. And no one has satisfactorily explained why.             But that is because Daniel is simply in places nobody has bothered to look. And perhaps - after all - this is for the best.             Get a man from around these parts drunk enough - moonshine is his preferred drink, of course, but only if it is made within the county limits - and he will tell you about the Dirt Fellers who crawl in the red clay, and eat the things that once were people that lay sleeping in warm graves. They are corpse-gnawing nightmares made flesh, and once the soul has departed the body the loved ones that sleep in the Earth are their fair dinner. Granny-women up in the distant, taller hills and the mountains know what herbs to plant to deter them - ramp and ginseng seem to do it, with the offputting way they make the grass smell and taste - but without their aid any cemetery is fair for them to gain their noxious repast.             They seem to have been many places where people buried their dead, by no coincidence. The Arabs in the time before Mohammad called them ghûl, for so it was that they snatched and grabbed. And though it is hard to say what terrors that Al-Hazred saw in the Empty Quarter, surely now they are all gone.             But there was a tiny remainder in North America. They had planted themselves there, their fathers and fathers' fathers, from Europe, by way of the Umayyads, Libya, Arabia - scions of unspeakable couplings with the most depraved of humans, masquerading amongst the nobility and commonfolk alike. Their awful legacy would reappear, late in life, if it all, obscured deep in the blood.             There was a man in Boston who painted them, his name was Pickman - and he, helpless to the charm and sensuality of these most devilish of mortal creatures, that run about and amok in warrens and tunnels all up and down New England, eventually became one. Maybe you've heard of him.             For so long were they hunted as varmints and vermin and their underground nests flooded and demolished by encroaching settlement and agriculture. Tales of them circulate as folklore and secret passed-down legendry - if only because nobody else would believe they had really existed.             There used to be a whole family of them - inbred and moronic - that tormented a poor family out west from here, in a place called Hopkinsville, in Kentucky. Maybe you've heard of them too.             This time of year - that first lick of Fall, football weather - is the last time they like to stir, for they prefer it when it is still hot and the soil warm. They do not mind what phase of the Moon it is, but prefer the darkness and shrouds of trees and shrubbery to move about, until the night grows darkest and they can make their way to cemeteries and graveyards to do their awful work.                      Creatures like them are common but they are totally different: those nauseous loping scavengers that some unlucky Crackers in the twisted jungles of Florida devolved into, following the blackest of traditions imported from their Highland homes back across the Atlantic, and the prowling monstrosities with red eyes and black fur that maul cattle in the Dairylands of Wisconsin...they are similar, yes, but they are utterly different.             For the ghouls remain a thing unto themselves.             And the Dirt Fellers are a tribe apart.             Into this somnambulist world of half-hidden monsters was Daniel Hodges thrust - so was the stage set, for him to meet his doom - and delight.             The hinge of the Autumnal Equinox' door creaked like a haunted house in a deathly breeze, the feel of the air at first just ghostly, the haints getting restless in their hideaways, crows leering malevolent as they cawed raucously in their trees come sunset...             Daniel was walking home from a friend's house about a half-mile away that night, passing by a graveyard which had been long abandoned but cared for by some older folks in Rocky Mount.             He had lived here all his life, and though he had just graduated from high school and longed to go to college, the pressure was on him to follow in the family business of agriculture: his family owned a large corn farm that you can see by the road, the passing blur of the cornstalks hissing out a welcome to moving cars. He was sturdy, of moderate height, blackish-brown hair that tussled back shaggy, he had the build of a farmer's boy and the earnest greyish eyes of his family, the color of slate, the color of stormclouds.             He had an older sister, Rachel, much more bookish than he was, she studied at Randolph Macon, and she and Daniel were not close - Daniel was a good boy but his family was in a slow-motion trainwreck of falling apart, his daddy too often on the drink and his mama too meek to divorce him, and so he, as Rachel had consciously done some years before, would spend as much time as he could away from home.             When he had been smaller he had spent most of his time with an old family neighbor - the very same Roland Scruggs. Their relationship had been close and to all outside observances positive - Scruggs had taught him many skills that Daniel's father probably should have, how to string a bow and hunt with it and how to skin a buck and how to clean and gut a fish and snap peas and so on, and in many ways he acted as a second or even surrogate father for the boy.             But the true nature of what they shared was far darker, and far more insidious.             Since the time that Daniel had started going through puberty, they had been constantly sexual.             Scruggs was tall and bald, with a handsome face that gave him a ready sagaciousness, his body thin and wiry from years and years of working in tobacco fields - he owned only a modest plot and had done most of the work himself. He was remarkably fit for his age, and with this fitness came an addictive, irresistible need for constant orgasmic release.             No one - not a soul - knew of how Scruggs had initiated the boy into sodomy, how since Scruggs was seventy-two, and Daniel still shaking off the dew of boyhood at twelve, they had done all manner of perversion in intimacy and secrecy.             Scruggs lived alone in his smallish but well-appointed one-story brick house that commanded a large view of the road before the Hodges' own farm - there, in his isolation, could he indulge in all manner of sexuality that was abhorrent and disgusting.             There are some who would call what he and Daniel did the clear evidence of how mashed and messy a brain becomes when bludgeoned with the conformity of the Southern Baptist - but this would be too convenient, too Freudian. There are men of every stripe, every faith and creed and accident of birth who enjoy being filthy, for whom it is a thrill to be a devil, and it is their own right of privacy to do so - shall we also say they are crazy or deranged?             But this would never, could never, excuse doing these things with a teenage boy - no matter how mature Daniel looked for his age. But with the years, and the passing of Daniel's legal age of consent, even this became, much to the chagrin of surely any decent person, a nonissue.             Worse still, although Daniel was seduced into it, he found it was his passion also. And though he was very young, he consented, enthusiastically, with a gleeful curiosity, at every turn.             Scruggs was, save for these unforgivably animal vices, a man of honor, loyalty, strength, and hard work. It was not his fault - unseemly to say, yet who can deny it? - he had something in him that needed to be stroked and pushed and claimed, that had bid him flirt with sin in decades past but which now pulsed and screamed, deep within him, to be let out.             Something, you could say, that was actively defying the morality of all the humans around him - something that put him in a class of debauchees unto himself, in this quaint and loving Christian community which would have never guessed just what kind of man he really was.             Scruggs would fuck Daniel ferociously with his unusually well-endowed penis until the boy was loose and sore, and when he was too packed full of semen and had to release it, Scruggs would push his face into Daniel's ass and await, drooling, the expected release of cum and shit, eating every drop with his dexterous tongue. When Daniel would come over to his house near to the first thing they would ever do was have sex - Scruggs would not shower and instruct Daniel to do the same, and so, grimy from the day, they could be as honest with each other as they possibly could.             He would sniff the boy's armpits and relish at his changing and maturing smell, which with the years was joined with a unique signet of Scruggs' master over him: Scruggs would regularly, as he got older, piss on the boy - to mark him, as a beast would, in dominance and ownership which Daniel was equally passionate about. Still later, when Daniel wanted to devise his own monstrosities for their mutual pleasure, they would take two of Scruggs' finest glasses, piss in them, and serve it to each other with a sandwich, clinking their glasses in a toast, laughing.             And, again, to all of this, statutory as it was, Daniel consented - gladly, over and over again. Their homosexuality was hidden from God and their family - a long hot shower and nobody was ever the wiser. But sometimes it did puzzle him why Scruggs, as attractive as a man he was for his age, should be so obsessed with dirtiness, uncleanliness - shit and piss - why, in the realm of the sexual, did he desire to be as insouciant as he could. Not that Daniel minded at all - but he did wonder.             It calls to mind what kind of other horrid nonsense goes on behind closed doors - here was Daniel, the scion of farmers in a failing marriage and Scruggs, a man with friends and respect in the community. And yet, in the privacy of a wood-paneled basement underneath an unsuspecting country house, did they do everything they possibly could to blaspheme and shame the very act of sex itself. And no one - no one - ever knew.             Perhaps the worst part of this - if there could be a worse part - was that their relationship, though strongly and disgustingly sexual, was bound indisputably by companionship, trust, and love. It seems impossible given their ages - it hints that something farcical, something predatory, something brainwashing, was happening instead.             