Rat Prince: Act II
Rat PrinceAct IIRuinis inminentibus musculi praemigrant._________ Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia It had been three days - had it been so long? He was there again, back where it all started, laying on the hardwood floor of the foyer, staring at the ceiling, the room all around him coalescing in his eyes, more and more, now that it was growing dark...he found that he could see better in the dark. In fact, he could always see better in the dark, but now he could see perfectly, now he felt right at home in it. Halloween was last night, come and gone. The great shivering sable shadow descended and then lifted, the little trick-or-treaters in their Iron Man and Barbie costumes, sheets with the holes cut out like it was still nineteen-fifty-fucking-five, the little girl dressed like a cat - here kitty, kitty, kitty, here pussy, pussy cat - they'd all rung his doorbell, passing through, rung his doorbell and asked Hello?! in their high little voices and then walked off, disappointed. It was when the evening wasn't even all that dark and not properly night that they came around this year and every year recently. Suburban moms had become convinced, in their own inexpressible mind's eye, that the night was a great mouth, a yawning circle of fangs that would gobble up their little preciouses and leave them tied to a furnace and raped to death by a guy with vacant eyes and wild hair whose mugshot would be plastered all over CNN. And so they let their little pups out for trick-or-treating only at dusk, when it was still light, when you could still see. There was no fear in the day, only at night, when things hid in forests with glowing monster-eyes, things that bit you as you tried to run. That was why everyone in Florida must be in such a frenzy to tear everything down and uproot every last tree and shrub, fewer and fewer places for the monsters to hide - uproot, overturn, no rock undisturbed, and it would rip out the fear from the collective mindset and bring the masses kicking and screaming into a sterilized future. They may have been smart, those fuckers who tore the forests down. Something had hid in a forest and - something had bit Cameron, something had created fear... When the trick-or-treaters had rung his doorbell the first time he was laying on his left side in the tiny foyer of the modest two-bedroom house he and Hampton, his roommate, best friend, whatever, were renting. Cameron would grin at the door, at the little children outside it. They couldn't see it, they couldn't see that his smile was one of someone of who had been destroyed by something far outside his control. Confusion, contortion, stress and strain had all done their job, they had warped him into something the little children would not understand... ...but he had wanted to open the door, Cameron did. Trick-or-treaters, the roaming progeny of the daylight, he wanted to show them what the night was like, what it was really like, and they would have wanted something sweet for their trouble, for the long walk to his porch light, for ringing the doorbell, for patiently waiting. Even laying there, prostrate on the floor of the foyer, some part of Cameron knew, some small side of him understood, the person he was would not answer the door, something else would have responded., perhaps the confusion, perhaps the fear...perhaps something darker. That was last night. The porch light was still on but the inside was bathed in shadow. It felt strange that he could see better in the dark, he found, lately, super lately, which was surprising, there was something with his right eye, something...wrong, his vision was getting blurrier every day since the attack, the attack, put it in italics, The Attack, throw some capital letters on it, all he thought about, all he dreamt about - the fear, the terror, the horror, the nausea, that after three days and three no-call no-shows to his work was turning into something, shifting, popping, hideously, disgustingly... ...into pleasure. The fear had gripped him the first night as he soaked and soaped, washed and dried, everything his useless whore mother told him to do when he first scraped his knee, but each moment that ticked by, each thought that wandered back to it inspired him to grow warmer, less cold, less frigid with the first fear. He had masturbated about it last night, when a third group of trick-or-treaters had come around, it finally happened, right when they squealed out trick-or-treat his balls jerked up and spurted warmth, new warmth, vital warmth, all over the wainscoting and the wallpaper. Even though he sought comfort the morning after, all day, he kept thinking about it, and he started smashing plates in the sink - it was the noise, the jarring crash, that cleared his mind of the image, the image that refused to leave, every moment his head was free. But finally...it was too much, finally he gave in, just that once, and jacked off harder than he ever had in his entire life, and when he came, the resultant spray smelled horrible, really