Yet it was not so.             Scruggs was the only man Daniel ever truly loved - and Daniel was his beloved boy.             So that night, walking back home, seeing Scruggs' house in the distance ghostly and dark - he blushed...and fought back tears.             Although they had ceased to be sexual when Scruggs had suffered some erectile dysfunction when Daniel was seventeen, he still loved the man - there were parts of him that wondered if they had been married, or had something like that kind of relationship as a man and woman does, if he would be damaged from this, if he would be always seeking a much, much older man to shelter and love him as Scruggs had.             And because he could tell nobody, he had only his memories to go by - his own, lonely thoughts.             Scruggs had no family, and so the tobacco plot and the house and the surrounding acreage was bought up by a neighbor to expand his holdings, easily outbidding Daniel's father. The house was left to let, unentered after the police searched it in a vain effort to find the man.             Daniel had walked this way nightly for the past few weeks, but he was losing track of the time and, he thought, he was losing track of himself.             Although the area around his house was characteristic of Franklin County sprawl - a field of corn that bobbed gently with the hills against the road next to a modest brick house in the midst of a vast spot of green lawn interrupted only by the deliberate walnut tree and then, more distant, the forest, separated by a billowing meadow of tall grass - now, to Daniel, all of it, every bit of it, seemed foreign, strange, remote...             Without Scruggs, there was little of life he cared about anymore.             He slowed his steps as he drew close to the graveyard and felt the familiar shiver of spookiness tingle up his spine. Though it was only early Fall, at best, already under the Virginian moonlight the place had acquired a sullen Carpathian gloom - a scene fit for a Gorey, or a Gammell, or a Vargo...the way that the wrought-iron fence seemed to arch out in accusing points to the sky, the big maple tree that plunged its roots to suck out nutrients from the hoary earth casting feathery half-shadows on top of the darkness, the moonlight itself pale and consumptive, spreading its spectral glow across the deep rolling hills to turn everything ghostly, making the low-rising mist above the grass luminesce, a blanketing corpsefire.             It was a masterpiece.             It drew Daniel in.             The night was full of music: the crickets in their collective hypnosis, the katydids with their surreptitious laughter, the occasional swooping ping, a grace note, of the bat...the lost hoot of the big owls, the fluttering death-wail of their smaller screech owl cousins...             Yet on the nightwind, in the midst of the trilling swirl of dying crickets, came something - a smell, an odor, faint but distinct. He had wanted to see this creepy graveyard - now, how very weird, he wanted to smell it, also.             Do not many stories begin this way? Something that can be smelt before it can be seen - few things are more sinister.             It became apparent that there was more than one smell - there was something vaguely familiar, a smell he knew...and a smell he didn't.             The one he knew was simple enough - rot, death, a corpse or a carcass left out too long, a body unhidden by the ground and picked at by carrion-critters...the graveyard on the hill loomed before him yet closer, and he quickened his pace, his natural curiosity leading him on.             He crept cautiously, his footsteps deliberate, until the ancient cemetery came into complete view - the smell was getting stronger, both smells, the smell of something rotten, and something else, something deeply, richly musky, with a forbidding undertone, an animal reek, a beastly note that lingered long after it had faded.             He strained his eyes - his nightvision had never been good, and the glare of the moonlight made things strange and warped...but yes, he could see something, near to the middle where one could walk amidst the mounds and still be respectful, a large misshapen mass, a giant shadow that moved at one end.             Now Daniel came to the cemetery gate, and pushed it open, gently, gingerly, so that it would not creak.             He could barely make out - hooves, yes, sticking up to the sky, as though a horse, maybe, or a cow had been turned upside down - the body of a farm animal, moved this way, deliberately, and a vaguely humanoid shape crouching beside it.             "Jesus..." he whispered, awash with a horrible eerie feeling that what he was smelling, what he was seeing, was something he was not supposed to, something he was intruding on...             ...he was right. More right than he had ever wanted to be.             Now he could see it - now the images were sharpening, he was close to enough to really, finally see it.             In the center of the old cemetery was a dead cow, rotten and falling apart in places, four hooves at an angle propped up against a worn-down headstone...and crouching beside it, gnawing at it hungrily, was a monster.             At first sight it was a stray, mangy dog - but Daniel could see that, as before, it was human-shaped. He could not make out details - it seemed fleshy, but hairy too, with big ears, and eyes that looked like they were bright, like an animal when a flashlight is thrown upon it.             What the Hell was he watching here?             Discretion is the better part of valor, and though Daniel was a brave as well as a curious boy he knew well his own limits, and what constituted certain danger.             He turned, slowly, to go back home, and - like he did so many things in his life - never speak of this again.             Daniel had aimed for stealth in his escape, but stealth had failed him - an inopportune rise in the ground snagged his foot, and he went face-first into the grass.             The thing started, bolt upright, ribbons of the rotten cow-flesh hanging off his opaque, grey-silver claws. "Who - who there? Who there?"             Daniel snapped back up, trying to steady himself, readying a second, abortive escape - only to trip and fall again, crying out in fear and frustration.             Something about the thing's voice was familiar to him, strangely familiar - it was gravelly, rather unlike a human, but it sounded so completely like - like...             ...he had no time to think about it.             Still a third time he tried to get up, thrusting out a hand to steady himself on a nearby tombstone - when he heard the voice again:             "I say who there!"             Daniel spun on his heel.             There was no mistaking it.             He knew that voice.             He started violently - he took several steps back, his eyes wide with terrified amazement - he did not care if anyone else heard, it deserved to be shouted:             "Scruggs!"             There was a long, astonished pause.             "Danny..." the thing whispered, sounding like it had been shocked to its very core. "Danny - boy - zat - zat yew?"             Daniel's mouth hung open in wordless horror.             What was before him was not the Scruggs he knew, not the Scruggs he had loved, that had sheltered him from a broken home and raised him as best he could - it was a monster, with Scruggs' voice inside.             It was an eldritch thing, a half-human monstrosity from a malformed nightmare dreamed up in the twilight hours when one is never sure what is real and unreal.             It had eyes which burned with a ghost-light somewhere inside it, a chill phosphorescence that seemed to be coming from within the eye, like an impious glow-in-the-dark toy suddenly plunged into darkness.             Its arms were stretched, long and loping, terminating in powerful hands, thin fingers, nails, claws, a dull gunmetal grey, stained with dried blood - grotesque, abnormally large genitals hung freely between its strapping, powerful-looking legs that ended in large footpaw-like feet, bent like a dog's would be.             What was not bare naked flesh - sanguine and healthy yet thin, stretched roughly over sharp-cornered bones - was covered with grey, flyaway hair, that trailed off in oddly delicate, wavy patterns to flutter in the strangled breeze.             The chest was sunken, as was the belly, so that the ribcage stuck out - a figure of famine, a starved thing, and though it should have been weak, there was clearly a hidden strength lurking in that raw musculature that could wrench limb from limb.             The ears were like that those of a bat, sweeping out, pointed, rubbery with veined, pink flesh, nearly as large as it whole head - drool dripped from the mouth, two fearsome eyeteeth stabbed downward past its thin lips.             A beard of that same long, wispy hair streamed off its cheeks and chin.             But it was the face - the face that Daniel knew, the face that gave it away - none of this nightmare, none of this broken phantom, could ever disguise the face Daniel knew, the face Daniel trusted...the face Daniel loved.             "Scruggs..." The name was the best he could manage.             "Hey - hey boy."             "Scruggs?!"             A little chuckle came from the monstrous figure. "Dun be shy, now."             "What - happened t'ya? They said--" His voice broke. "Th-they - s-said ya died - we went t-ta the buryin--"             "Weren't no coffin, were there?" Scruggs asked, starting sarcastic but softening. "I ain't die, Danny - I'm alive as I ever was, now - I just - I just, I - cudn't bear ta show ya, me - like this..."             "How I--" Daniel hesitated, almost too scared to ask the question he most needed to. "How I know it's yew?"             Scruggs' face lost all expression. "Boy - really?"             "I gotta - I gotta know, this - it's - it looks like ya but it don't--"             "S'really me, boy."             "But - how--"             "Want me ta prove it?" Scruggs cut in, an impatient straining the rasp in his voice. "Do ya?"             "I--"             "Listen - listen up. When yew was still in middle school, ya had a big project for science class - tryin ta find out bout - sumthin bout gasoline and how it dry up, n'different octanes doin it at different - rates - n'yer daddy wudn't do nuthin fer ya and ya come up ta my house, cryin bout how yer gonna fail n'all this..." He paused - the carnivore mouth, the sharp teeth, formed a smile that flashed with a memory playing tragically, and suddenly he was a villain to weep for...Daniel's tears streamed freely down his cheeks.             "So I - got out my tractor, n'a thing gasoline - we went up ta the store, me n'yew, filled it up, come back, n'yew started yer thing out back on my workbench..."             Daniel gasped aloud, his lungs rattling in his chest with seething emotion.             It - was - him.             He was assaulted by a tidal wave of emotions - fear, still, and selfish rage, and relief, and sorrow - he could not hold them all, they wracked him as a storm-tossed ship, and he flung himself at the hairy beast that called himself Scruggs, the hairy beast that Scruggs had become...he flung himself at him, and as Scruggs caught him in his arms, Daniel's whole face ached in a painful staccato of sobs.             Scruggs let him cry, let him release, as much as he needed to.             The minutes dragged on, on and on, the stars, the Milky Way itself, silent witness to him, to unutterable feelings, to things which failed mere expression.             Then - at some length Daniel withdrew, doing his best to wipe away the tears and the mucous, the excesses of his disbelief and dismay, from his face...             ...and as he did, he caught Scruggs' gaze.              Daniel found himself staring at the strange thing in front of him - someone he had known for all of his life, deeply, intimately, for much of his recent life - so utterly changed, so completely inhuman, somehow¸ but...the appeal was still there, the charm, the desire to be close.             He couldn't explain it - maybe he didn't need to.             The smell that had drawn him here, into this graveyard that was already so redolent of elder phantom spooks, drew into his nose - this, too, was Scruggs, the musk of an animal, the moss and mildew of the sheltered Earth, the funerary horror of death and decay.             Daniel was hypnotized - the time and distance of being so close, so able to touch, again, to come back from the brink of oblivion...             He could not deny it.             He leaned up, and kissed him.             They shared in it for only a moment: Scruggs' breath was a toxic stew and Daniel had to step back and swallow his own disgust, not wanting the older man - ghoul - to see it.             Scruggs, for his part, seem utterly undeterred - he beckoned him back with his bony, clawed fingers. Daniel obeyed.             "Wanna show ya sumthin, boy - I might be - not like I was - but lookee here, ain't all bad..."             His arm came up and gripped Daniel by the shoulder, nudging him back some so that he could see it - although in the crepuscular light, in the trauma of the moment, Daniel had not noticed, Scruggs was calling attention to it, intent on having him see it:             Scruggs' new - transformed, inhuman - penis.             It was a cross between something human, and something animal - Scruggs' foreskin had thickened enormously into a protective shield, bloated veins bulging from it, pulsing, visibly, with each pump of blood from Scruggs' mutated heart. The shaft that emerged was an angry, ferocious red was enormously long - grown from a healthy eight inches to something like a full foot, a swollen cannon with a tapered, pointed tip. Beneath it was a scrotum that had ballooned larger, clearly housing not two, but three testicles.             "Got it back - ain't got the sugar n'more."             There was nothing else like it in the world...and that, Daniel realized, trying not to cringe, was what he relished most about it.             "Holy - m-my--"             Reverently, his hand shaking as it raised, he reached to touch it, this hideous and malformed but undoubtedly efficient weapon - on contact, Scruggs let out a contented grunt, as he oozed a thick, syrupy pre, with a smell that immediately polluted the air with a pungent, nose-curling smell, like spoiled milk, rancid butter.             Instinctively, Daniel hand's dove to catch the liquid amidst his fingers.             In the moonlight, the glistering fluid seemed to almost glitter, thick, sticky, reeking - Daniel stared at it, transfixed in wonder.             "Ya like that...?"             All Daniel could do was nod back.             Scruggs watched this boy, now on the cusp of manhood, struck dumb by how this liquid from a monstrous, mutated penis could be so fascinating...how, as he held it to his nose and inhaled, he could smell a thousand things of death and rot and the grave, and a thousand things of life, rebirth, viviparity - all at once.             It was so soon since he had met Scruggs again - so soon since he had to put aside his fears and trust this strange creature.             But he had to have it.             He had to - taste it.             With a hesitant little huff, a second to catch his breath, he stuck all three of the fingers that Scruggs' pre had coated, and sucked.             The taste hit him at once - it was everything that he had smelled, but now that it was in his mouth, it was far more intense, far more shrill to his senses...             ...it occurred to him a little too late as his fingers came out of his mouth, pulling out a long strand of saliva, that he was human, and that he had just eaten something humans weren't supposed to eat.             No sooner had he thought it, than his body felt it: his head began to ache - he felt like he would collapse, so weak, so anemic, he began to panic - slow, creeping, how heart attacks start.             His whole body felt warm, too warm, like a fever he didn't want to have break - he stripped naked, a frenzied action, the cool air against his skin almost wounding him.             He stumbled backwards to sit on a luckily-placed headstone, his hand thrust to his forehead.             "Scruggs--" he cried out. "What - oh Gawd--"             "Like it?" Scruggs snickered. "Ya like it, dontcha, boy--"             Daniel's head jerked up, straight - the Moon had passed overhead, its light full in his eyes, almost blinding. The taste was still full in his mouth, enigmatic, complex.             "Yes," he heard himself say, his eyes affixed firmly to the Moon only - the weakness only slowly let him go, and let him think. "Y-yeah - yes - s-so different - makin me feel all hot..."             In a single, fluid motion, with an agility he was never known to have as a human, Scruggs dove down, all fours, scrambling up to pop his head between Daniel's naked thighs, the cold white-green of his eyeshine stabbing into the younger one's very existence.             Daniel's eyes trailed down to him - the handsomeness of his human face was still there, combined with the insidious, magnetic pull of his new features. He was terrified, helpless, yet hopelessly aroused, the desperate cataclysm of having Scruggs virtually resurrected from the grave, mixed with savage chemical infection...this open doorway to another world of wood, grass, and musk that he had fallen into.             "Ya want more, dontcha..."             One breath - two breaths - and Daniel, nodding, reached down to grasp one of Scruggs' new, oversized ears, rubbery and fleshy but soft, pleasing to touch.             "This - is - all weird ta me, Scruggs - I can't really think, n'maybe I shouldn't, cuz - I - I like it..."             The phosphorescence of Scruggs' eyes vanished, because he had closed them - a pleasured rumble vibrated deep inside his chest, the sensation of his ear being rubbed like this evidently a heavenly feeling.             "Ah, that feels good..."             "Do - do it now?"             A tightness seemed to come to Scruggs' voice as he answered: "Oh - boy - yanno - yanno I missed ye - can't be without my boy, my boy that's made this old life worth livin..."             "I know - Scruggs - I--" Hearing Scruggs say it made his very heart hurt, and he felt the too-familiar lump in his throat, but he shook his head rapidly, willing his emotions begone. "I love ya - I dunno what happened but I--"             The glow of his eyes returned, two headlights to search him. "What happened?" he repeated back. He smiled that fangy smile - he let out a chuckle that had a knowingness Daniel did not like. "I - changed boy..."             "Ya - ya told me, but--"                        "Ya tasted me. Ya tasted how I changed..."             He grunted - his tongue came out, longer and more slender than it had been when he was man - he licked the tip of Daniel's penis slowly, carefully.             Daniel let out a long, low groan - he was unprepared, he was transported in absolute ecstasy...he felt a dribble of his own pre gush out in an unnatural flow, and with it Scruggs' flicking tongue in and out, a quick dash, of his pisshole.             Scruggs made a noise that sounded like "Hmm..." It was a consideration, a long thought. "Yanno, I reckon here - now y'ain't taste like me - not yet - but I do reckon ye could..."             An unwelcome lucidity came back to Daniel as he blinked at Scruggs askance.             "Wha - whattya sayin?"             Scruggs' face revealed nothing. "I started changin one night, boy - cudn't tell nobody cuz it was just me up ere, had ta leave right quick afore anybody seen me." His eyebrows slanted. "I wanted ta tell ya but I was scurred o'what ya might think - mighty scurred - imagine wakin up one day and then, fortnight later, yer like this..."             Daniel wasn't sure how to respond. "I...woulda found ya anyhow, right?"             "Ya think so?"             "I - woulda hoped so..."             "Well, I reckon--" Scruggs flashed a smile before he continued: "At first I ain't known what was wrong with me - took me awhile, some days, yanno - but then I knew, I knew what I was..." He paused, as though for effect. "I heard em stories for many a year - ain't believed none of em..." He chuckled, without mirth. "Reckon I should've. Reckon one o'my ancestors way back - was a Dirt Feller--"             "D-Dirt Feller?!"             "S'right, boy - Dirt Feller - just like in em old tales. It fell ta me - fell ta me ta git the curse, if--" He seemed to try and force a laugh. "If curse it be."             He smiled again - but it was sadder, more vulnerable than Daniel had expected...it took him aback, and he reached down, once again, to touch the man, now monster, who he had loved for so many years.             