fucking horrible, like mildew, something rotting, garbage water, an open sewer spewing out of his cock. And it was grey, dark grey, the color of cavities in teeth. Three days. The image, the image of him pinned to the ground, and all that stink, holy shit that stink, that smell of advanced decay and limbs that were falling off, the smell of a whole graveyard with tombstones upended, a whole zombie apocalypse, that image wouldn't leave, that image that was illuminated as the Sun illuminates the day by open eyes, those glowing eyes of the thing that bit him, that sunk its teeth into him and made him hurt., hurt, hurt so fucking good, a strange throbbing ache he craved again, those slavering jaws he wanted to put his own mouth to now...now, that three days had passed. Amidst the ache and amidst the pain...he knew. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew. There was something wrong with him. There was something seriously wrong with him. Three days. The plate-shards were still in the sink, a dozen of them, twelve whole plates he and Hampton had bought together that one really awesome day weeks ago because he had tried, he had tried so hard to stop, but he couldn't, and after the first time he did it again, and then again, and again and again...until the wall in the foyer was rank with it, crusted with it, what looked like a sheet of ghostly pus all over the wall, what his semen had become. The broken-up plates stayed where they were, covered in the vomit that came from not keeping anything down, nothing, not even water. It was always the same, dry heaves, the clear painful void in his stomach and the vague background noise in his brain that, at this stage, he should be dead, from dehydration and malnutrition... ...but no. He was still here, on the floor, in the foyer, staring at the ceiling. He was still here, but he was different. He felt different. He was becoming different. His balls were bigger, they had swelled and at first, for all of two hours so many days ago, he was worried that this, also, was a reaction to the bite, that maybe there was some esoteric symptom of some esoteric disease that caused testicular swelling, but after thirty minutes on WebMD, on his phone (he had cancer, WebMD said, definitely cancer and also AIDS, how fucking helpful) he gave up...the tingling, the tugging, his hands losing the ability to cup them, he just gave up, they were too sensitive and he couldn't stop touching them, and when he touched them he noticed they were covered in more of his pubes than they were before, how good it felt to touch them, roll them in his hands, how big were they now? Oranges - big as oranges, oranges that would hang low in the deepest parts of the nature reserve where he had gotten attacked...something untouched by humans. That started it again, he would start thinking about the monster, and that stink - that stink... And then he'd stop, his head smashed into with the notion of how deeply and utterly wrong it was. That was before he gave up. That was before he had begun to paint that one wall in the foyer, stinking up the whole house with the stuff that geysered out of his cock that smelled like sewer water - but it smelled so good, after these three days, especially today, especially today... There was something wrong with him. There was something seriously wrong with him. He had foregone a shirt, boxers too, for these three days, even though it was getting chillier this early November, he usually didn't wear a shirt every other time of the year and because Hampton wasn't home he could be as naked as he pleased. His body was slender enough and there was a tone to his stomach his ex-girlfriend had appreciated, but the dumb bitch catted around on him with some faggot at USF because enough about him, right? Enough about him, enough about Cameron the loser, Cameron who was only good enough for community college, Cameron got cat around on because Cameron was a fucking rat. Since a long time ago, he had felt like a rat, he felt like a rodent. He was the rodent his dad didn't want so he went out for some smokes for the past - oh, eight years or so.
He was the rodent his mom didn't want and so she kicked him out a month after high school and so he had to rent this little two-bedroom house with Hampton. He was the rodent his girlfriend didn't want and so she gave head to that guy in his dorm room of all fucking places, recorded it on his phone, there was video of her doing that shit. And this feeling, of being a rat, he wanted to shake it off, but he couldn't. It felt like...like that monster that night, pinned him down and then grabbed him with its claws and took a big chunk out of his shoulder, that monster had to have been a rat - why, why he could never reason or figure out, but he figured, the smell, the teeth, the eyes... ...a big rat. A big stinkin rat. A rat that only came out at night when he would sit down and drink cat's blood with those devil-worshippers he heard about all those years ago. Just a huge - fucking - rat. Just like me. It made