But Scruggs took his clawed hand and gently pushed Daniel's own away.             "I'm tellin ya boy - I'm tellin ya...I ain't wanna be alone like this. Been hard - had to ta dig my own place, live in a little hole like--" His voice faltered, and Daniel's chest tightened to hear it. "Like one o'my kin, way back when, I reckon."             "Scruggs, I--"             "Now look here, boy - if there's one - fella - I want with me, it's..."             "Me," Daniel blurted.             The eyeshine disappeared for just a moment as Scruggs shut his eyes, and nodded. "Danny - my boy - my only boy."             Daniel swallowed hard - tears formed in his eyes, and as he kept blinking them away, more appeared, stubborn in his love. "Ya - ya mean that?" he managed.             He saw Scruggs nod. "Always did - all them years - all them years - wished I coulda taken ye away from that nuthin of a family...then ye'd really be my boy--"             "I know," Daniel interrupted, unable to take it anymore. "I know, I know ye said it n'I wanted it, I - oh Gawd, I--" Daniel tried to hide fresh tears, more than there were before, into his arm - but he felt Scruggs' push it back.             "Danny - Danny. Look at me, boy - look at me."             Daniel gulped back a fresh sob, wiping the snot away.             "Now's the time, boy - now - now that I'm like this, we can be - tagether, now, we ain't gotta be apart--"             "How?" Daniel cried miserably. "I thought I'd lost ye forever, n'now I found ya, n'yer like this - ain't nobody gonna wanna--"             "Danny - hush."             He put his shaggy arm around him, pulled him into a warm hug - Daniel tried to pretend the smell didn't bother him, stifling an urge to wrinkle his nose.             "If I changed - so can yew."             "Me? But I--" Daniel shook his head, utterly bewildered. "That dun make no sense!"             "Yeah it do. If a man can--" He gestured with his head, referring to himself. "Be - like this, now - anybody can. If yew n'me is like this, tagether, we ain't - gotta be round people n'more."             "I - I - I wanna be with ya, but..."             "But what, boy?"             "Scruggs, this - ain't - ain't this happenin too fast? I - I just--"             "I know, Danny--"             "What about - everybody? Mama and Daddy n'all em?"             Scruggs' face turned to stone. "Can't believe what I'm hearin. Ya really care about em, Danny? Be truthful with me."             Daniel was forced, uncomfortably, abruptly, to search his feelings - he remembered just last week Daddy coming home from the bars in Rocky Mount, yelling and carrying on about nothing, the booze had made his mind a terrible thing, he saw things that weren't there and he said things he didn't mean. And Mama - Mama just cried, and hoped he weren't too coordinated enough to hit her again.             He thought back - he thought back to all the times in school he was mocked for what a drunk his daddy was, inheriting their land and doing jack with it, how the responsibility to turn the farm into something had fallen to Daniel because his daddy was terrible at business as he was everything else - the pressure on him to revive something whose demise was never his fault, which he had worked alone to try and save but always failed, because his daddy never could do anything right.             And then there was Scruggs - then there was a real man who had taught him how to be a real man, who saved him, really, from being a loser at life like his daddy was...             ...it took him a space of introspection he almost lost himself in, all the memories, good and bad, percolating in a frenzied silence.             Scruggs waited patiently, studying him with those phosphorescent eyes.             "I - I wanna - I wanna be together, Scruggs," he answered at last, nodding with his decision. "I wanna - change - n'be like you." His eyebrows went up. "But - hey, I - um, I gotta ask - how?"             "We can try some ways."             "Some ways?"             "I gotta - an idear how we can start..."             Daniel's blood ran cold - the crispness of the evening made it worse, how something about the way Scruggs said it made him deeply nervous.             "What - what ya mean?"             "I mean - makin love."             Scruggs edged closer, his cock, a floppy piece of meat that hung off of his crotch, swaying mightily, half-swollen with latent arousal and sleeping power...it made Daniel's anus spontaneously burn with desire, the same fire coming to his face in a hot blush.             Daniel's heart was now fit to leap out of his chest - his very soul quaked with fear.             It had not been many minutes since he had found out that Scruggs was still alive, but had been made, somehow, into a monster - it had not been many minutes at all since his first taste of that same monster.             And now Scruggs was proposing something serious - something life-altering on a sickeningly literal level.             "Ya - do what now?"             "Ya heard me," came Scruggs' answering whisper.             His face was serious, as if he was really drawing upon some vast, ancient reservoir of knowledge newly imparted to him from having become the way he did.             "Scruggs..."             Daniel had never not trusted him before - and he did not want to stop now.             Gently, but firmly, Scruggs took Daniel's face and cupped it, lovingly...directing it down, down to show that he was ready.             At the sight of Scruggs' penis, staring at him, catching the moonlight with a wet animal sheen, smeared with pungent smegma...as it moved out of its swollen, meaty foreskin home, Daniel felt the increasingly familiar sensation - the dizziness, the feeling of being here and not here at all...he moaned, very softly, and for a moment felt faint, and then he was faint, falling forward...             With a start, he found himself caught, gripped, protectively - in Scruggs' arms.             "Sc-Scruggs--" Daniel strained, utterly lost in lust to the only man, now monster, that he had ever had feelings for - he could feel it, in that instant, their luminescent eyes locked together...boy, man, ghoul, they were losing control, in tandem sublimating their human ways into twisted, basal, nameless needs.             Scruggs did not answer - his face went to stone, already pale to begin with but now phantasmic with his eyes, the half-moonlight barely lighting it.             "Bend over..." he heard Scruggs whisper.             It was Daniel's own fault - his own weakness - that now he needed immensity, power, authority, all the privileges that Scruggs' new genitals afforded...it was his own fault he was so powerless before this superlatively male ghoul's phallus, how it made Daniel so weak, and why this feeling of submission washed over him, a comfort, a rightness to this outrage.             He slouched down further over the gravestone, raising his ass, the old ritual between them - so deeply loving and paternal, so deeply and hideously fraught with incest...             He did as he was told, bending himself over a gravestone.             Scruggs lowered himself to sniff Daniel's ass, a faint, pleasured purr-like noise throbbing in his chest...responding to the snuffs against it, Daniel gave a soft little moan that escalated into a louder, almost orgasmic noise as he felt his sexual repression burst forth like a failing dam.             Daniel was, in this drugged, bestial moment of Autumnal ghastliness, a gaping himself - something to be filled, an incomplete space.             Now came a wet, thin intruder - Scruggs' tongue - and Daniel's whole body shook with a quivering elation that overloaded his brain, yet again for that night, even if he could never get used to it...never be able to accept the full surrender to his changing body, changing brain.             He seized, tears coming to his eyes with Scruggs' slow, careful tracing of his open hole - it seemed to go on forever, Scruggs' hungry rimming with its impeccable technique that been borne out of decades upon decades of blood-embedded repression...Scruggs was savoring him, Daniel knew, savoring the taste in his own savage and disgusting needs, now amplified to a point of no return by his inhuman transformation, his reincarnation into something weirder - and better. In the febrile cloud of blurred sexual thought Daniel imagined that, having flirted with it for years, Scruggs was finally unashamed - and trying to eat Daniel's shit, the most nauseating, yet too also the most intimate and trusting, act they could have done between them.             It seemed at last Scruggs could control himself no longer - the tongue retreated from Daniel's asscrack, leaving the boy pulsing and needy in the night air. On his back Daniel felt the thud of the burning-hot ghoul-cock that jutted out proudly from Scruggs' shaggy-hairy body...and then he felt it move, shift, from between the cleft of Daniel's rear, to its intended destination - his hole.             "Missed yew - missed - my boy--"             He gasped and shut his eyes in immediate pain - this was far bigger than Scruggs had been as a human, even with the prepping that had done with Scruggs' tongue his hole was still unprepared for the superior girth Scruggs now possessed.             The older man - ghoul - growled out a high-pitched, carnal noise Daniel had never heard before, and he felt strong, clawed hands around his waist.             Daniel's hole did not widen readily enough to accept Scruggs' cock - it was too big, too thick, a living column of virile flesh that throbbed, each heartbeat, with sheer and completely male supremacy. Scruggs bent forward, further, his bent footpads arching up to push more, more, ignoring Daniel's desperate noises of agony and raw desire...inch by inch the slickness of Scruggs' dickcheese and the new animal lubricant of his ghoul-cock made its way in, deeper, deeper, until it felt like Daniel's ass would choke on it, this enormous scepter of maleness that was claiming him by right of power and size alone.             The ring of Daniel's anus stretched to nightmarish, excruciating lengths, as it never had before, around Scruggs' penis...the requisite surge of endorphins was not enough to arrest the spreading pain that wracked his body in this impiously unnatural coupling of ghoul and boy.             