sense - so much sense, and he didn't want to embrace it, but then his dad was a rat, a big stinkin rat, ran right out on his mom, at least that's what she said, the story, the old story, about going out for cigarettes and never coming back. His uncle, who was bludgeoned to death for not paying money owed to a pimp named Red, used to drink too much, and when little Cameron would ask him what happened to his daddy, he'd say: "You don't wanna know, kiddo. Some things you just don't wanna know." Then he'd ask his mom, and his mom would ignore him, like always. His uncle was always there for little Cameron even when his daddy wasn't, he was a good man but a damaged man, he liked to fuck little boys, but he never laid a hand on Cameron, so he felt it keenly, maybe the only time he ever really cried in his entire life, because one night his uncle had wanted to fuck one particular boy but wouldn't pay, and so his brains ended up soaking the sidewalk on Nebraska Avenue. Cameron thought he knew who the boy was, too, this guy named Cody who used to skate with him and Hampton some days, and he could never prove it, but there were clues, little things he picked up on like where he would skate back to when he said he was going home, and mentioning this guy named Red...when Cody, who was way too nice for his own good, wanted to be his friend, there was just way too much fucked up about the situation. Cameron was used to being alone anyway, why the fuck change? And so - now - he felt a kinship that made his stomach cramp with his dad, disappeared dad, daddy didn't want him or his mom but it was okay - today it made him feel alive, today it was the greatest feeling in the world. The eclipse inside his head that blotted out the sunshine of reason was nearly complete - an understanding that defied logic, that made him think death was coming soon, the kind of epiphany that only arrives in the final ticking seconds of this useless life, no different than the last dying gasps of a malfunctioning brain showing a hallucigenic light he did not see, a calling of some unseen specter that he could not hear...his mind knew that something was on the edge of expiry. He didn't want to die - he liked how he felt in that moment, the pain, the lethargy, the stink. He could delight in his balls being way too big, way too fuzzy, his erection unnaturally stiff, unmoving, rigid even as he walked, boner in the most fucked up literal sense of the word, noticeably stiffer after the second day and now, by the third, too stiff for him to move even from side to side, like he was always having an erection even when there wasn't one, coming out of the soft foreskin he was born with unusually moist, and then slimy, and now too slick to even grab a good solid hold of. At least he could look in the mirror and not scream anymore - a smile ran over his teeth at the thought. The first time...the second time, too, there were tears the second time, but the first time was the worst. The bite on his right shoulder had been healing, but messily, swollen with scar tissue and crusted over with pus, mucous, dried blood. All around it were hairs, little fine hairs, the same color as the encroaching fuzz on his balls, that greyish color like that in the skies of overcast days, plucked from the clouds and slathered all over his shoulder, and his testicles, probably his foreskin too. And then there was his face. He had vomited so violently, so relentlessly, that he had broken the capillaries in his cheeks to where they looked like freckles, and more of those fine little hairs came out of them, out of the broken capillaries, like the fur on his shoulder, where his body was healing, something else was growing in its place. Sick - he must be sick. Today, earlier, he had finally dragged himself up from the foyer and into the living room - he'd been tired enough to attempt a nap even through the ague that rolled through his body. Before he could, there had been a stinging, needling pain around those thin lips of his, even as he closed his eyes for sleep, and an hour later he had awoken to sexual ecstasy saturating his brain, his hips jerking, thrusting inside some unseen hole beneath him. He had cum all over the couch, belly down, by humping the cushion so that now it, too, smelled like rainwater collected in a dumpster. And those tingling lips had grown filaments, thin coarse strands erupting from his flesh - six of them. He realized now it would have looked cute any other time, like a kid's costume, that little girl's Halloween costume, little itty bitty kitty, here pussy cat, heeere pussy, pussy cat... All of this, absolutely all of this, was cause for dire panic but, he was alone, alone in the house, Hampton had gone to Jacksonville to visit some bitch he had been texting, they had met on The B9, a hot piece of ass, tattoos, gauged ears, he was probably balls deep inside her right now, inside her pussy, pussy pussy cat, not giving him a second thought, not giving the irritated calls from his manager at Jimmy John's a second thought because their driver hadn't shown up for work in days and Hampton was his emergency contact. Hampton had texted him and called him some number of times, he had lost count, but only a perfunctory number, just enough to make it seem like he cared before he probably went back to plowing that new girl, he had given up on him, like his mom, his dad probably, like his friends that all moved away from Tampa and got on with life and left him alone, the rodent that still scurried the back ways of Hillsborough County. He smiled - why was he smiling? But he was smiling, curled and warped, where the fur was coming in. Fur, fucking right, that's what it was, his fur, rat-fur, but he stopped, it stopped before he could finish, before it spread all the way across his face. Now - now, a pain was mounting in the front of his mouth, dull at first, but progressing very rapidly into an intolerable fire, a nameless pressure, a stimulus he had no precedent for, and it built, building higher and sharper until his jaw twitched and throbbed in exquisite agony. His head came off the hardwood floor and he flopped over onto his belly, arching his back upward to get room, and he drew his hands to his face, starting to whimper, the pain wouldn't stop, it was getting worse, it was a different pain from when he had bitten in The Attack, this was the relentless, numinous pain of a toothache that had waxed monstrous until it was all he could feel, all across his mouth, lips, teeth... He opened his mouth, he put a hand to his two front teeth, the nexus of this agony, wobbling and loose, and knew, an instinct he could not vocalize even if he were able amidst his own pathetic groans, that this pressure, the pain that would not quit, was there, coming from his teeth that wiggled and struggled against his tongue, and without a second thought, the agony now impossible, not standing for another minute of it, he grabbed his own two front teeth and jerked, in a single motion, downward, so that with very little give, ripped them out of his skull. He screamed, long and loud, the silent house rippling in the wail of excruciation - what had pained him before he had just made far worse, the pressure in his head, what was coming, what was building and building until it burst forth with a wet crunch. His ears registered two light clacks, and a moment later as his shaking fingers pulled up to where they had left a moment before. His skin brushed something hard, something large, something sharp - two new teeth, incisors, where his two top front teeth had been, out of the empty sockets, soaked in the blood left behind. For several breathes, he did his best to spit out the excess blood that pooled in his mouth, until beneath him a sticky red puddle had formed, thick with blood, his blood, and two tiny, puny, human teeth. It took a minute, a full minute, no sound, no noise, over and above his own breath - no thoughts, nothing, just a purgatory he had been thrown into by sheer shock, staring at the blood, all the blood, feeling the teeth with his tongue, the ivory-like incisors that came down to his chin, wedged, aggressive and sharp. The madness, the eldritch waking dream-life that had claimed him for these three days, which had grown in his brain like a voracious tumor, seemed to fade, in that moment - it gave him a kind of clarity, an appalling lucidity to the horror that had befallen his entire being. He felt everything, the pain in his lips, the sensitive spots where the odd strands poked out, his larger than before jutting lower jaw and aching upper, his swollen sensitive testes between his legs, the odd hardness within his manhood all crying out, an unceasing, unholy, chorus in his brain. "Rat," he hissed slowly, his penis, guided by the unseen, unyielding baculum, becoming erect, sticking out lewdly, wetly, slimily, from a thickened foreskin. He could feel it, the warmth wrapping, still furless, even though everything beneath it was coated with the fur that had appeared in blotches on his face, on his testicles, on his shoulder, spreading down to his ribcage on his right side, and his whole body twitched in fear, in confusion, in...anticipation as he spoke again. "Rat...rat..." He repeated the word, a single syllable, three letters. He finally realized why he said it, his voice had changed, there was something off about the way he said it, and the way he sounded - off. The word, rat, sounded right, proper, good, safe, but his voice, his voice was his, yes, but it was different, it had changed. It was coming, slowly, inexorably, it was coming, the revelation - deadly and final, the connection between who he had been, what he was, and what he may have been becoming, and he sealed it. At last, with one final repetition of the word that had vexed him all this time, perhaps all his life: "Rat..." He laughed, raucously, his voice strained and rough, high and whistling like he was being strangled, the same way the voice in the darkness in the nature reserve sounded. He rose, slinking upward, quickly taking a tumble - his legs weren't used