But he was undeterred - he felt Scruggs thrust, a movement, out, then in, and he felt his legs turn to jelly with the feeling.             A strangled, ecstatic moan gurgled in his throat, and he let himself go, forcibly erasing all doubt, all reeling back his head to get fucked by his best and only man - a transformed, inhuman monster.             Scruggs' thrusts sped up, spaced less and less apart, they were athletic, they were expert, they speared Daniel's insides with a ponderous accuracy, over and over, with just enough self-control that he wouldn't orgasm - not now, not yet.             It was far away from anyone and no one could hear them, there were no cars passing on the road, no travelers out this nighttime past midnight.             Only the dead - sleeping uneasy in their graves, chewed upon by something unseen for centuries that in this new millennium had chosen to reappear - only the dead could hear them and their searing, sexual noises.             Maybe someone in the far distance sitting on their porch, enjoying this chill that announced the Autumn, in the false, blinded world of humanity, would hear something - something, and think it only a strange animal.             Because, really, maybe it was - for, if Scruggs had come about this form by accident, who was to say that his idea was indeed the correct one, this Scruggs' was actually contagious, that Daniel really would be infected, and slowly, slowly, he too would become--?             The thought was unexpectedly, shockingly pure, something that drove Daniel into a frenzy of wishful thinking - yes, that was what he wanted to happen, he wanted to be filthy and he didn't want it to be a secret anymore, he wanted to be free, free of his family, free of the artificial constraints on his sexuality. Neurons fired along warped pathways in his brain, and then his mouth, open in the shriek to come before orgasm, flooded with Pavlovian drool, the sudden, unexplainable, but irresistible need for piss, for warm urine fresh from Scruggs, from the man he loved and needed - now not just piss but sweat, semen, smegma, all the filthy things to feed him as a fledgling little ghoul-boy himself.             Something was happening - something was starting to happen, the first medical symptoms of a terminal illness, birthed in the stray, devilish thoughts that were bursting inside his head as Scruggs fucked him, again, and again, and again.             It drove Daniel to a quivering, quaking orgasm, roaring to terrible life in his loins, there bent over on the ancient tombstone that belonged to someone long ago forgotten, succumbing to the eminence and ascendancy of Scruggs, the ghoul, his legs in tremors at the merest thought of being like Scruggs - it drove Daniel to this, and to a new, raw, sexual insanity, the infinite desire to change, to have his ears grow long and rubbery and pointed, and his teeth sharpen to a point, and burst forth with shaggy hair all over his body...             He bucked his hips helplessly, thrusting pathetically, uselessly, his voice rose as he called Scruggs' name, a high prayer upon the starwind - his cum spraying all the blades of grass whose roots went down to ancient coffins beneath him, his skin scraping the rough-hewn stone of the grave he was bent over on.             He knew that Scruggs would hear him, he knew that he would hear his helplessness, his need, that crass, incomplete word that could never encompass the febrile madness that possessed them both in these throes of lovemaking - he knew that Scruggs would hear him and he guessed, a thought that vanished in an eyeblink, that the act of hearing him, the oath within the orgasm like how a vassal would kiss a king, the reminder that Daniel still loved him no matter what he would look like...would be what he needed, to finish, to put into Daniel the seed that would sprout into metamorphoses, goblinhood.             There was another carnal noise - a grunt, a growl, a vibration that Daniel could feel coming from Scruggs' whole body - a rising crescendo of the limber, focused thrusts into his ass...before the flood.             "Danny - oh, Danny--"             It was hot - burning, scalding, caustic, it blasted out of Scruggs' cock like the cannon it was, it filled Daniel to the point of bursting, at the very verge of what should have been physically impossible, draining all three of his inhuman testes.             And Daniel had no defense - he met the assault with noises he had never yet made, mixtures of imperiled discomfort, sexual transcendence, he wanted it to stop, but then he never wanted it to stop, his spent cock filling back up with blood at the maelstrom of feeling.             But then this flood, the interminable deluge, from Scruggs' fat, meaty cock, did indeed end, and finally relented - Daniel's angry, orgasmic groans, joining Scruggs' gritted teeth, parting, to let out hot blasts of air.             "Aww, Danny - my boy - I love ya - missed ya - s-so much..."             "F-fuck..." Daniel choked. "Th-that - I've never--"             He heard Scruggs let out a raspy laugh - their center of gravity shifted as he leaned back to grip Daniel's asscheeks, playfully stabbing their supple meat with his claws, and Daniel squeaked again, tensing up.             "It's cuz I'm better, boy - better n'I've ever been, like this."             "It was crazy," came Daniel's agreement, a meaningless word salad to tell the untellable, a rush of endorphin-soaked air. "Crazy - crazy as Hell!" And then, with a deep sigh, the afterglow rapidly fading as he remembered where he was, and how he had gotten here: "This - whole thing is - crazy, as Hell..."             Scruggs seemed to be given pause by the comment, and Daniel felt his head nod.             "I - I know, Danny. Why ain't ye get yer clothes on, I'll tell ya about it - I gotta eat now, mercy I'm starving like I ain't been in ages..."             "Eat?" Daniel repeated, still dazed. "Oh - oh, the - cow uh - I s-saw it when I c-came in..."             "Yeah - got all worked up doin this right here - s'what I's doing before ya come up here."             "I'm sorry, I didn't--"             Scruggs snickered. "Don't be apologizin, boy. But gimme a minute, here--"             He pressed his palms against Daniel's hips to give himself leverage, and slowly, carefully, he withdrew his monstrous, beastly cock out of his young lover's ass - inch by inch Daniel felt the monstrosity slick out of his hole, lubed by cum, a little bit of blood, and dickcheese, all the while moaning the entire time, his penis stirring back to life at the godly sensation of something so enormous, so perfect, moving within him.             Finally Scruggs eased himself out all the way - some dribbles of bright yellowish slurry, his semen revealed to be as abhuman as everything else about him, started to trickle out of Daniel's hole, but the boy clenched his rectal muscles tight, trying to hold it in, the inexorable drip from being violated so hard and so passionately wetting his buttcheek.             He glanced over his shoulder as Scruggs stretched, his hairy arms behind his back, so that his strange, famished-looking body stood out in all its detail, illumed by the moonlight - Daniel could count each and every one of his ribs.             Scruggs' penis swung about, bouncing up, still aroused, a sleeping stave of raw passion and power - seeing it made Daniel's choke on his own spit with arousal, cleared with an awkward cough, but he remembered why they had to stop, and he took a breath, easing off the gravestone, to try and find his clothes, holding his hole together to will it back somewhat shut.             The two of them went their separate ways but only a few yards apart - Daniel, to his carelessly-tossed pile of clothing, and Scruggs, to his decaying, flyblown cow carcass, his dinner for the night.             Daniel concentrated on putting his clothes on, on keeping Scruggs' cum locked in place deep in his guts - amidst the noise of an early September night like tonight, he tried to tune out the horrid noises of Scruggs' inhuman appetite, his scarfing and snarfing the gangrenous flesh of a dead bovine that, for whatever reason, was that evening's sustenance.             A rude burp, and Daniel turned to see Scruggs picking his teeth, rubbing his flat, concave belly which bulged just slightly with his meal.             "Good eatin!" he exclaimed.             Before Daniel could answer back, he saw Scruggs' fangy smile stiffen for a second, and then snap into a frown - he leaned forward and a made a serious of strange noises, something like half-grunts with deep breaths between them.             Daniel stepped back. "Sc-Scruggs?"             "Wait - wait - dammit, this ain't gonna be pretty--" Scruggs hissed - and then, jerking his head back and letting out a high moan, he did it: out from behind him, he shat out several hard pieces of shit.             The smell was unlike anything Daniel had experienced before: it was far more upsetting to his nose than quite literally anything he had ever smelled before, a superlative he never knew he could ever attain.             He took two steps, gagging - the other smells before had been alluring, unusual...but this was a heinously mephitic foulness he could not take.             Scruggs remained there, squatting, panting, trying to catch his breath - his head came up and his glowing eyes threw out their familiar light once more.             "S-sorry, boy - the things I gotta eat now - don't r-rightly agree with me, just yet..." His breathing steadied, and he stood back up again. "S'gettin better tho. Better n'it was..."             He placed a hand over his bony belly, grunting - both hands flew to his penis, which had suddenly stirred and bloated back up to stand at hard attention - some quick tugs with loud brutish grunts on his too-thick foreskin and he came again, a generous spurt of the yellowish slime that passed for semen made by his three balls.             Daniel, gritting his teeth - his shirt only half-on, and his own cock bouncing lewdly from his open fly - looked away. There were more important things to consider.             "The things - the - things - ya gotta eat?"             A mischievous look came to Scruggs' toothy mouth - he was still panting from his second, quicker orgasm, but he grinned, wider than before...something about it looked a little prideful.             "Ya heard of us, ain't ya?" He grinned. "Dirt Fellers - n'what we eat?"            His words chilled Daniel - all of them, but most of all that casual use of the words us and we - even in the pleasant September night air Daniel felt as though a bucket of icewater had been poured atop him.             "Ya...eat - ya eat the dead...like that big ol cow--"             "Poor thang died not long ago, yeah."             Daniel's mouth stayed open. "But ain't that - ain't that wrong¸ though?"             He wanted to say more, but he was silenced by Scruggs' hearty laugh.             "Wrong, Danny? What the vulture do and what the raccoon do - reckon they wrong too?"             "N-no..."             "What them Dirt Fellers did all them years ago - how anybody gonna know? They all dead, who and what's they eatin - who gonna care now?!"             "Zat what yew - what ya tell yerself there?"             Scruggs seemed to consider it for a moment. "I ain't - need - ta tell myself nuthin, Danny. I is how I is - and y'are how y'are." His toothy grin returned. "Ya wanted ta change, ain't ya? We tried one way..."

            Daniel's eyes trailed down as his penis seemed to stir back to life again, and his whole body went flush with immediate arousal - with a small little snicker Scruggs wrapped his hairy, clawed fingers around his beastly shaft to give it a lewd tug, and it occurred to Daniel, his own penis straining in his jeans, that what Scruggs had become had allowed him to be perpetually and wickedly sexual, without any need for recharge.             "...we gonna let that take, though. We gonna see..." His hand came off his penis, his arms folded before his hairy, starved-looking chest.             "What - uh - um..." Daniel swallowed hard, trying to follow along. "What - yew wanna do now?"             "Nother way." He dashed back to the rotten cow carcass, ripped off some meat from it, and reappeared - so swift and so agile, Daniel was forced to note - right in front of him.             "Here--" He held the torn bit of flesh in his hand - he scraped off some errant larva that had been squirming on it - up to Daniel's face, as if he was presenting something precious.             But Daniel recoiled - the smell was bad enough, but this was part of the newness that he could barely handle.             He looked to Scruggs and his glowy eyes, his smile reappearing from one corner to the other so that his huge, tusk-like fangs once again glittered in the moonlight. Even now, Daniel found them hypnotic.             "We'll try this way. Eat what I eat - nother way, ta be like me..."             Daniel quickly shook his head.             "No - no way--"             Scruggs' eyes narrowed, the light coming to slits. "I ain't ever steered ya wrong..."             "I know that but I - I'm scared. This is new, Scruggs - this - this is way - way new, I - I still dunno..." His words were lost into the night, a trail of streaming consciousness that went nowhere - he shook his head once more, slower this time. "Yer - yer right, ya really never steered me wrong yet, but--"             "Ya wanna be like me, don't ya? Ya said so--"             Once more with the excited, fantasizing flush. "Yes, I - well yes I do, but--"             Scruggs was never insistent with Daniel, never pressuring and always considerate of his feelings - there were times when, like just before when they had made love, that he had been commanding, domineering, but always with Daniel's invariably enthusiastic permission.             And so it was now.             Scruggs took the piece of cow-carcass back, folding his fingers around it in his palm - about to eat it himself - when Daniel called out:             "Wait - wait." He stared at it, Scruggs' hand, then darted his head to look into Scruggs' impenetrable eyes. "I - I wanna. I wanna try this."             "Yer sure, now. We can wait, see if the other--"             Without any word he thrust his head into Scruggs' hand, and took the piece of rotting cow into his mouth, right out of Scruggs' clawed, bony fingers.             It was so quick, the sensations of taste fleeting, strange, yet familiar: bitter - salty - tangy...it seemed to be altogether too chewy to be palatable, but with each bite, each movement of his teeth, he minded it less and less, and then - he swallowed.             He waited - Scruggs waited too, grinning, the same mischief.             But he did it - he kept it down - no vomiting, no gagging, nothing. Like Persephone in the lead-laden court of Hades, he had eaten his first taste of an inescapable new life.             He heard Scruggs snicker as he sat back down on the dew-laden grass to consider the impulsive thing he had just done. It didn't even seem real...none of this did. Could this have been all a dream?             A hallucination of grief about his elderly neighbor - lover - dying suddenly?             He tried retake stock around him - the rising mists here in the graveyard, the glowing Moon, the charnel-smell of rot up ahead with the cow...the deathly musk of a changed and transformed Scruggs...             He took a deep breath - Scruggs was waiting for him.             "Not - bad." He forced a smile. "But I ain't sure if I could live off it now--"             He had meant it as a joke, but then he saw the expression on Scruggs' face...as if sensing it, Scruggs grinned again - more muted, more self-aware.             "Ya sure, now...?"             Daniel did not answer - the weighted profundity of the moment threatened him.             "Ya dun hafta go back, now, Danny. Ya can live out here - with me..."             "I - I..."             For some minutes that went uncounted he stared into the passing luminescence, the thrown-out searchlights of Scruggs' eyes. Even with the foxfire that burned in them, two holes of phantom light, they seemed kind, they seemed trustworthy - still, still after all these years.             It was too much - too much, and so much, so soon, so many unanswered questions, not just now, but for years before them.             Scruggs had corrupted him from such an early age that nothing, some five years later, made sense any more as it did to his neighbors, to his church congregation and his community - but he had done so because that way of life, which had served so many others so well for so long, had failed him, Daniel, so terribly. The breakdown of his family, his land, his freedom - Scruggs was the leader out of the wreckage of all of it.             What he and Scruggs had done as a couple, if it could be called that, may have been disgusting to many - but it was but one facet, one facet only. Scruggs had done for him, given him, so much...             ...but nothing could have prepared them, either one, for this.             Daniel wanted to answer - but he couldn't. And so Scruggs seemed to answer for him, moving the conversation toward its logical conclusion:             "Ye'll come back, won't ye? Remember what ye said, bout bein together..."             "I--" Daniel's heart was pounding. He wanted to say yes - he badly wanted to say yes - but he did not know if he could. He knew what he had said but that was under the pretense he could change too - and what if he couldn't?             Whatever Scruggs had become enticed him, yes, and sexually excited him from the deepest and most primal parts of his brain - but it terrified him, too. Instincts fired adrenaline to ablaze every neuron in fight-or-flight panic.             "I - ain't - r-rightly kn-know..."             He saw Scrugg's mouth light up with a smile that knew something he didn't, teeth catching the moonlight with the sinister gleam. "I think ye will boy - I think ye will."             Flustered, embarrassed, terrified, drenched with sweat and feverish with new, abominable needs, Daniel plunged out of the cemetery, into the field and then the forest, down and then up two great hills, never stopping even as his abdomen began to groan and ache from the inside with the massive load of cum Scruggs had given him - until he got back to his own house, running so hard and so fast his lungs were afire.             He did not care if he woke up his daddy, headlong into the booze as he was or his mother, who ceased to protect him since he was a teenager so that Scruggs had been the parent they should have both been - he rushed into his bathroom and took a shower, to get the smell off of him, lest they smelt it too, lest they knew something was very, very wrong.             In the shower he felt the familiar feeling from years ago clench his bowels - at first he wanted to ignore it, but a second later he was helpless to it, and he bent forward, mimicking the same motion that Scruggs had done, he felt the horrible but strangely satisfying need to let go, and as he did, he let it loose, the torrent of impacted shit and Scruggs' own cum - the rancid foulness that the old man, now a ghoul, a Dirt Feller, freely spewed out of his newly reenergized penis.             It went down the drain, out of sight and out of scent, but Daniel inhaled it deeply, finding to his shock he was savoring it, trying to map out in his head all the exquisite strangeness within it, how it seemed to vacillate between something rotten and dead but then alive and vivacious - but all the time, masculine, powerful.             He did not have long - it, like everything else, melted away into nothing.             He finished his shower, he cut the water, and he stood there, alone, perplexed.             The vague sensation that this was just an hallucination, an erotic dream-terror about a man he missed, disappeared - there was too much to prove it had really happened.            But as it left, Daniel felt something else.             Something new.01             Even in the darkness of his bathroom with the steam blowing about him like the smoky breath of a dragon, he felt it - he pressed his palm to his belly button and felt it - a queer stirring, a warmth, nausea, arousal...and something else, something deep, something without a name, that sat and dwelt in his thin belly.             Something that would not go away, something that had no name, only a feeling - a hunger, an appetite.             He tried to find a name for it but couldn't - but he kept it where it was, inside him, a secret.             Days passed.             In the daytime that would pass in a haze, Daniel would pretend his freakish night of ghoul-sex and necrophagia had never happened, even when it plagued his brain, gripped hold of his thoughts - maybe his parents, maybe his friends would notice how he would stare out the window, at nothing at all, and then turn away, as though sickened.             