to this. He was unsteady, the base of his spine seemed inflamed, and his legs were - they felt different, bigger, more muscular, but muscled differently...the wrong way, like he was supposed to walk a certain way on them, a way he had to get used to, like he was thirteen again and he had shattered his tibia at soccer practice and had to relearn how to walk. His stomach let out a wholly alien sound, a low rumble that made his entire abdomen, still tastefully toned and mostly attractively human, quiver. A hunger, stark and decadent, invaded his brain with an appetite that was met with a passing nausea, but was soon overridden by a new drive, primal and ancient even if it was perfectly new to him, for sustenance and a nourishment that bare days ago would have made him wretch. And he smelled it. All over the wall. He tried again. Yes, he could do it this time, he could lurch and lope and... walk, he was walking again. He walked - he pounced, the wall, stuck out his tongue and slurped its surface, the dried semen that reached an ineffable pungency that had filled the house. It should have been lethally disgusting, he knew that, yet, for him, it was delicious, the taste pouring over his tongue, like fluid from bursting blisters, all over his tastebuds, salty and bitter and acrid. He knew all of this, he knew he should not have, would not have before, but as he licked, the more that he realized, how addictive, yes, another taste, yes, more - more. He was attacking the wall now, the days-old spunk-covered wall - the substance semi-soft like a noxious kind of cheese, smearing it, all over his body, slathering his swollen testicles and his deformed penis that jutted rigidly before him. His foreskin, in an ecstasy he did not think possible, thickened as he thrust it against the soft surface - he could feel it swell, and then bloat, as an orgasm overtook him again. His penis twitched, jerked up, and stuck there, in a single action his foreskin, now a chubby, deformed sheath, fused, a faint tickle, with his abdomen... And so it was that he was barely conscious, barely cognizant, to the moment when more of his humanity fell away, grotesquely, perversely, sexually. Even as his euphoria grew, his tongue and taste and body chasing away the ebbing pain, the dull ache that had settled into his back finally gave away to the penultimate transformation: Something underneath the skin of his naked ass, still tensing, still flexing against the wall before him, seemed to writhe beneath, a worming wiggle, trying to burst free. A yielding stress, and then - the skin just above his creepingly furred crack split, and out from it, with a gush of blood, flowing out like a grotesque river, came a long descent of bone. Each lick, each lave, each gnaw, drove it further, longer, his coccyx descending in a solitary deluge of new nerve, muscle that enrobed the skeletal intruder as it flopped to the floor. Cameron, numb against the crescendo of lust and hunger, drew a single hiss of breath as his head rolled around to look, eyes turning greet the newcomer. He snickered, breathless, but pleased, insidious, inchoate, yet - still - pleased. What's a big stinkin rat - without a tail? "Rat...rat..." His new tail twitched, its full length reached, the skin turning a dry, sickly gray...he turned his attention back to the wall. His arm slammed against, his right hand convulsing and twitching as claws grew out from his nails curling upward from his fingers to join the messy, pus-ridden scar tissue on his shoulder, pushing out of his skin in a blitzkrieg of hot pinpricks. All across his right side came fur, more fur, the same color in great flowing waves, the same texture, ghastly and foreign but his - his fur, he understood it, it was a part of him, it could not be separated from he, him, Cameron, this fur, these claws, the teeth, that tail, his tail - and one final shudder, exquisitely self-actualized, crowned the words of admission that made his penis throb with a pride he never felt, not once, as a human being: "A big stinkin rat..." Yet his euphoria of self-discovery, the fetid depravity that had he flung himself willingly into, out of the blackest suicidal depths when his sanity had departed on the wings of a heritage that he now only dimly understood but which was now almost certainly linked to something night-dark and terrible - was interrupted. From the door next to him, not five feet away, came the sound of a key entering a lock, and the turn of metal into metal. The door opened, and into the foyer poured fresh, breezy Tampa Bay air, chilled with the early November spirit, wholesome and fresh, juxtaposed with the charnel-house horror-miasma that dwelt inside the house. There was a cough... and a gag, then several more coughs. But Cameron had now turned and waited patiently before a shoe stepped over the threshold, a breath flowing, with greyish drool, over his grotesque lips, down his teeth, puddling before him. His new, strained, reedy voice greeted the newcomer with a toothy, fangy, vicious smile: "Hampton..."