Because he was still thinking about it. He was still thinking about what it tasted like - that piece of flesh from God-knows-what, and before that the yellow putrescence that was cum which had oozed out of Scruggs' phallus...he was still thinking about it, all of it, analyzing every detail, becoming obsessed by it, so that he could eat very little, and then not at all.             He stayed in his room, not bothering with his friends, too scared - in mortal terror - to go out after dark, lest he see Scruggs again, lest the horror of peeling himself away from being human, being a man at all, would wax and swell until he would tear his skin off to reveal the changing self underneath, if he only could.             It was only a few days but the queer feeling inside him, the warmth that never left, gave him a kind of food version to anything set before him on the table. Four straight days, like this, feigning not being hungry, before he knew both of his parents even in their neglectful apathy would realize something was seriously amiss, and call a doctor.             He found himself in the bathroom too often, peeing more than he thought was normal but never the thirstier for it...there were dull aches in his lower body, somewhere inside him, pressures that randomly mounted and just as randomly faded, as though something - was it his bladder? - was growing...             But he couldn't be sure - he could never be really sure.             The only reason a bladder would grow - if it was growing at all - would be to piss more. Was it really that Daniel had a new inner nature, was it really awakening in ways to warp and evolve his body, latent needs met with physical changes?             This was blasphemy - against the Good Lord, against Nature itself.             That he craved.             Each night, four nights, one after the other after the other, he had sweated profusely, tossing and turning in bed - he was battered with ghastly visions, strange sights in his dreaming world of underground mazes, crumbling walls of red clay, moss-covered gravestones whose carved names had long since worn away, the smell of damp earthen floors, sepulchral rot.             Though he should have been scared, though he should have been afflicted with that terrible bewildering sensation of being lost and unable to find himself...he felt safe. As though what he was seeing - in these dreams - was where he belonged.             Every time, as this feeling hit him at last and what he could see made sense...he awoke, the torrential and unnatural sweat out of every pore turning cold.             Now he tormented himself with questions. How could he quiet his mind of these awful, devilish impulses - this sin that surely God would punish him for?             He felt something he had not felt in years - it consumed him, a memory, a place, a moment:             When he was sixteen and well-engaged with Scruggs in all the strange sex that they had - when, indeed, Scruggs had been there for him as the family that Daniel never had at all - Daniel had asked him, what would he do if they were caught? Weren't he afraid of the law, in this life - of the Devil, in the next?             And Scruggs, dead serious, had told him that it weren't never matter - that Daniel was worth the crime, and Daniel was worth Hellfire, if it came to that.             Daniel saw, in his mind's eye, Scruggs' face, so kind, so earnest, morph, slowly, into the Dirt Feller he had become - only the face was different, but the words, his words, his voice, the defiance against Divine Providence for sacrilegious love...were still the same.             On the final night, with this half-vision burning his brain, Daniel could take it no longer - his breathing a heavy draught, out of his bed he tumbled, skulking into his bathroom - in the dim half-light he could see himself, the mirror that hung above his sink.             He peered - closer - he blinked. How could he see so well, if it was so dark in here?             This, like the pressure in his lower body, the warmth in his body, was new.             But see he did.             In the darkness was Daniel Hodges, at eighteen a handsome dark-haired farmboy with the entire world ahead of him if he could only leave Franklin County and live amongst normal people - Daniel Hodges, whom Roland Scruggs had corrupted but saved from a family that did not love him, who had brought him up upstanding and honorable despite what went on when the door was shut and the blinds were drawn.             But now he was different.             He had not eaten in so long and not there was a definite thinness to him - a grey famine that seemed to be making him emaciated but only if you could see him without a shirt, a starvation that made it possible to count each and every one of his ribs.             But why, and why so soon? Only four days, he shouldn't be this thin...             ...unless...             ...there was only one explanation - there had to be one, only one.             "It - took..." he whispered to himself in cosmic awe.             His penis, with its foreskin that he could now notice was already just slightly thicker than it was before, stirred to life - what blood was left turned, even in the dark, his whole face red, red the color of the iron-leeched soil of the bricks his house had been built with.             He leaned forward, closer, in the mirror.             There was no denying it.             Below his neck, he no longer looked normal.             He was starting to look like Scruggs.             The thought - a mere collection of words - stirred him into a berserker rage.             He burst, he exploded.             Still naked, he tore out of his house, into the darkness, into the licking Autumn winds that heralded September.             He raced through the meadow, near on all fours, passing the cornfield, into the forest - he hadn't eaten for days and he was hungry, ravenously hungry, and he could smell something, he could smell something he could finally eat.             He found it, there at the edge of the wood: newly killed by old age, by the Reaper that Scruggs in his new, changed form would forever evade, the little rotting body of an elder raccoon.             His mouth gushed with drool at the smell - greedy spittle that soaked his teeth, spat out to down his chin.             Daniel was hungrier than he had ever been before in his life.             He dove down at the little carcass, he scraped away the bugs as best he could, the same action he saw Scruggs do, and he held the thing, filthy and rotten and falling apart, up to his mouth - and began to eat it.             The very first few bites were what he expected: the taste of death, not only unpalatable but noxious and nauseating - but it changed, the very taste changed, his tastebuds and his tongue changed, and he picked up speed, he was voracious, this was the most delicious thing he ever tasted, he must have more, he must eat more like this...             He was finished soon - too soon, he was left unsatisfied, the queer feeling, the bilious warmth in his belly had grown and was spreading, it was taking over...it was changing things inside him.             He swallowed, he groaned aloud as he felt something else down in his stomach - an abrupt fullness, a pleasurable discomfort.             His stomach made a threatening, fearful noise - a deep, tremulous gurgle that sent a surge of nausea to his throat, joined immediately by a sharp, cramping pain in his lower regions.             A sweat like the one he would have when he was sleeping burst through every pore once again.             This was new - scarily new - the pressure mounted, swelling inside his rectum and pushed, pushed, right to his anus, already enflamed and too-sensitive. Whatever was inside him was too large for his butthole where it was trying to come out - it strained, it halted and then it strained again, an inexorable action.             But then, second by second, the panic and the disgust were dissolving, changing, and suddenly Daniel's mind was a ruin of indecision, of violent uncertainty: a flicker of a smile twinged his face, because the hurt was still there, yes - but it was good hurt, it was a hurt to savor, a hurt that made him feel great.             He squatted - cramped, instinctual position, like he had seen Scruggs do.             Now the pleasure overcame the pain - now his hole yielded to the shit inside him, it dilated, it opened, and the thing, hard and dry, slowly, slowly, slorped out...he cried again in shock, burning surprise, before tipping over and collapsing.             This was new - this was his body adapting, this was his the new him...the ghoul inside him taking over, eating carrion as a still-human, his human digestive system adapting and morphing too slowly for his hunger's sake.             He would have to learn to pace himself, he would have to relearn, as he kept changing - and he hoped as he hoped that he could keep on living that he would keep changing.             But now all the blood rushing to his abdomen had caused his penis to become painfully erect - he coughed in discomfort, once, twice, and his hips thrust involuntarily into the air, quicker, gaining speed...one last push and the final bits of hard shit left him mere seconds before he felt his cock roar out a powerful, hands-free orgasm that spurted cum out in a tiny puddle in front of him.             He lost his balance, he fell - his head next to the puddle on the grass, he could smell it - into nostrils poured something new, yet familiar.             The pangs from his abdomen forgotten, his face brightened in delight - the cum, his cum, was the same rancid, rotten stink that Scruggs' own had smelled of, wafting into his nose. It was not complete, it was not full of the delicious reverie of stink like Scruggs - but it was close, and close enough for Daniel to know it would take only a little more time.             He raised his head to the night sky - the glimmer-stream of the Milky Way gushed overhead...the lights from a darkened sky seeping into his bones.             Nobody looking down at him anymore.             He was by himself - but he was not alone.             It was happening.             How soon his dreadful, fatal wish would be granted - that he would give up his own humanity for the only man, the only ghoul, who had ever shown him love.             His heart was consumed with a fresh desperation - where was Scruggs? Should he call out? What if someone had heard him - and seen him starting to look like the Dirt Feller he maybe always was?             Then he remembered: if Scruggs smelled then so would Daniel - even faint, right now, Scruggs would find him easy.             He rolled onto his back savoring the feel of the dew-covered meadow grass against his naked flesh - he looked down, his newly improving nightvision affording him a glance at his thinning-out torso, the thickening flesh of his foreskin, the slow, the subtle swelling mass in his scrotum he was just now noticing that may, he realized, have been a third, to join the other two. He felt around in his mouth - his teeth were not yet sharp, his tongue still the same...but time would pass, he knew, and these things also, would change, the symptoms would worsen, the disease would claim him.             "Danny - up, boy!"             Scruggs voice was closer than he realized - he bolted up to see the now-familiar pair of foxfire-eyes looming at him from atop a nearby hill.             "Scruggs?"             He heard Scruggs laugh, richly, heartily - happily. "I knew ye'd be back!"             "Scruggs--" He laughed, too, the same kind of happiness that Scruggs must have felt, the triumph, the surging euphoria, the cusp of freedom. "Hey hey!             "Ya ready?" Scruggs asked.             "Ready for - for what?"             "Ta g'on with me, Danny." Scruggs' smile was mischievous again.             "Well, where - where - where are we gonna go now?"             "Up here, boy - lemme show ya."             Daniel paced up the hill, to where Scruggs crouched, hands and footpads on the grass - once Daniel reached the summit, Scruggs hopped to stand, and seemed to pause, looking the boy up and down...he grinned, all of his teeth glittering in the moonlight, and then pull him into a tight bear hug.             Now Daniel could not hold back his tears - he released it, he poured it out, all the intense emotions, all the extremes he had faced in just a short time...all the hatred and bitterness toward his family, the depression and loss from thinking Scruggs was gone for good, and the realization, now, that they would never be separated, and the pointless existence he was facing down was gone, salved by an unknown magic that keep them together for centuries hence.             They separated after some length. Daniel hiccupped back his last sob, which turned into a chuckle, and then a happy laugh - he saw Scruggs grin back at him, those gorgeous fangs.             "I - I just gotta say - with everythin, yanno, I - I love ya - Roland - Scruggs." He laughed at saying his lover's full name, so oddly formal.             Scruggs gave him a kind, humoring - toothy - smile back the ghost-light from his eyes faintly illuming the way. "Love ya too, Daniel Hodges." He jerked his head over to a white pine that stood out from the other trees. "Now follow me, boy."             A few paces ahead, and before them was a disturbed plot of grass - squatting down, Scruggs took off the dug-up grass to reveal a hollow in the Earth, just large enough for them to fit through. It was high enough that it would not be flooded, and inconspicuous enough that it would never be disturbed.             Into the hole they vanished - into a tunnel they crawled and crawled, for a half-mile it seemed, until they came at last to a massive hollowed-out room under the hill...Scruggs' den. It was pitch black inside, but Daniel - to his immediate satisfaction - realized he could see, perfectly, in the dark. It was vast and empty, the only thing to break up the monotony were the roots of nearby trees bulging out of the walls of impacted red clay.             He slowed his steps, the soil coloring the soles of his bare feet - which would harden, he realized, into pawpads, like Scruggs' - to realize that Scruggs had dug and built this by himself, alone, waiting, someday, for someone to join him...Daniel couldn't help but wonder if they, the two of them, could furnish it together, if they could start over as two new members of some kind of esoteric family.             As if reading his mind, Scruggs turned about, and he nodded at him, as though approvingly. "Your new home, boy."             The phrase warmed Daniel's very heart - he smiled, a weak motion that was pulled into a full grin, tears of sudden and unexpected joy coming to his eyes.             "R-really - really? Y-you mean it?"             Scruggs paced back so that they stood, mere inches apart - Scruggs grinned as well, and in Daniel's nightivision he could see that the smile was kind and sweet, as well as lecherous.             "Promise, Danny. Welcome home, boy."             He grabbed hold of that beastly penis of his, and with the same soft, purring noise that Daniel had heard before, let out a powerful, impressive blast of acrid, pungent urine. He nodded at Daniel to get his attention, and snap him out of his transfixion at the sight.             "Yer turn, boy - mark it with me - this is our place now."             As if on a new instinct - a new chemical in the dank air down here he was responding too - Daniel felt the dull ache of what he now understood to be his expanded, upgraded bladder.             "I - w-wait - ungh--" He managed to intone, putting  a hand to his abdomen. "D-dammit--"             Scruggs chuckled. "Nah, boy - let it go. S'who y'are now."             Daniel swallowed hard. "Let - go..." he repeated, just in time for his cock to harden enough to stand at enough attention to piss on the wall...he stared down at his own cock, with its foreskin changing day by day, and then with a faint moan the flow of urine started from him, anointing their den with their own, private scent.             They watched each other in amusement and arousal - Daniel felt a familiar, savage thrill at being able to be so dirty, so depraved, without any judgment, and with someone with him who enjoyed it just as much as he.             He ended up finishing first, then Scruggs...the wall, the floor still damp with each others' urine, Scruggs leaned in, his breath hot an moist against Daniel's face, stinking of the pit, the foulness that all the Earth should keep hid...             ...the perfume of Daniel's infernal desire.             They kissed, passionately, Daniel's residual barriers of fear and uncertainty broken down second by second - he broke the kiss, he leaned back, letting his newly improved eyesight find Scruggs' wide-grinning face again...and then, mouth opened, slobbered on Scruggs' pointed fangs.             "Fuck," he said, strands of thick, smelly saliva falling down between them. "I love - why do I love them fangs so much?"             "Damned if I know--" Scruggs snickered, using his thin, inhuman tongue - which Daniel, he realized with an electric thrill, would soon share - to lick them seductively. "But Lawd I like em too."             Daniel tried to lock eyes with his much older - now, it would soon be apparent, eternal - lover, his inhibitions fading, he ground himself into Scruggs' muscular thigh, his cock dribbling out strings of pre that, already, smelt different than just a few days ago - Scruggs grabbed his dick and gave it a playful tug, and as Daniel cried out in surprise a large gob of pre splashed out of his urethra to splatter on the ground.             "Dick changin li'l," Scruggs murmured approvingly. "But ye got some ways ta go..."             "Yessir - y-yessir I do--"             His clawed hand slid up to Daniel's earlobe - he gave it a tug. "But I want these ears bigger..." The other hand tickled Daniel's chest. "And this hairier--"             "I wanna look just like yew, Scruggs," Daniel blurted, his heart skipping a beat just by saying it. "Pl-please--"             He heard Scruggs make one of his quiet chuckles.             "Oh yew bet, boy - yew bet..." He took another finger to poke Daniel's emaciated belly. "Lookin like it already..." As Daniel smiled at him, Scruggs placed the same hand on lover's shoulder to push him back against the impacted wall of sturdy red clay - he lingered at Daniel's navel to tickle it, and Daniel arched his back against the wall as he giggled in delight.             It was the happiest noise that Daniel had made in months.             The two regarded each other - in the pitch blackness of their new warren, new nest, new home, under the hills, safe, secure, forever hidden from humans - the two regarded each other, in the moment, sensing one to another that this was the start, the real beginning, to what they had always wanted.             Daniel hesitated - gingerly he lifted up his hand. Scruggs, seeing it, caught it, and squeezed it, bringing it to his fangy mouth and to kiss.             How soon, how immediately, everything had changed - and would still change. Yet within the curses of ancestry, the bad luck of being born into strange families with strange histories, came this blessing...the two of them together.             "We gonna sleep?" Daniel murmured.             "Only if ye want," Scruggs answered.             "I'd like ta." He smiled. "Been - been real wild, ain't it?"             "Wildest in a bit, I reckon," Scruggs replied, trying to make a little joke of it.             They let a moment of quiet pass between them. "We gonna be okay, Scruggs?"             Scruggs nodded, that toothy grin that Daniel knew he would see every day, every night, for the rest of life, reappearing. "Yanno we is, boy - yanno we is."             Daniel pressed his face against Scruggs' cheek, feeling the silky, wispy hair against him, breathing in the earthy funk of his elder musk.             "Why don't ya sleep, Danny - I got ya, right here."             Daniel sighed, a happy smile curling his lips, a lassitude taking hold of Daniel that swept over him in a wave of drowsiness - and relief.             At last he could rest. At last he could sleep somewhere where he felt loved.             He slid down, shutting his eyes which were giving off just the faintest, bare glimmer of bioluminescence...slid down the red clay wall, caught by Scruggs' strong - shaggy, hairy, sinewy arms.             Scruggs bent down with him, pulling his young lover - husband, fellow-ghoul, Dirt Feller- tightly against him.             And so it was, under the hills, in the darkness of their own labyrinth, that two creatures could live in love.